From iTunes to BitTorrent

A Realization for Some

In may of 2006, the Pirate Bay (www.piratebay.org) had their home office, located in Stockholm, Sweden, raided by the Swedish police. If you are anything like me, you rolled out of bed over into your computer chair, clicked to your favorite news website, BBC or Digg perhaps, and saw a headline that looked something like this:

"PIRATE BAY RAIDED;

POPULAR TRACKER CURRENTLY OFFLINE!"

Then, just to make sure, you hurridly click your way over to the Pirate Bay's website, watching as the progress bar moves ever so slowly until finally "click," 404 Error. Page not found. Maybe you clicked refresh a few times, just to be really sure. "No way," you think, "I don't believe it." The obvious thoughts follow, thoughts wondering if all your favorite torrent sites are going to be going offline soon (whew! good thing torrentspy.com is up), and more importantly, if they, the RIAA or MPAA if you are in the United States, are going after sites like the Pirate Bay, are they going to come after a normal person like me?

The Pirate Bay Outcome

When it was all said and done, Pirate Bay's website was offline for a grand total of three days (yeah, but... that is the time it takes for my illegal copy of 300 to finish downloading at least like 10 times). Soon after re-opening, the Pirate Bay started a project in an attempt to avoid prosecution, or persecution depending on what side you are on, resulting from facilitating illegal copies or copyrighted material. They would buy an island (not so much an island as a man-made eyesore) and declare it their own country. The government of the ex naval base, Sealand, has since stopped negotiations with the Pirate Bay, but that has not stopped their vision. The "Buy Sealand" project (www.buysealand.com) has raised over 20,000 dollars in the less than a year that it has been in existance. A post on the Buy Sealand website on January 27th, 2007, outlines the new plan, seing how the Sealand negotiations seem to have become a lost cause. The moderator writes:

"We have a couple of islands [in the Caribbean] we have our eyes set on. We will come back in a few days with which one we're deciding on buying - and the price for it."

It is May now, and there has not been an update to the boards on buysealand.com since the January post. Whether or not the Pirate Bay has found their perfect island, or even intend to, the message is still astoundingly strong - a website widely known to be the largest facilitator of illegal downloads could gather, against all reason, more than 20,000 dollars, and even more astounding, a political party (the Pirate party) comprised of pro-filesharing representatives numbering in the thousands. The political party has come within a thousand members of the Independant party, which holds a number of seats in the Parliament. People won't give filesharing up so easily.

Read More: How Do Torrents Work?

Could I Ever Get Caught?

Anyone who has ever downloaded something illegally, at least knowingly, has thought at some point "Could I get caught for doing this?" Maybe not that phrase exactly - but you get the point. When you're doing it, it never seems as though you could get caught, I mean what is one cracked bopy of Microsoft Office 2000 to Microsoft, they have tons of money, besides a newer Office has been released by now. The truth is, people do get caught. If you are lucky, you might merely be reported to your Internet Service Provider, who would then send you an email warning you not to do it again, as you have violated the Terms of Agreement set by your ISP when you began service (who knew there would be rules, right?) If you aren't so lucky, you will recieve a prelitigation letter telling you that you have 20 days to settle, usually for about 3,000 dollars, or you will be sued. Generally, if you decide to ride it out in court, you'll end up paying far more - somewhere between 5,000 and 15,000 dollars has been the outcome in recent cases.

RIAA Targetting Universities

Recently, the RIAA has had its sights set on University students. Students from more than 30 Universities nationwide have recieved prelitigation letters. This hits close to home as Universities as close as Ohio University and the University of Wisconsin, Madison, both have a number of students which have been caught partaking in illegal filesharing. Ohio University immediately changed its internet policies, booting students off the internet if they are using filesharing programs. The students can have their internet access restored if they read (or re-read) the university's internet policies, and agree to refrain from illegal filesharing.

*click*

*click*

*click*

DRMs (and why they make legal alternatives to illegal filesharing unpopular)

In February, 2007, Apple CEO Steve Jobs said in a memo that Apple would embrace a DRM-free music-sales environment in a heartbeat if that s what the music companies wanted (Doctorow). While it has been offered that DRMs exist solely for companies that deal in in the sales of copwriten content (such as CDs, DVDs, computer software, etc...) to cover their asses in a legal sense, they tend to affect the piracy of said materials very little.

Those who are arguing for DRM-free music and movies will argue that DRM's are merely a frusteration, both to the hackers who can effortlessly crack the DRMs, and for the general public, whosees iTunes as a decent program for organizing their music library but would rather own a Zune than an iPod. Apple is not the only company that encrypts the music that it sells with a DRM, as Microsoft has developed a DRM it has named PlaysForSure. PlaysForSure is the DRM used by subscription-based e-music stores, such as Napster (the new, "improved," legal Napster that is). Subscription-based options are widely unpopular because people do not like the concept of not owning the music that they paid for. The way these subscription based music services work, is that you pay a monthly fee (Napster charges 15 dollars per month), during which time you can download as many songs and albums as you like, listen to them as many times and as often as you want, and even put on your portable music device (except for the iPod of course). The downfall, and what turns people away is that when you decide to quit your subscription, all of the music you had downloaded is unplayable, utterly worthless. Lets say that you had a Napster subscription for two years. You would have paid 360 dollars, and have nothing to show for it once you decide to find your music elsewhere. These two DRM-ridden e-music sales models really are the only alternatives to illegal filesharing at this point in time (aside from actually going out and buying the physical product).

EMI - A Trendsetter?

The record label EMI has been the first company to, with the help of Apple's iTunes, begin offering DRM-free music downloads in the midst of this anti-DRM movement. The songs are offered at the same prices as the songs which are DRM encrypted, and if a person has EMI songs that they had already downloaded, the DRM can be removed (legally) for a one-time fee of 20 cents. This is being viewed as a victory by proponents of DRM-free music, and the hope is that other labels will follow suit in the near future.

The Digg Phenomenon

On May 1st, 2007, a revolt against DRMs and the way in which companies utilizing them tried to block internet free speech took place. Digg.com, which is said to make up 1 percent of the total internet traffic in the United States, recieved notice from the AACS that they must remove a hexadecimal code which could be used to decrypt the DRM from HD DVDs. As Kevin Rose would later point out, this is nothing new. Digg often recieves notices in which certain links are asked to be removed from the website, and in the best interest of the website, the moderators comply. Only on this day, with this scenario, the users of the Digg community made it clear that they were not having it. From posts with titles like "Digg revolt?" to posts linking to pages where the HD DVD code is stealthily hidden, to posts with simply the code as the title, Digg users didn't just roll over, but "fought" back with what has been coined a "21st century revolt." Digg eventually went offline under the stress, with spam posts being posted quicker than moderators could take them down.

Digg was not the only website to go offline that night, as Wikipedia ended up handling the overflow of Digg users after it went offline. Wikipedia users editted entries, adding the HD DVD encryption code into catagories having anything to do with DRMs, DVDs, HD DVDs, and so on, until Wikipedia too went offline under the stress.

Outcome Unknown

The morning after this event took place, Kevin Rose posted a link with the code in the title. It links you to the Digg blog, where Kevin decides to take the users side. He posts that Digg will no longer remove links that involve the code, though this will more than likely lead to Digg being sued (and as many people are saying, its downfall). But as Kevin so eloquantly puts at the end of his post "If we lose, then what the hell, at least we died trying."




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