Lull after the Torrent
to Hollywood executives and recordmoguls, it is public enemy number one. to film and music fans across the world,it’s the equivalent of a modern-day Robin Hood. The BitTorrent revolution -which took off in 2004 – changed the face of infotainment around the globe,sweeping in its wake an IT-energised India where, earlier, it was difficult tolay your hands on a legal copy of even cult films like Trainspotting orhistorical documentaries like Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph Of The will. all ittook to bulldoze the dynamics was a free software.
with BitTorrent,film students easily and quickly scored their weekly fix of Fellini, music buffshad the entire Pink Floyd discography to groove to and Friends freaks couldalways catch up with Season 1. The filesharing technology took all kinds ofcinema, music, TV shows and books to everyone – even the least affluent and mostcensored of societies. Anybody with any bandwidth was having a goodtime.
but like with all good things, the free entertainmentera might be coming to an end. Studios and labels have begun cranking uppressure on illegal file-sharing sites and late last month – on Thanksgiving,ironically – popular BitTorrent portal Mininova, complying with a Dutch courtruling, deleted its index of over a million files when it partly shut down itswebsite. The court had ruled that owners of the site – five students – had toremove all links to ‘infringing’ files or risk $7.13 million in penalties.
after nearly five years of loyal, though illegal, service, Mininovaactivated its Content Distribution Service, allowing only material that artists- mostly unknown – agreed to give out for free.
Earlier in November,Swedish torrent website The Pirate Bay was crippled after it was forced to shutdown its popular tracker, the hash files that make p2p (peer-to-peer) sharingpossible.
Apart from Mininova and The Pirate Bay there wasanother safe haven for the avid downloaders – the so called private Torrentsites which aren’t open to the public and require an invitation to join.
but these too came under the scanner. SceneTorrents, a close-knit ,private community with 20,000 users, was forced to shut down.
Suchis the pressure that several legendary brands of the piracy underground are noteven waiting for the court orders. Canada-based BitTorrent website Demonoid hasbeen offline since September. Netizens suspect that the blackout, following theclosure of the site from November 2008 to April 2009, is self-imposed to avoidany criminal proceedings.
across the world, even lesser known,insignificant offenders are not being spared. in June, Jammie Thomas-Rasset ofMinnesota, US, was ordered to pay a fine of $1.92 million to music companies forillegally downloading 24 songs. Britain and France, meanwhile, intend to pursuepersistent pirates by imposing download caps or restricting the bandwidth ofillegal filesharers. if that is not effective, the governments will considerdisconnecting them.
but even as the world comes down hard on illegalfile-sharing , Indian netizens do not seem to be too bothered – neither by thelong arms of copyright law, nor the looming black-out of all BitTorrent relatedwebsites.
a student in an elite film school in Kolkata believes thatin a country where pirated DVDs of all blockbusters are being hawked at everynook and corner – urban and rural – of the country, internet policing is still along way off.
“I remember trawling the city for months for a Bergmanfilm some years ago. I couldn’t even find a store attendant who had heard ofhim. That is when someone showed me how to use Torrents. I tried it out and inless than 12 hours, I had downloaded, viewed and dissected the film,” he said,wishing to remain anonymous. “Even major organisations and some governmentagencies here run on pirated Windows. I have no choice but to use Torrents. Theonly films I would otherwise get are Hollywood trash.”
DISCONNECTINGTHE DESIS
Indians, however, have reasons to worry.Connectivity in India has significantly improved – most netizens, though not yetup to global standards, surf on a 1mbps connection – and that has resulted in amassive increase in the number of file sharers. Mininova , in the week before itcleaned up, reported a 300 per cent increase in traffic from India compared tolast year. For most other Bit-Torrent sites, India is in the top 10 trafficsources. also, if the government target of 20 million broadband subscribers by2010 is indeed reached, India will become the number one traffic source forTorrent sites by 2011.
Such statistics will not be missed by thepowers that be. Legalities apart, major internet service providers (ISPs) areconcerned about the unrealistic pressure that downloaders are exerting on theircables. Rumour-mongers say that certain ISPs are throttling Torrent speed at theback-end . both Airtel and BSNL, however, reject the charge, saying they havenot received any government directive regarding BitTorrent.
even ifthe ISPs do allow Torrents to run free, major studios, software firms and musiclabels are bound to target the subcontinent sooner than later. Low-cost DVDbrands like Moser Baer and T-Series are also expected to push for tighter curbs.
So where do the bandwidth hogs go? many believe the recentdevelopments might mean the beginning of the end of file-sharing as we know it.Mininova says that it may appeal the court’s decision, but the costs involvedand next-to-zero chance of success will discourage the owners.
WELCOMETO THE FUTURE
though it is tempting to view thesedevelopments as a major victory in the war on piracy, it is not. Every fewyears, the downloading community goes through a series of drastic changes thatalters the landscape. Mininova only came into being to replace an older torrentsite, Supernova, which, in turn, emerged after the fall of Napster, the p2pfile-sharing pioneer. in between them were the less virulent Gnutella andeDonkey.
in this scenario, it is only fair to assume that those intodownloading will continue doing so. there are still hundreds of active Torrenthubs around and it won’t be long before another one grows as large as Mininova .The emergence of DHT and PEX – next-gen codes that Hollywood believes aredesigned by The Pirate Bay – now allow peers to locate one another without atracker. The approach also allows The Pirate Bay make the argument, which ittried in court this year, that it is just a search engine for Torrent files -like a specialised Google.
already, several pirates are usingthirdparty web-hosting sites like Rapidshare and Megaupload to distributecopyrighted content free of cost. Others are making their rips available throughchat clients like mIRC and Yahoo! Messenger.
File-sharing isevolving and will continue to thrive, no matter how many judges, rulings andpenalties are thrown at it. The name of the site, or the technology, doesn’tmatter. all that does is the fact that millions across the globe want access toentertainment of their choice, and as long as that is the case – it will alwaysbe the case – the war on file-sharing is unwinnable.