Do the big media companies simply download a Torrent with a standard torrent client and take note of violating IPs, or do they use more sophisticated software?
This probably depends on the company. Many hire specialists that run many different systems and report the results or take the action on behalf of the client.
And company that does this sort of "work" probably uses VMs with every different client and some that are custom to them. They are not going to tell us how they do it either way.
p2353879, they're using proprietary software, in most cases developed in-house. Examples of this include Markmonitor and Rightscorp.
At one time these copyright trolls used "passive monitoring" in which they didn't download anything but only passively monitor bittorrent swarms. However, some of their court cases were thrown out because all they could prove was that certain IPs had been part of a swarm, not that they'd actually downloaded anything. Now they use active monitoring but, according to researchers, they seldom ever fully download any file. This makes them pretty easy to spot.
The proprietary/closed architecture of their software means that, from a legal standpoint, there is much basis upon which to challenge the validity of their findings. It's known, for example, that they produce many false positives, thereby targeting perfectly innocent people.
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And company that does this sort of "work" probably uses VMs with every different client and some that are custom to them. They are not going to tell us how they do it either way.
At one time these copyright trolls used "passive monitoring" in which they didn't download anything but only passively monitor bittorrent swarms. However, some of their court cases were thrown out because all they could prove was that certain IPs had been part of a swarm, not that they'd actually downloaded anything. Now they use active monitoring but, according to researchers, they seldom ever fully download any file. This makes them pretty easy to spot.
The proprietary/closed architecture of their software means that, from a legal standpoint, there is much basis upon which to challenge the validity of their findings. It's known, for example, that they produce many false positives, thereby targeting perfectly innocent people.