The site youhavedownloaded is starting to make some buzz. This is especially true, since Torrent Freak reported that some people at Fox, Google, or NBCU did download copyrighted content (or at least IP addresses registered by these companies). Of course, with the heated debate about the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), this has been used by the opponents.
The site claims to have collected information about downloaded content on BitTorrent for more than 55 million users (or rather 55 million IP addresses). When you visit the site, it displays the allegedly downloaded content for the currently presented IP address of the visitor. You can check the records for any IP address. The site even offers a banner to display the results to the visitors of your site (nice way to make friends :Weary: ).
Is it serious? The authors announce
Don’t take it seriouslyThe privacy policy, the contact us page — it’s all a joke. We came up with the idea of building a crawler like this and keeping the maintenance price under $300 a month. There was only one way to prove our theory worked — to implement it in practice. So we did. Now, we find ourselves with a big crawler. We knew what it did but we didn’t know how to use it. So we decided to make a joke out of it. That’s the beauty of jokes — you can make them out of anything.
However, if you have a better idea — don’t hesitate to contact us.
I would love to see a person who would claim that”yes! the claimed content are true”. The likelihood of such a person is low. Serious or not, this site highlights that it is possible to collect such data by using the BitTorrent DHT and trackers. I am doubtful about the story of large companies downloading copyrighted content. I would expect that the proxy/firewall of such companies would ban P2P traffic or at least restrict it for trusted users.
Oh, by the way, the site did report that Technicolor did not download copyrighted content. :Angel:
Update 20-dec: Is it serious?
With the team, we did some experiments, and found at least one positive evidence that the site has true data (using a long-tail type content)/