 | ||
 First came the pirate radio ships of the 1960s offering new musical thrills to the pop-starved young. The law closed them down yet they changed the sound of music for ever. In the 1990s came Napster, offering computer file-sharers an illicit new means to download free tunes. The law forced it to go legitimate and charge, but not before it introduced surfers to peer-to-peer networks, which have come to define one of the internet’s most important roles in the digital era. The moguls of Hollywood and Silicon Valley want the law to close down these pirates, too, but Fredrik Neij, 28, and Gottfrid Svartholm, 22, have managed to evade all attempts to shut down their site. This geeky Ben and Jerry pair are self-proclaimed digital freedom fighters at the helm of the Pirate Bay site. Appropriately, their emblem is a galleon emblazoned with an audio-tape skull above crossbones. “The bottom line is that file sharing should be legal, and that is proved by the support we receive,” says Neij. “People love what we are doing.” Not the 50 cops who raided three addresses in Stockholm last May and confiscated several truckloads of computer equipment they believed belonged to Neij and Svartholm. The website was back up and running within three days and, although the pair were also taken in for questioning, they have yet to be booked for any illicit activity. Meanwhile, the content of their confiscated computers continues to be investigated, so they do not know for certain whether or not the handcuffs will click. The allegation is that their website is involved in copyright infringement. The Swedish press has claimed the raids were prompted by pressure from the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), a trade group representing the world’s biggest film studios including Warner Brothers, Sony and Universal. What has really annoyed the studio bosses, it is said, is that the Pirate Bay is aiding and abetting those who want to view copyrighted work without paying for it. Through the Pirate Bay, surfers can find the latest movie blockbusters, including Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest, or new episodes of television shows such as Lost, even if they have been screened only in the United States. In addition, surfers can find the latest news footage such as the execution of Saddam Hussein. For a period last year, the BBC’s Top Gear programme was the most downloaded item on the web, thanks to the Pirate Bay and YouTube. “The operators of the Pirate Bay are criminals who profit handsomely by facilitating the distribution of millions of copyrighted creative works protected under the law,” claims John Malcolm, MPAA executive vice-president and director of worldwide anti-piracy operations. Malcolm says that in 2005 internet piracy cost the movie studios alone $2.3 billion, and although the MPAA may overstate the damage, it levels much of the blame at the two Swedes. The studios have a point. The purpose of copyright is to protect not only cigar-chomping bosses: it secures the rights of artists from Bruce Springsteen to the humblest scriptwriter and session musician. Without it, arguably there would be little creative material on the web. “By downloading illegally not only are you committing a criminal act, but you are also depriving artists of the right to earn a living for something they’ve created,” said a spokesman for the Federation Against Copyright Theft (Fact). So who exactly are the men who have become America’s most wanted rogue programmers? The pair are only part-time buccanerds; by day Neij works as an IT consultant, while Svartholm runs a small internet service provider. The two teamed up in 2001 at the hackers’ equivalent of Glastonbury, a three-day festival regularly held in Holland known as Hackers at Large or Hal — no prizes for spotting the geek sci-fi reference there. Soon afterwards they hatched plans to create their search site. Originally intended for Swedish file-sharers, who today make up a third of its audience, the Pirate Bay quickly went global — its servers now span three countries, and visitors can select from 30 languages. File sharing accounts for nearly two-thirds of all internet traffic and every day about 1.5m surfers visit the Pirate Bay in search of a digital fix, making it currently the 384th most popular site on the web, according to the monitoring service Alexa — as big as sites such as USA Today and Last.fm, the web’s largest online radio station. Svartholm claims the site’s popularity is justification in itself. “I see the Pirate Bay as a form of organised civil disobedience against the current copyright legislation, on a huge scale,” he says. “Some publishers are afraid — out of ignorance — but even though they are wrong I can respect that. Some, however, like the MPAA can most accurately be described as rabid, obsessed lunatics.” One reason why the site has not yet been closed is that it doesn’t store illicit material. The issue is whether it can legally act as a search engine for sites that do. Tap what you want into the Pirate Bay and it will tell you where to find, say, the latest episode of Desperate Housewives, and how to download it using a file-sharing technology called BitTorrent (see panel). Envisional, a British company that tracks illegal downloading for Hollywood studios, estimates that 4m surfers in North America and Europe use BitTorrent on a daily basis. “The world’s appetite for up-to-the-minute entertainment is virtually insatiable,” says David Price, the head of Envisional’s anti-piracy team. The numbers sharing media files continue to grow as broadband becomes increasingly widespread. You might think this is a simple matter of right and wrong, but the issues are more complex. The war being fought between corporate victims and file-hungry thieves could well decide how we enjoy our favourite media in a future beyond CDs or DVDs. Many media content owners believe web surfers should pay to watch their material, just like other audiences, and protect their files with digital rights management (DRM) constraints that prevent people making copies. A recent Treasury report on intellectual property concluded that this kind of protection actually encourages innovation and creates the next big thing that consumers seek. File-sharing evangelists such as the Pirate Bay buccanerds believe all media should be free at the click of a button. For them, all notions of ownership rights are a rotten throwback to the pre-digital age. They argue that the selection of movies you can download legitimately from authorised sites such as Wippet.com is patchy at best, and even after you have paid for the film, you are allowed to play it on only two devices — a PC and a portable player, perhaps — and can’t burn it to your own DVD. No studio is currently willing to compete on the same terms as the Pirate Bay, they claim. The experts agree, even though they don’t condone the illegal downloading and copying of files. “Right or wrong, there is no legitimate file-sharing service that offers anything like the convenience and choice available through pirate downloads,” Price says. As ever, the consumer is caught in the middle. You might disagree with the tactics of the buccanerds, but — just as with the 1960s pop pirates — the digital pirates may finally force big business to respond radically to the market demand that leads to lasting change. Until that day, the Pirate Bay pair will continue to sail the high seas — close to the wind. Sailing into the Pirate Bay – how the system works What is BitTorrent? BitTorrent is an innovative means of distributing large digital files. Most file-sharing services work on a one-to-one basis. File sharers find the file they want — usually on someone else’s computer — decide to download it, and the file is slowly transferred. Not so with BitTorrent, which takes data from many computers simultaneously. As a result, pieces of a chosen media file are brought to the home computer from many sources, then reassembled. This technology is so fast and efficient that the BBC has adopted it for distributing its programme archive.
How downloading works
1. First, the movie/video fan downloads BitTorrent software such as Azureus (http://azureus.sourceforge.net), and this sits on the PC desktop to manage downloads.
2. Then the fan heads to the Pirate Bay (www.piratebay.org) and searches for the item wanted.
3. The search results are listed as a “torrent” — a digital signpost telling the PC where to go online to access a chosen film or song.
4. This torrent file is saved to the computer. The BitTorrent software then takes over, at which point downloading begins.
Are you breaking the law?
UK law has yet to test the legitimacy of a search service such as the Pirate Bay. It claims merely to play a neutral role even though in Sweden it may yet be charged with “contributory copyright infringement”. An analogy is Google, which sidesteps copyright law by claiming it doesn’t publish anything. In the US and UK the offence of “making available” copyright material exists. But in the digital age, when material can be copied and transmitted at the click of a mouse, the law is in danger of becoming an ass. The use of BitTorrent lies on neutral ground. It is the person who uploads (and to a lesser degree, downloads) copyright material who risks offending against existing British law, which the British Phonographic Industry has been keen to enforce in the music sector. Services such as the Pirate Bay are keen to emphasise that among their search results you will find plenty of licensed material or free user-generated content. |
Tuesday, January 09, 2007
