PirateBay battle piracy laws with IPREDator

PirateBay's IPREDator is a new P2P anonymizer designed to cloak the actions of downloaders and keep file logs and IP addresses hidden from the authorities.

The IPredator, which sounds more like a ballistic missile or an alien trophy hunter - has been unleashed just in time to coincide with new Swedish anti-piracy laws, due to launch next week.

According to Torrent Freak, the IPREDator launch has been designed to coinicide with the introduction of Swedish laws that could make it much easier for copyright enforcement organisations to force sites to cough up the personal details of alleged file downloaders.

The service is currently only available in beta mode to a small group of 500 subscribers, but PirateBay are expecting to expand the service.

The anonymity service, designed to work like existing VPN services, will charge international subscribers the small fee of $6 euros a month, for the knowlegde that their downloading actions will be extremely difficult to trace.

PirateBay are certainly not the first to offer a P2P VPN service. There are already a multitude of sites online devoted to hiding user IP addresses for a modest monthly fee, including paid programs including annoymizer and free IP filters such as PeerGuardian2.

Bittorrent client Utorrent also provides limited protection, although nothing is 100% secure online if authorities want to find out more about a user.