I've built a company a few years ago which competed with these guys in their previous market - bittorrent optimization for ISPs. We've built the product (sort of a bittorrent cache) and achieved some positive results on a few production installs but never hit the real mark. The optimization we provided for ISPs wasn't worth for them the cost of the service we were considering minimally acceptable. The 'long tail' was really longer than we anticipated and this long tail spoiled our cache. But we've developed the 'carrier grade bittorrent client', i.e. hundreds of thousand connections, tens of thousand downloads, millions of files. Erlang + C. Hack value was something to be proud of. The next attempt would be to convert it to this - spoil the downloads and charge the copyright owners. We discussed this many times within the company but finally decided to wind it down. I believe breaking the protocols is beyond the line and we're too old school to cross this line. I wouldn't have been hesitated to, like, chasing individual violators, given the proof of violation, or identifying child porn distributors or something along these lines, but not breaking the internets. I talked to this guy once, btw. They were quite behind us in terms of technology and I don't think they progressed much. Well, I'd like to think :-)