Your piracy history
By Bala Shah

India, like many countries, has lots of online piracy.  Sometimes the latest movies, music and games are available within 24 hours of their being officially released. The Indian Government and police, prodded by the big tech companies, first started clamping down on software piracy.  Soon, there were large scale raids to stop online unauthorized movie and music downloads as well.

But the Indian police and even software houses and movie / music producers avoid prosecuting individuals who download only a couple of movies or music.  Too much hard work going after individuals.  The ROI is better targeting pirates who have downloaded something worth a few lakh rupees (or more).

Security blog Krebsonsecurity has detailed on how a website youhavedownloaded has been set up to list the details of more than 50 million people who have downloaded even a single movie or piece of music.

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You may have never heard of youhavedownloaded.com, but if you recently grabbed movies, music or software from online file-trading networks, chances are decent that the site has heard of you. In fact, you may find that the titles you downloaded are now listed and publicly searchable at the site, indexed by your Internet address.

In many ways, the technology behind the site merely recreates in a publicly searchable way what the entertainment industry has been doing for years: It tracks and records information that users share when they download and upload files on public peer-to-peer file-trading networks. But the free service does have the potential to make people think twice about downloading pirated movies, games and music, because it shows how easily this information can be discovered and archived.
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