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Jeff Howe has a fascinating article in Wired magazine, “The Shadow Internet.” File piracy doesn’t start with casual consumers:
In reality, the number of files on the Net ripped from store-bought CDs, DVDs, and videogames is statistically negligible.
It doesn’t start with the peer-to-peer networks like Kazaa at all. They’re too slow:
...Even first-run movies get ripped. “Remember what happened to The Hulk?” he asks. On June 6, two weeks before its official release, a near-final version of The Hulk showed up online. To hear studio executives tell it, the bootleg went straight to the P2P networks and spread like a contagion.
“########,” says Forest. “Trying to distribute The Hulk through the P2Ps would take months, not hours.” That’s because files on the public file-sharing networks, where no single node is much more powerful than the next, spread at a glacial pace. Furthermore, when users connect to a P2P network – FastTrack, for example – they connect only to a small proportion of the number of other users connected at the same time.
Instead, it’s run by a hard-core subculture of people that are driven to obtain status as the best, fastest pirates, and to get credits that enable them to receive goods others have pirated. They put the files up on “topsites” where pirates with secret access codes grab them:
It’s all a big game and, to hear Frank and others talk about “the scene,” fantastic fun. Whoever transfers the most files to the most sites in the least amount of time wins. There are elaborate rules, with prizes in the offing and reputations at stake. Topsites like Anathema are at the apex. Once a file is posted to a topsite, it starts a rapid descent through wider and wider levels of an invisible network, multiplying exponentially along the way. At each step, more and more pirates pitch in to keep the avalanche tumbling downward. Finally, thousands, perhaps millions, of copies – all the progeny of that original file – spill into the public peer-to-peer networks: Kazaa, LimeWire, Morpheus. Without this duplication and distribution structure providing content, the P2P networks would run dry.
This may suggest a way to shut down file piracy:
This should be good news for law enforcement. Lop off the head (the topsites), and the body (the worldwide trade in unlicensed media) falls lifeless to the ground. Sounds easy, but what if you can’t find the head? As in any criminal conspiracy, it takes years of undercover work to get inside.
Copyright must be protected. It appears to me that eventually the government will probably track down and bust these topsites.
The same technology may eventually be used for legal purposes:
Forest believes the scene will eventually go legit, and he’s even started a company, called Jun Group, that uses the topsites to promote movies, musicians, and TV shows. “The topsites don’t care where their files come from, as long as no one else has them,” he says. Last summer Jun Group dropped a collection of live videos and MP3s from Steve Winwood on the topsites. “We got 2.9 million downloads,” says Forest, “and album sales took off.”
Read the whole thing.
