Intellectual Property Law

The Pirate Bay's Anonymity Service Signs 100,000 Users Pre-Launch

By Ryan Singel, Kevin Poulsen, Sarah Lai Stirland, Kim Zetter, and David Kravets

Kerstin Sjoden reports.

Over 100,000 people have already signed up for The Pirate Bay?s new anonymity service, Ipredator, designed to hide IP addresses from the authorities, the Bay's spokesman says.

Last Wednesday, the controversial Intellectual Property Rights Enforcement Directive (IPRED) became law in Sweden. Its main goal is to enable copyright holders to acquire data identifying people linked to illegal file sharing. Wired.com reported last week that internet use in Sweden dipped by 30 percent when IPRED came into force on April 1.

Some 113,000 persons have signed up and are in queue for the Ipredator service, and about 80 percent are Swede, Peter Sunde, spokesperson for The Pirate Bay, said to the Swedish news agency TT Tuesday. The service was originally set to go live on April 1, but the unexpected high demand delayed it.

The service will operate much the same way as other anonymity services, with one important exception: The Pirate Bay says it will not log its data, making it more difficult to trace activity to a specific user.

Ipredator is a Virtual Private Network (VPN) which allows users to anonymously connect to the internet. Their ISP-designated IP addresses remain hidden, revealing only a second IP address provided by the VPN.

Details concerning the service are scant, except that users will pay a fee of approximately $6 for the security of knowing that their actions will be difficult to trace. The service is expected to start operation on April 8.

There are already a numbers of sites online devoted to hiding user IP addresses for a monthly fee, and in the wake of the country's new anti-file sharing measures, the demand for such anonymity services has increased across the board, according to the daily newspaper Svenska Dagbladet.

One service, Dold.se, is currently informing visitors that its service is "overloaded". Relakks.com, another service, says on its site that it's seen a big wave of new customers recently, and that the service might be slow as a result.

Full post as published by Threat Level on April 08, 2009 (boomark / email).