On Mon, May 12, 2014 at 1:09 PM, David Barrett <dbarrett@quinthar.com> wrote:

connecting to everybody in a swarm, downloading one block, and automatically sending out a takedown

Beyond that (which few if any seem to be doing in the first place), they have to prove the content and custody chain of that block, etc. A difficult and costly bar for typical enforcement trolls.

effectively monitor and police all the top torrents out there

Any torrent out there.

the enforcer would never send you a block of valid data

They own it, they'll do whatever they want with it. You forget, the few random blocks they choose to send are worthless to them, yet scaring you into settling for serving them back out is pure profit. You're also confusing the lesser/non issue of downloading blocks with serving blocks. The latter is better known as the actual regulated infringing activity.

The only defense Bittorrent has is the "blocklist"

Now the fun part... have you guys gone daft? Blocklists and VPN's as best defense against such 'enforcement', really? Really?!! Isn't it about time you all plugged your client in to some anonymous overlay network like I2P, Tor, Phantom, cjdns, whatever and just forget about the issue once and for all? Oh, yeah, I forgot, you have: - no patience and need your DL right fucking now. (anon 'swarms' are not really slow at all) - no money and so you leech bandwidth instead of buying clear bandwidth to support whatever anon overlay you're using. (rate limits on linux/bsd are actually easy) Have fun with your clearnet thing, you get what you asked for.

In a recent conversation about piracy and whether it could win

Old school battles don't necessarily win the war, sometimes all it takes is lots of voices in anon yet visible protest.