Fascinating post over at O’Reilly Radar:

HBO is actively poisoning the BitTorrent downloads of the new show Rome. In addition to an older tactic of offering bogus downloads that never complete, HBO is now obstructing the downloads offered by other people. ...

HBO runs peers that tell the tracker they have all the chunks of the show, but then send garbage data when a downloader requests a chunk. The downloading client can detect that it’s garbage and will try another peer for the chunk, but the end result is that it takes much much longer to download shows. ...

It’s also very effective--to test this, I randomly selected a healthy torrent for the 2nd episode of Rome, and after hundreds of failed chunks the download stalled at around 30%.

Actively poisoning downloads is a horribly stupid idea. It is true that in the short term HBO will gain a little ground on the “pirates” but unfortunately technology has a way of routing around problems. Just like you might use your social networks to find people you know, new technologies are now arising that allow Peer 2 Peer networks to detect “dishonest” hosts and blacklist them.

Wouldn’t it be great if they just put all that effort into poisoning downloads into finding new ways to make money? Sometimes people just have to learn the hard way.