Russian IT, Microsoft join forces against piracy

Russian IT developers could have found a solution to Internet piracy problems. The new technology, which has already attracted investment from Microsoft, claims to stop torrent-based file sharing. Brothers Andrey and Aleksey Klimenko and Dmitry Shuvaev developed the technology in 2009. Initially, it was conceived as a file-sharing traffic management solution for Internet service providers. Yet pretty soon the developers realized their creation could become a goldmine for intellectual property protection, Russia Beyond the Headlines reports. “After creating the prototype, we realized we could more generally prevent files from being downloaded, which meant that the program had great promise in combating the spread of pirated content,” said Andrey Klimenko, now CEO of the company the founders named Pirate Pay. The technology can prevent peer-to-peer file-sharing in torrent networks when the IP address is known. Pirate Pay quickly caught the eye of the Microsoft Seed Financing Fund, which has offered the company $100,000, and the Bortnik Fund ($34,000). Russia’s Skolkovo Innovation Center, where Pirate Pay will be resident, has also signed up to give support. “The underlying technology of Pirate Pay has no analogues in the world,” executive director of the Skolkovo Information Technologies Cluster Aleksandr Turkot enthuses. Pirate Pay say they have already completed a successful test of the technology. After the release in Russia of the movie Vysotsky, they claim they managed to prevent around 50,000 downloads of the film from torrent networks. “Not all the goals were reached. But nearly 50,000 users did not complete their downloads,” Andrey Klimenko said. As legal liability of Internet users seems to have little effect, and with entertainment content producers losing millions to piracy every year, Pirate Pay could soon make a very good name for itself.