The Right Way

Napster's Logo

Who can forget the widespread popularity of Napster in 2000? The dramatic increase in Internet usage during the 1990s created the perfect environment for peer-to-peer (P2P) file sharing to emerge, and most of what was shared at the time was MP3 files. Naturally the Recording Industry (RIAA) brought a lawsuit, and the immediate effect was that Napster was shut down in July 2001. But this was only a temporary setback as there were now countless millions of people around the world who knew the benefits of P2P sharing.

So it wasn’t long before Morpheus and Kazaa took Napter’s place, and P2P sharing continued its growth. The RIAA wasn’t even close to learning its lesson, and they took StreamCast and Grokster, the companies behind Morpheus and Kazaa respectively, to court for copyright infringement. The RIAA was not immediately successful in suing these second-generation P2P firms, and in the mean time it resorted to suing thousands of individuals who had used these programs. After a protracted legal battle, A U.S. Federal court ruled against the P2P companies in September 2006.

And as P2P networks such as Kazaa began to decline due to legal pressure, the use of BitTorrent for file sharing surged. While Kazaa was a software program used with its own file sharing network, BitTorrent was simply a protocol for communications between computers. The central concept behind BitTorrent is that every user who’s downloading (leeching) is also uploading (seeding) to others. This reduces or removes the burden on a web server to provide a particular file, and it also allows users to host their own files for others to download.

Many applications (or clients) have been written for the BitTorrent protocol, and neither the clients nor the protocol can be associated with copyright-infringing uses – they are simply technologies in their own right. However, every popular P2P system has something which links its users together. In the case of torrents, websites (known as trackers) allow users to upload and download .torrent files which contain information about a particular file and the address of the server that keeps track of the clients currently leeching or seeding that file.

And as websites, trackers are not directly tied to any one individual or location and are easily renamed or relocated. One of the first trackers to gain popular recognition was SuprNova.org. From 2002 to 2004, the Slovenian website was widely regarded as the largest torrent tracker, but in December of 2004, the website’s owner was forced to take it offline due to legal threats.

However, just two months earlier in October 2004, ThePirateBay.org was launched in Sweden, and it would become the most widely recognized BitTorrent tracker in the world. The Pirate Bay still holds that title, and it’s still in operation today despite intense legal opposition. In the Fall of 2009, a Swedish court ordered The Pirate Bay’s Internet provider (ISP) to block its traffic and the site’s owners to cease operations, but the site was quickly relocated to an ex-NATO territory within the Netherlands. And even after that, The Pirate Bay is taking some steps to avoid more lawsuits and advising BitTorrent trackers and users to move to a new “trackerless” system. While the future of The Pirate Bay is uncertain, it’s clear that peer-to-peer file sharing isn’t going anywhere.

So what are people sharing that creates so much controversy? Almost all of the copyrighted works that are “pirated” through torrents and P2P networks are digital media such as movies and music. The reason so many turn to file sharing is that media companies such as Universal Music Group and Sony Music Entertainment are clinging to outdated pricing models. People today consume an incredible amount of digital media content, and many either can’t afford to pay for it or need their media in an unrestricted digital format.

For example, Green Day’s latest album costs $13.99 on Amazon, and even if you paid that much, there’s no easy way to get the music from the CD onto a computer or MP3 player. You could also buy MP3s online for under $1 each, but that is still too expensive for most. This creates a barrier that supply and demand won’t tolerate, and as a result, file sharing is meeting that demand. It’s illegality has forced P2P technologies to evolve towards decentralized liability, and as popular as P2P sharing is today, it’s fair to say it’s been wildly successful.