NBC Universal Patents Technology To Automatically Detect Origin Of BitTorrent Piracy

If you think that it’s impossible for a company like NBC Universal to prove victorious in the battle against BitTorrent pirates, then you see things very differently than the company does. That’s proven by the fact that it’s just upped the ante in its fight, with a newly-granted patent for a technology that aims to detect fresh BitTorrent piracy as soon as it hits the Internet.

The patent (US9386089) is titled ‘Early detection of high volume peer-to-peer swarms’, which admittedly is one of the easiest-to-understand patent names ever. The goal of the technology behind the patent is to automatically single out torrents that have come out of nowhere and have an unusually high adoption rate.

It’d be the belief of companies like NBC Universal that if a brand-new torrent hit the Web and immediately grew its swarm to something substantial, that the data held within that torrent file is likely to be pirated content.

Considering the sheer number of people who stalk their favorite BitTorrent websites from week to week whenever their favorite show ends its latest episode, it’s hard to disagree with this logic at a basic level. However, it goes without saying that there would be many false positives, because quite simply, BitTorrent is used for a lot more than piracy.

What this technology could lead to is NBC Universal being able to single out IP addresses quicker than ever, and then take whatever action it can to either sever the connection, or send threat letters to the alleged guilty parties.

If this kind of technology was ever put into place at an ISP level, it could have dramatic effects on the torrent world. While encrypted torrents might be a bit safer, it could still be possible for NBC Universal to figure out the source, and then use the process of elimination to figure out what it is that’s being pirated. Whether that kind of analysis would be worth its time is anyone’s guess.

We’ll have to wait and see where this leads.