Terminally Incoherent

I was always a little bit on the fence on the issue of piracy. I do not want to openly endorse it here on a public blog. I agree that conceptually it is a wrong thing to do, and that theoretically it does impact the content creators. However for me to openly condemn it would be just hypocritical. I just accept it as a fact of life, and approach it pragmatically. It is a bit like littering. Is it ok, to toss a candy wrapper or a cigarette but out of the window of your car while driving on an empty road cutting through the forest? Nope, it’s not ok. Most people will agree that it is bad for the environment, inconsiderate and anyone who does it is an ass. But, then everyone has probably done it at least once in their life. Most people don’t even think about it - they just toss something out the window and drive away. I noticed that most people have almost identical attitude about piracy.

Let me give you couple of examples. The other day I was at work and overheard the following conversation:

This was conversation between grown, educated women in their late 20’s and 30’s with white collar jobs and plenty of disposable income they could spend on music. They barely know how to turn on a computer in the morning, but they are into file sharing anyway. They are aware that the practice was illegal, but they are willing to take that risk - just like they take the risk speeding on a highway, or running the stop sign on their way to work.

I once asked my students to raise their hand if they ever illegally downloaded a movie, song or a piece of software from the internet. Almost everyone raised their hands. One girl sitting in the middle looked around, and exclaimed “Where do you people download this stuff?”. Needless to say, that day she went home with bunch of “useful” links carefully written in her notebook. Most people don’t really care, unless they get caught.

And even if they get slapped on the wrist, they don’t really stop pirating. I once had the following conversation with a coworker:

Yep, don’t use torrent - use Usenet instead. File sharing is perfectly ok, as long as you don’t get caught! Can you see pattern emerging here? Anyone trying to combat piracy by appealing to morality, ethics and etc is facing an uphill battle. While it might be wrong, it is socially acceptable… No, socially permissible to break copyright law. There is no social stigma around it. In our society smoking and drinking is less accepted than blatant copyright infringement - and these two things are perfectly legal.

Here is another conversation I have overheard - this time at the video game isle at Wallmart:

You could argue this is bad parenting, and/or irresponsible behavior. Perhaps it is. But I have yet to see a parent who gets upset that their kid is “saving them money” by downloading movies and video games from the internet. Most parents are actually pleased - they think it’s somewhat frugal. Some worry about the potential legal issues in an event their children will get caught. But then again, how many people who got sued by RIAA or MPAA you know personally? You know, like a friend of your second cousins former roommate fathers sister in law kind of thing.

No? Me neither. Very few people actually ever saw a victim of the *AA legal machine. Statistically, chances of you getting caught are somewhat akin to chances of you winning a lottery. Most people are ok taking this risk - especially if they mostly leach, and do it very casually. Downloading 5-6 mp3’s and perhaps one movie every month makes you a relatively small target - especially if you close the torrent connection or remove the files from your shared folder as soon as they are downloaded as many people do.

To tell you the truth, I have yet to hear someone IRL preaching about the evils of piracy, and condemning file sharing. I swear, I have never in my life met a person who did not indulge in a little bit of piracy now an then or at least benefit from it. Even the conservative, religious and law abiding little old ladies I met while I was working at a doctors office back in the day openly admitted they watched a movie or listened to a CD burned for them by their grandchildren and thought nothing of it.

I’m not saying there are no people like that out there - idealists, who refuse to download movies and music from the internet. I’m just saying they are a dime a dozen and I have yet to meet one in person. And even then, I wonder if they sometimes borrow movies or music from friends. Cause if they do, they are no different from the rest of us. In my mind there is no difference between downloading a DVD rip, watching it once and deleting it, and borrowing a DVD from a friend or a relative. Or rather the only difference is the legal scope. Former is legally shady, while the later I believe is perfectly ok. But logically, morally and ethically - I can’t tell a fucking difference between the two.

