A new company in Russia wants to be the MPAA's newest defense against bit torrent file-sharing.

From Slashdot:
The company doesn’t reveal how it works, but they appear to be flooding clients with fake information, masquerading as legitimate peers.
“We used a number of servers to make a connection to each and every P2P client that distributed this film. Then Pirate Pay sent specific traffic to confuse these clients about the real IP-addresses of other clients and to make them disconnect from each other,” Andrei Klimenko says.
The end result was that 44,845 transfers were successfully stopped. How many downloads slipped through, and whether the downloaders didn’t simply try again later is unknown. Pirate Pay don’t disclose their exact rates but say they charge between $12,000 and $50,000 depending on the scope of the project.
While Pirate Pay claim their technology is truly unique, it is not the first company to tackle BitTorrent piracy. The now defunct MediaDefender charged hundreds of thousands of dollars to attack BitTorrent trackers and upload fake torrent files. MediaDefender was rebranded to Peer Media, and under this brand they continue to offer these and other anit-piracy services.
Whether Pirate Pay is truly different and more effective than any of the other solutions remains to be seen. Even if it’s hugely effective, the scattered nature of BitTorrent makes it practically impossible to stop all infringing downloads of a movie, while the costs may outweigh the “losses” that are prevented.
Companies that really want to make pirates pay are probably better off investing in improvements to their legal offers.


Meanwhile, a cam copy of The Avengers enjoyed thousands of downloads during the week before its official theatre debut, when the movie had the biggest box-office in history. If all of those who downloaded the cam copy would have instead attended the opening, the receipts would have been increased by only 0.05%.

Box-office receipts suffer most when popular movies debut months apart in different countries. Some movies sit in the can for months before initial release, and it may be another year before it is shown in foreign theatres (some US-made movies are first released overseas).