LokiTorrent's Logs Give MPAA Nothing but Hot Air

"By Court Order [Edward Webber, former LokiTorrent owner] must provide the MPAA with access to and copies of all logs and server data related to his illegal BitTorrent activities, which will provide a roadmap to others who have used LokiTorrent to engage in illegal activities."

The MPAA's press release is chilling. Not only has the money donated to the legal defence fund disappeared into a black hole, but all former registered users of LokiTorrent are placed at risk of future lawsuits.

However, registered users will be relieved to hear that very little, if any, useful information will end up in the hands of the MPAA.

"They don't have anything, they have air," an ex-torrent site owner told Slyck. He chose to remain anonymous. For arguments sake, we will call him Paul.

Paul also ran a Torrent site based on the same scripts and source used by LokiTorrent. They conferred regularly.

Referring to the website logs:

"Those access logs have no value it all. They only display whether you downloaded the .torrent file, not if you actually downloaded the content using that Torrent," Paul explained to Slyck.

The Torrent file is merely a key; the MPAA can not prove that it was used in any locks.

Paul went on, "We both didn't log [seed and leech] information because first it would allow us to know too much about the people using the network and what they were sharing. 2nd it would require huge resources to keep track of all that. That's the tracker's job."

At best, the information could be used in conjunction with other research to target "serial uploaders". Much like the RIAA target those who share more than a set number of music tracks, the MPAA can now target those who have a history of trading Torrent files, although such a system would rely on static IP addresses.

But Paul does not believe that there will be enough information even for this.

"Logs files tend to grow at a rate of 1GB per day on this kind of site. Most site owners … either disable logging or purge the logs every few days. So there's little to no information for them," he explained. "Perhaps Loki [Webber's alias] even disabled his logging completely recently because of the large influx of new users."