The Pirate Bay's IPREDator anonymous service signs 100,000

Posted by Al Warmington on Thu 9 Apr 2009

IPREDator VPN service delayed by sheer popularity

Last week, Sweden rolled out its new Intellectual Property Rights Enforcement Directive, IPRED. Its purpose is to allow copyright holders to identify individual file sharers. Needless to say, said file sharers and those that don’t like the idea of some big media corporation having virtually unfettered access to their personal internet habits, were not pleased about the idea.

And where there are disgruntled internet users, there’s money to be made. The Pirate Bay thus offered to step in with its own cure-all service to combat IPRED – a VPN anonymiser called IPREDator. Yes, you can see what they’ve done there.

The Pirate Bay spokesman, Peter Sunde, has revealed that over 113,000 people, 80% of whom are Swedish, have signed up and are now in a queue to get into the service.

IPREDator is not vastly different from previous VPNs and other services dedicated to hiding IP addresses. But relatively speaking, these services are unknown to most internet users. The Pirate Bay, however, has earned a reputation for sticking it to the Man and IPREDator fits the bill nicely. It also promises not to log its data so that tracing an individual user’s activity is extremely difficult.

Further details are thin on the ground, except for the fact that it will cost 5 EUR per month. It was originally supposed to roll out in time for IPRED to become law. Unfortunately, the sheer volume of interested users has forced The Pirate Bay to delay launch until now.

With copyright laws tightening and the outcome of the landmark Pirate Bay case still very much up in the air, it’s possible that we’ll be seeing a whole lot more internet services like IPREDator. Privacy is a growing concern for many internet users, regardless of their stance on file-sharing, and it’s looking likely that in the future, picking a VPN service will be almost as essential as picking the right ISP.

Link: IPREDator (via CNET)