And that is the problem. We can either completely lock down our media and make it virtually impossible to socially share, re-sell, and exchange them or just accept piracy as a social phenomenon of digital age and concentrate on adding value to your products to make them better than free. The entertainment industry decided to take the first route trying to lock down our media. But as we have seen it over and over again, this just doesn’t work. Almost every form of DRM can and will be broken. And if it is too difficult to break, it can be defeated using the analog hole. And of course the scene folks have inside suppliers who can leak out pre-release material before it even gets wrapped in DRM to begin with. In other words, investing in DRM is like tilting at windmills. Wasteful, futile, silly and deeply tragic.

The old hacker motto used to be “information wants to be free”. This was the driving philosophy of the 80’s and the 90’s when the Internet was going through it’s awkward onset of puberty, and turbulent teenage years. We currently live at a peculiar junction in history where information is truly free. And it’s all thanks to advances in communication technology, ubiquitous broadband access and ever growing transfer speeds. Information is no longer scarce - it is a commodity much like water, or electricity. It’s obviously not worthless, but it’s relatively cheap in the grand scheme of things and it’s plentiful. For a modest monthly fee you have unlimited access to all the water and electricity you want.

In the very same way for a flat monthly fee you get unlimited access to the Internet which contains most of the information you will ever need. Every song, every movie, every book or piece of software ever made is out there for the taking. All you need is a torrent client and a little patience. Sure it’s not entirely legal but the odds of getting caught are incredibly small - not much bigger than the odds of winning the lottery. And there is just nothing that can be done about it right now. Neither the lawsuits and aggressive take downs of p2p networks nor the copy protection and ever more restrictive DRM have put any dent in the overall p2p traffic. Anything that is in digital format can be copied - no exceptions. Anything that can be copied will end up on the internet. Anything that is not in digital format, but can be digitized, will also end up on the internet. For free. And unless we completely change the fundamental rules of electronic communication this trend will only escalate.

Naturally the cost to produce these digital goods (movies, songs and software) is nonzero. It is actually quite expensive make them - both in terms of investment capital, and labor. But thanks to internet, their effective market price approaches zero. You either sell yourself cheep, and loose money or sell high, and put up really tough competition from p2p. This competitor is different though - he cannot be thwarted, legislated away, sued into oblivion or absorbed via hostile takeover. You are competing with the basic human nature. There is nothing - and I repeat, NOTHING that can be done against this. Unless of course you can figure out a way to turn back the clocks, and cripple the internet to where it reverts to it’s slow and non-threatening form you remember from the 80’s. For better of for worse, you are stuck with broadband internet as the most efficient distribution system, and the fiercest competitor you will ever encounter.

How do you compete with free? Obviously you can’t cut the price, unless of course you are willing to pay your customers to use your product. The only thing you can really do is to add value to your product. Believe it or not, but people are always willing to pay for a superior quality. Think about this next time you are shopping for a new cell phone. You provider probably offers a fully functional free phone with the service, but a lot of people opt for the sleek looking $200-$300 alternative which has extra features, bells and whistles. You have to do the same - you have to add bells and whistles to your product - and once you do, people will eagerly hand over their money to you, even if a free version is available.

The only problem here is that you can’t add value to information by combining it with more information. Adding bonus tracks, or blooper reel to your album or dvd doesn’t do anything because these things will end up on the internet as well. You need to add something that cannot be easily digitized and sent over a wire.

Kevin Kelly in his excellent article Better than Free identifies 8 value adding features you can use to make your digital product more desirable to customers. I highly recommend reading his piece in it’s entirety but if you are to lazy here are the 8 things he proposes:

1. Immediacy - ie. the ability to ship the product to the customer before 0-day crack comes out
2. Personalization - tailoring your product to customers specific needs
3. Interpretation - lifetime support, warranty, 24 hour helpline, etc..
4. Authenticity - genuine article is bound to have highest bit rate, sharpest picture and no embedded trojans
5. Accessibility - pay once, download from anywhere and in any format
6. Embodiment - no mp3 can beat a live concert, and no ebook is as nice as a beautifully bound hard cover edition
7. Patronage - fans usually buy original cd because they want to support their favorite musician - not because they can’t find the mp3’s of the songs it contains
8. Findability - iTunes are more user friendly than bittorrent - even with the DRM - you can capitalize on that sort of thing

So there you have it. Kevin goes into much more detail there, but I don’t want to steal his thunder. Read the article and see if you agree. All you need to do to make money on the seemingly free data, is to implement one or two things from this list above. And most digital content producers are already halfway there. They are just to set in their old ways to develop their strengths and capitalize on them. They still think it terms of distribution and scarcity. But this is a dead end.

