Torrentspy caves, begins content filtering

AS THE legal case brought against it by movie studios toils onwards, Torrentspy has finally caved to the pressure and started rolling out a content filtering algorithm to reduce the amount of illegal content indexed by the service.

Dubbed File Rights, it works by hashing file names and content, rather than trying to recognise video or anything like that. It seems that whilst the move comes too late to affect the adverse judgment against it in the movie studio's court case, this could be a mitigating circumstance when it comes to a judge deciding how to proceed.

There's no official news on the Torrentspy site, but Cnet has spoken to the owners and confirmed the filtering installation.

Of course, the irony is that Torrentspy doesn't actually host any copyrighted content itself, it merely indexes it - think of it as the Google of Torrents. An adverse legal decision could hh ave some worrying implications for the search engine business at large.

A search on the site this morning for copyrighted movies and TV didn't turn up a shortage of content, including Spiderman 3, the latest US episode of Studio 60 and the last season of Scrubs zipped up nicely. Evidently, the boys at the site aren't trying too hard just yet. µ