Although copyright owners are known for taking extreme measures to fight piracy, the case of authorities creating a “pirate” honeypot is really exceptional. However, Portugal became the first country where a co-operation between the Ministry of Culture and the country’s entertainment industry led to a protocol calling for creating such a honeypot for scaring illegal downloaders.
If you don’t know, the term “honeypot” is widely used among file-sharers in order to describe websites and networks specifically created in order to lure Internet users into downloading copyrighted content. Although this label is usually applied to all suspicious looking websites, the existence of true honeypots has never been proved. Many people have alleged that pay-up-or-else lawsuits against them resulted from .torrent files uploaded or seeded on purpose by the rights owners themselves. However, this hasn’t been proven either.
Meanwhile, no-one can say that it means honeypots are a myth. Actually, Portugal has confirmed their existence recently, when approving of agreement between the country’s Phonographic Association and the General Inspection of Cultural Activities.
The agreement in question was announced a couple weeks ago as a part of the effort to fight piracy under which pro-copyright outfit would provide some “anti-piracy” training to the inspection officers from the Ministry of Culture. However, the actual text of the protocol was never released, which makes the Portuguese Pirate Party believe that there’s something more. And they made no mistake, as the agreement turned out to promote a mentioned honeypot scheme. In fact, the music industry agreed to grant the authorities the right to upload copyrighted files to file-sharing networks in order to create traps designed to gather the IP-addresses of illegal file-sharers. Those who get caught by this honeypot scheme should expect a warning from their ISP, which may cause a disconnection because of a breach of the terms of service. Meanwhile, the sad thing about all this is that the evidence collected by the government isn’t very solid – it is supposed to only rely on screenshots indicating what kind of illegal material is being sharing.
As the Portuguese government claimed, the main purpose of the co-operation is to influence public opinion through the media.
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