sirenianshores

As the impact of its presence grows, coverage of Bittorrent is becoming more prevalent in the mainstream media. The latest edition of Vanity Fair has an excellent piece on the founders of the Pirate Bay and their recent battles against the entertainment industry.

As far as the average TV viewer is concerned - the way we watch TV in five years time will be radically different to the way we do now. For the early adopters at least, Bittorrent has revolutionised TV the same way Napster did with music. Prior to Bittorrent, I had all but given up on watching TV. The reason I started watching it again was because Bittorrent allowed me to watch whatever liked on demand. No more having to sit through endless ads designed to make me hate my life and make up for my inadequacies by going out and buying products I don’t need.

Much like the Internet, the Bittorrent protocol operates in a highly decentralised manner. The same way the Internet was designed by American military researchers to survive in the aftermath of a nuclear holocaust; Bittorrent was designed to survive attacks by legions of lawyers, industry lobbyists and easily swayed governments. Bittorrent is superior to previous technologies like P2P in the way that it solves the problem of excessive bandwidth usage by spreading the load among downloaders. Instead of downloading from a single source, it can also download portions of the file from other people who are downloading at the same time. The only central points of vulnerability are servers like the Pirate Bay who host the torrent files and provide indexes of torrents to search. But as the politicians and the entertainment industry have found when dealing with P2P networks, for every node they shut down, several more will inevitably emerge to replace any lost ones. The more the industry fights the technology, the more it will continue to evolve and become more resistant to attack - in a manner reminiscent of the Borg in Star Trek. The net result is that the War on Piracy will have about the same level of success as the War on Drugs or the War on Terrorism, which is to say very little if any.

More worryingly for the entertainment industry and the political elites, the people who operate the Pirate Bay have also been smart enough to start their own political party - the Pirate Party - to take on the corrupt politicians at their own game. The party is gaining increasing political support in Sweden.

The reason the Pirate Bay gets away with all of this is due to the fact that they don’t actually host any copyrighted material on their servers - just torrent links - which is entirely legal under Swedish law. It should also be noted that Bittorrent is used to download more than just copyrighted content. It has some perfectly legitimate uses as well such as providing an efficient means for downloading the latest Linux distributions.

This hasn’t satisfied the US government however. The U.S. government has directly interfered in the domestic affairs of another sovereign nation by pressuring the Swedish government into arresting its citizens for doing something that is legal under Swedish law. The situation is especially worrying for the US as much of their economy is now based on the notion of intellectual property. The US doesn’t actually manufacture many goods any more - much of their indigenous manufacturing capability has long since been outsourced to countries like China and Taiwan. If other nations ignore their intellectual property laws, the American economy will be in serious difficulty.

Ultimately the entertainment industry is going to have to learn to adapt and to embrace technology - something many of those big companies have been lecturing their outsourced and downsized staff about for years now. Now that the industry’s current business model has proven hopelessly obsolete. I think perhaps the best approach they could adopt at this point, would be an all-you-can-eat service where for a reasonable monthly fee, subscribers could download as much content as they like without any DRM to lock down content in a manner which would easily need and frustrate consumers.

If the industry cannot come up with an innovative new business model, then they don’t deserve to be in business in the first place. This may lead to the death of the entertainment industry as we know it. This in itself may not be a bad idea given how increasingly bland and commercialised these so-called entertainers the industry foists on us have become in recent years. Similar to how, after a forest has been raised after a fire, fresh green shoots emerge where once there was rotten dead wood.