

maartena

Elmo

Premium Member

join:2002-05-10

Orange, CA 3 recommendations

maartena Premium Member Piracy is unstoppable. It's unstoppable. Way back in the day in 1996 I was one of the first people with a "cable modem" as they were trialing in my town. It was a system connected to a serial port, and thus limited to one computer and at 115200bps. But it was on 24/7, and everyone in town was getting it.



Within weeks of it being launched - and mind you this is years before P2P really started - most people had their own FTP servers, and people exchanged logins. At that time, people were really hot in the exchanging of so called "warez CD's", you could buy those off of people for like $10, and they would contain all new games, software. MP3 and DivX weren't quite there yet at that time, so it was really limited to software. Next to FTP servers, a channel on IRC was formed with our town name. Next to just chatting it up (Internet was so new in those days) people could announce their new finds that they had put on their FTP servers.



The speeds weren't fantastic (115kbps = 10 Kbyte/s roughly), it was really just 3x dialup speed, but uploads/downloads would happen overnight, and software and games weren't as big as they are now either. In those 3-4 years, pretty much till 2000 when P2P things like napster started showing up, followed by Kazaa, eDonkey and finally Bittorrent.... that is how we shared our stuff. I had an FTP client with probably about 40, 50 sites from city friends/new online friends and we downloaded stuff from eachother overnight. Within a year or 2, the "warez CD" that was traded in schools and offices, were replaced by FTP on the internet, and we all know where it took off from there.



The point that I am trying to make is.... People have always been pirating, from dubbing cassettes in the 1980s (including those commodore 64 cassettes) all the way up to Bittorrent now. The Internet just made it a lot easier, and a lot faster. Where we with our little FTP servers saw something spread across town in about a week or so, from FTP server to FTP server, etc, etc... now it takes minutes to download a movie.



It has grown to such an extend it really is unstoppable. The only thing ISP's and the law can do is indeed register an IP address, and warn the owner of that IP address that they are UPLOADING content. In many countries, the DOWNLOADING of material is actually considered legal as part of "home copy" laws, AS LONG as you already legally own the movie in question, ergo you have paid for it, and are now just trying to get a copy for the laptop. That isn't the law in the USA mind you, but in some countries it is and/or was. It's impossible to prove whether you own the movie though based on downloading, but UPLOADING is always illegal in any circumstance, as the countries with home copy laws do prohibit it from being distributed. But what can a ISP do? They can send warning letters 3 times, but then what? Do they really want to kick a customer to the curb?



Recent years have seen a fair number of people being sued for illegal uploading or downloading, and when looked at the finer details, there have been quite a few cases where the router was open and the owner was an elderly lady with no knowledge of P2P, or a coffee shop owner offering free WiFi access, or someone with a hacked/tampered with router etc.... on a few occasions the media industry really embarrassed themselves in going after people that had really downloaded one or two movies, and ended up being a single mother with children living on low income that wanted to show the kids a family friendly movie and couldn't afford it. Breaking the law she still was, but it doesn't make for very good press against piracy.



The latest is the blocking of websites like the Pirate bay. Nice, but sites like that probably already have an unused domain as backup, registered under a fake name, that can be transferred on a moments notice. Pirate bay is on a .se domain name now, but could probably get a .sx or .sk or .cc domain in minutes and re-launch. or re-launch under a completely different name by just giving the underlying code to someone else. And the reality is that there are hundreds of websites like that, and on top of that probably hundreds more private trackers.



The only thing that is working..... is making legal content affordable. Music piracy has dropped because of iTunes. And Netflix makes pirating older movies/tv series a thing of the past.



But even if they somehow manage to ban Bittorrent.... there are already options for completely encrypted forms of P2P where the uploader cannot be revealed as the data travels through a series of encrypted nodes, and the data uploaded is encrypted as well. These systems aren't particular popular right now, because very few people use it, and therefore the speed is very slow. But outlaw Bittorrent, and people will massively move to tor-based P2P and other encryption solutions.



The "next big thing" in P2P is already coded somewhere.



In short: Piracy is unstoppable. Don't try to stop it by force, instead try to minimize it by offering decent legal options. Options that allow you to take a copy for the laptop, and one for the dvd player in the car, and one for the iPad to watch on the airplane.... without being forced into DRM that cripples and limits your ability to use your legally purchased media.



In even shorter: If you can't beat them, join them and still make money.