Torrent Pirates Beware: NBC Has A Patent And It's Coming After You

[Thakur]

NBC UNIVERSAL, the multinational media firm owned by the even bigger conglomerate Comcast, has been granted a patent for technology designed to track torrent pirates.

Media companies have tried for years to prevent people sharing video and audio files over the web without paying for the privilege, and the Early detection of high volume peer-to-peer swarms patent aims to put an end to all that.

The patent is for software designed to track the sharing of pirated files by large groups of people using popular networks such as BitTorrent.

The patent abstract describes it as: "Early detection of high volume swarms in a peer-to-peer network, including a data feed of peer-to-peer swarm activity, and an analytics engine processing the data feed and identifying the high volume swarms that have parameters that exceed a threshold.

"The early detection provides for enhanced anti-piracy efforts, improved allocation of network resources, and better business decision-making."

In other words, once a certain number of people share a particular file an alarm will be raised and action taken.

Torrent news site TorrentFreak noted that NBCUniversal could license the technology to stop the spread of large-scale pirating before these swarms become too big to control.

However, TorrentFreak also said that the media firm is likely to tread carefully in any such action since parent company Comcast was widely criticised after an attempt to throttle the bandwidth available to BitTorrent a few years ago.

The patent application, which was approved only last week, was submitted eight years ago, since when file sharing has moved on considerably with the advent of streaming by the likes of Netflix and Spotify.

Nevertheless, file sharing grew 44 per cent between 2008 and 2014 in the US and even more in Europe, according to Digital Music News, meaning that piracy via torrent sites is far from being yesterday's problem for the industry.