Internet is the most efficient distribution channel you can imagine. You can’t get your data faster to your customer than over a high bandwidth fios connection. And if you try to use a slower channel or introduce artificial scarcity, into the equation to drive the price up the consumers will simply pick the free (illegal) alternative. If you concentrate on adding value in one of the 8 ways listed above however you can easily rise prices without scaring away or alienating the customer.

The funny thing however is that information is not the only thing that is becoming a free ubiquitous commodity. Even the physical products that were once scarce are heading that was as the technology improves and the prices fall due to normal market mechanics. Just go and read Kevin’s Technology Wants to be Free essay. I don’t think I can explain this concept any better than he does. But he is right - and his vision of future is certainly bright for us as consumers.

It seems that isoHunt has been fucked by their ISP. From their website:

Update, Jan. 16, 2007
Lawyers from our primary ISP decided to pull our plug without any advance notice, as of 14:45 PST. No doubt related to our lawsuit brought by the MPAA, but we don’t have more information at this time until people responsible comes to work tomorrow. We will be back in operation once we sort out this mess with our ISP, or we get new hardware ready from our new ISP.

Sit back and enjoy the rest of the internet in the mean time, while it last. For your torrent searching needs, try Google for now by searching for “SEARCH TERMS ext:torrent”.

You can also come hang around our IRC channel (SSL on port +7000). We’ll update on this page and on IRC when we have more information.

- The isoHunt crew

I wonder if this is for good or if they can actually regroup and get the site back up with another ISP.

You probably know this already but let me reiterate this for you: The Pirate Bay - a group of Swedish torrent tracker operators, webmasters, and the founders of the first Pirate Party in the world want to buy Sealand - a small WWII gun platform off the cost of Englad which declared independence and became a sovereign nation.

My reaction to this: holly fucking shit awesome!

Ever since the Sealand story surfaced on the internet we have been talking about this sort of thing. Every geek out there dreams of a nation with no copyright law, no patents and no rules that would constrain creativity and free exchange of ideas. A place in the world where you can put your torrent website, and host some trackers without fearing of being raided by the police. A place where the technologically minded elites would make the rules. If TPB manages to scrape enough cash, and buy this old platform this dream of our own little safe heaven nation may come true.

Of course some people claim that Sealand survives only because so far it has been flying under the radar, and Great Britain simply had no reasons to enforce their territorial rights. TPB creating a file sharing hub right of the coast is high profile though, and may turn out to be a thorn in the side of all the copyright natzis out there. The pressure from American entertainment industry and their lapdogs (the US government) may actually be a good enough excuse to send bunch of armed marines to the platform and retake it.

Would the world care about England wiping a file sharing enclave off the map? I don’t know. So far the status of Sealand is not certain as it has not been officially recognized by any nations. It will be interesting to see how it unfolds.

Whether they succeed in buying Sealand or not, this seems to be a great PR move for Piratebay and their budding political party, and a nice way to make some extra cash from advertising and donations.

My coworker just got a nasty letter from his ISP (optonline) accusing him of copyright infringement. It turns out that his kid got caught downloading some warez from one of the trackers indexed by Torrentspy.

Conclusions are simple: someone is monitoring Torrentspy network. I don’t know if they do this by setting up decoys, or if they actually connect to legitimate torrents and log the IP’s in the swarm. But either way, they are out there and if you are not careful you might get caught.

The ISP my coworker is using seems to be doing the right thing. They notified him about the complaint, and warned him that future complaints may lead to termination of his account. It doesn’t seem that they were willing to cough up his personal data so far, so he might get lucky and avoid being slapped with one of those frivolous lawsuits.

The poor kid is not allowed to use BitTottent anymore. He got a stern talking to from his pop for using these new-fangled, easily trackable p2p technologies instead of leaching from Usenet the way internet Gods intended it.

Sigh… I really liked TorrentSpy - it had lots of content, and large community behind it. But I guess it’s time to move on…