I thought almost the exact same thing. In my minds eye I envisioned an awsome system for films that combined the best parts of services like Hulu with GOG where you could rent or purchase (along with behind the scenes extras) movies, some even still in theatres.

Read about it, it won't come to anything. Imo, nothing to worry or talk about.

I'm sure this will be just as effective as all the other anti-piracy schemes.

So that's why the download of Kooky from the latest Humble Bundle took so long? And I just assumed everyone was just leeching.

So capitalists hinder my legal use of torrents just because someone does something illegal with it somewhere? What is next? There are special car drivers aiming for accidents because pedestrians who are too dumb to live run over the street when the traffic light is red?

Even if they managed to even get it really working, wont work on private trackers where its invite only generally ;).

Not true. At least in Poland the Blizzard anthology is still regularly finding its way to retail stores (which includes Warcraft 2 BNE, Starcraft + Brood War and of course Diablo and still costs like 15€) - saw it just a couple of weeks ago. And I think the same goes for Germany so it's most likely also the case in other countries.

Yeah right, and getting an invite or any other kind of access to private trackers is usually SO hard. German lawyers specializing in mailing pirates have infiltrated many private trackers - in fact, the only time I ever received such a letter was after using a torrent from a private tracker. :P

The irony is that Microsoft turned a blind eye on piracy during the '90 because they knew that the more their OS gets pirated the bigger their market share is going to become. And now that everybody and his sister is using MS Windows, they are reeling in the nets.

On the measure itself, it will probably work for about 12 minutes and then can be easily avoided.

For everybodybeing afriad of privacy in the net should use a swedish VPN. Sweden has decent privacy laws, it isn't expensive and I can buy games indexed in Germany ;-). Only the swedish military intelligence can check those connections, and I think they have better things to do then to look at my internet traffic.

I have a simpler and free solution. Whenever I'm in Germany and want to get a censored or indexed game I just ask my Polish girlfriend to run Team Viewer for a minute and then I visit the Steam store through her PC. And when my German buddies want such a game I just gift it to them and they pay me back.

Oh great at last a post to promote Pirate Bay.

It is one of the last sites fights for freedom. And i used it to a great extent. What i am buying for my PC today is because of in the past i used Pirate Bay. Plus, lately i am being able play and latest Elders Scrolls game(unlike its payed version it has no client or restrictions), thanks to the Pirate Bay.

Oh by the way fsck the Pirate Pay. There is no way that they can stop a Bay with full of Pirates! =)

I presume the idea is try to disrupt torrent downloads (for which you find links in e.g. Pirate Bay), not to disrupt the the PB site itself?

Anyway as said, these kinds of technical measures will just mean there will be anti-measures in future bittorrent clients. I'm betting my money on these anti-measures, eventually the clients become so "secure" that Pirate Pay will not be able to do much anymore. I don't think this is the first time these kind of measures have been tried on different p2p networks.

For what it's worth, I haven't been able to (easily) connect to PirateBay for some time as our ISPs are blocking it, and at least for now I don't really care that much. On an ideological level I'm against such embargos.

From my laymen point of view, it always seems that the "digital anarchists" (for a lack of better term) generally have the better technical aptitude. So far every measure of this kind has been swiftly defeated and I don't think this will last long.

The only way to battle piracy is the way GOG did. Give a better service. It is telling that pirates are usually the ones that have the least problems with DVDs and games.

Yes it is that easy. Give better service. Bye bye piracy. End of line.

I remember when Crysis 1 was the most pirated FPS game.

LOL @ people wondering if torrents still exist, as if no one here downloads movies or the new Big Bang Theory & Game of Thrones episodes every week, since they can't afford to pay for HBO or the series do not air in their countries.