Piracy: Who's to Blame? Part 1

Depending on your familiarity with the Internet, you may or may not know how to obtain songs, movies, and software for free. BitTorrent, a peer-to-peer file sharing protocol, remains one of the most popular yet legally dubious methods of obtaining free content.

How does it work? It's simple. There are a number of free, easy-to-use torrent clients -- uTorrent, Azureus, and BitComet to name a few. Once the program is installed, a user can visit a tracker site, which lists files available for download. Two popular tracker sites are MiniNova and The Pirate Bay. Alongside the file list, the number of seeders and leechers for each file are shown.

Seeders and leechers? The concept is quite simple. Leechers are downloaders -- they are leeching the contents of files from the seeders, who are sharing the file. 

If a torrent has 10 seeders and 220 leechers, expect the download time to be slower than molasses. Only 10 people have parts of the file available to share. Alternately, a torrent with more seeders than leechers should download reasonably fast. Once a leecher has some of the content downloaded, that user simultaneously becomes a seeder -- others will receive parts of the file directly from your machine.

The end result is a massive, decentralized network of people sharing books, TV shows, songs, movies, and software. Gone are the days of surfing virus-laden sites in hopes of pirating software -- collaboration on tracker sites allow bad files to be flagged by users. To be safe, a user can download the free antivirus program AVG to scan downloaded files before use.

Good torrent etiquette prescribes that once a file is finished downloading, the program should remain open to upload it for others. (After all, if nobody seeded, there would be no content.)

So, will the police come knocking on my door? It's highly doubtful. The RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America) would be the guys calling the cops on you. (But only when they're not busy lobbying Congress to change copyright law, or lower artists' royalties). While it's true that the RIAA has sued over 30,000 people, including students, children, and the dead, the statistical chances of being sued are negligible. Out of all the people who use torrents, 30,000 is a drop in the bucket.

Recently, four people running The Pirate Bay tracker were taken to court in Sweden, the country they operated from. The IFPI, who brought the suit, is the international version of the RIAA. The Pirate Bay is the self-proclaimed largest tracking site in the world. Before the trial, police raided and seized every server owned by PRQ, Pirate Bay's internet service provider. The four men were eventually convicted of "promoting other people's infringements of copyright laws" and fined $3.5 million dollars, in addition to a year of jail time.

The four will appeal. The legality of torrenting is still in the air. Here in America, the RIAA offers two options to those they target: pay a settlement (usually a few thousand dollars) or fight a long, costly court battle. Sadly, most people can't afford a lawyer or three years of litigation, so they pay the extortion.

It is important to realize that tracker sites don't host any movies, songs, or sofware -- they merely index .torrent files, which are nothing more than pointers which allow a BitTorrent client to connect with others.

So, who is to blame for this technological debacle? The millions of people sharing files amongst themselves? Or does blame rest with the companies for not devising new and relevant business models? I speculate in Part 2.