By: Arkein

As a downloader and self proclaimed pirate through and through, I have been illegally downloading copyrighted material since Napster first became popular. I can’t remember the last time I actually went to a store and paid for an album or an overpriced movie. I do, however, remember asking my mom if I could download the peer to peer (p2p) sharing program and I distinctly recall my amazement when she actually said the word “yes”. She could not have possibly known the Pandora’s Box she was opening with one uttered syllable, but from then on I was hooked.

Napster eventually got ko’ed by anti-piracy advocates and another p2p program, called Morpheus, became the next to fill the void. Morpheus was appealing to me; because unlike Napster,  I could type something bizarre in the search bar like, well the word “bizarre” comes to mind, and the clips that those searches brought back… Being a teenager (and a virgin with no hope of getting laid in sight), I loved Morpheus. Then Kazaa came, rendering its predecessor obsolete with its music, longer porn clips, and – get this – movies! I could finally watch full length feature films … for free! My parents used to pay twenty bucks for a movie they usually only watched once and put up on a shelf to collect dust and look cool for when company came over while I was filling the family computer’s hard drive with videos they were dropping a fortune on … for free!

Granted, it took forever and a day to download anything due to the fact that we didn’t have the fastest connection in the world; but it was free. My burgeoning love affair with piracy had continued to grow. I would set my downloads in the queue at night and go to sleep, set my alarm for thirty minutes before everyone else got up, and revel at all the 100%’s I saw before shutting off the computer and going back to bed like nothing ever happened. Sneaky, I know; but what can I say? I was bitten by the bug. Added to this, friends had started asking me to burn them CDs… for money! Not only was I watching enough downloaded movies and TV shows and listening to enough music to make my eyes and ears bleed, but now I was actually getting paid to do so. I didn’t think things could get any better…until I stumbled upon a little website called isohunt.com.

When bittorrent technology – developed in 2001 by Bram Cohen – was first introduced to me I thought “Wow.” That’s it. Just, “Wow”. The tech, as new to me as it was to lawmakers at the time, inhabited a murky area of legality. You see, unlike Kazaa, Napster, Limewire or any other p2p sharing program, using bittorrents (or torrents) was a completely different animal. This is why sites like ThePirateBay.org, ranked as the 85th most popular website in the world where millions (yes, millions) of pirates go to download music, movies, software and more, will not be shut down any time soon (unless the government succeeds in censoring the internet—check my other post; I may do a real one on it later).

Basically, torrents work by downloading small segments (or bits) of files from many different web sources at the same time. Besides people who have the files and are sending bits to the downloader (seeders) and people like the downloader who are getting the same file (peers and lechers), the sources of these files are usually housed on servers that reside in a country where US copyright law holds no grounds. So the “crime” is being committed in another country where the United States has no jurisdiction. But here’s where it gets tricky. The Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) and the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) just uploaded fake and dummy files that looked like torrents of new movies; but when downloaded, the file would deliver a nasty, hard drive crashing virus to the downloader’s computer.

More recently, the MPAA and RIAA have began getting serious spending millions of dollars on servers, lawyers and hackers of their own in an effort to stop the illegal sharing of their copyrighted works by closing down sites and even going as far as arresting uploaders of copyrighted materials. The Swedish government arrested one unnamed Swedish man, 25, and charged him with uploading over 1000 copyrighted movies earlier this month and in 2005 a Hong Kong torrent uploader was charged with distributing three movies and jailed. Three movies? Really?? Also in 2005, the FBI and ICE seized the site EliteTorrents.org, delivering jail time, house arrest and fines to several administrators of the then popular website. If a guy can have his freedom taken away, even if for just a day, because he uploaded three crappy movies (and Daredevil was a crappy movie), the pro-copyright guys finally have the example they were looking for with the popular uploader in Sweden. But the news reported he used no anonymity either so he kind of deserves to be slapped just for that alone. I could go on and on but it is clear to me that “the man” is no longer playing when it comes to piracy and bittorent technology’s involvement in the spreading of copyrighted music and movies. There is a silver lining to this cloud, however.

Recently, piracy proponents retaliated to distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks on torrent sites made by the MPAA and RIAA by launching attacks of their own. These attacks started with the MPAA website and its affiliates and has moved on to law firms, anti-piracy organizations, and individuals across the globe. All in all, the pro-copyright guys are on the hunt for torrent downloaders and distributers but there is hope for the copyright infringing technology.

“If we are liable for copyright infringement so is Google,” says isoHunt.

“We haven’t, [shut down the website in question] since the site in question is fully legal,” says ThePirateBay.org.

I agree with those guys. You call it piracy; we call it freedom. And there is always hope for freedom.

Sources (and some good reading material):

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Payback

http://torrentfreak.com/major-bittorrent-uploader-used-no-anonymity-bring-out-the-straightjacket-110310/

http://www.piracynetwork.com/page/2

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legal_issues_with_BitTorrent

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Pirate_Bay

http://static.thepiratebay.org/ea_response.txt

http://www.piracynetwork.com/piracy-news/if-we-are-liable-for-copyright-infringement-so-is-google-says-isohunt.html