Out of Control: The Sequel

by Mark Pesce
This morning I woke up to find that the torrent had died. Someone - no one knows who - had put enough pressure onto the operators of Suprnova.org and TorrentBits.com
to shut them down. SuprNova.org was amazing, the Wal-Mart of torrents, a great
big marketplace of piracy, all neatly dished up and aiming to please. You want
this new Hollywood release? Here's a recording from someone who smuggled a camcorder
into a screening. - How about the latest episode of that hit HBO series? There
you go, and no subscription fees to pay. Just fire up your favorite BitTorrent
client - BitTornado, Azureus, Tomato, or that good old-fashioned Bram Cohen code.
Click on the torrent, and you're up and downloading, sharing what you're getting
with hundreds of others. Share and share alike. What could be more friendly?

For those of you who found the last paragraph littered with weird gobblygook, here's
your opportunity to come up to speed: BitTorrent is a computer protocol (a language
computers use when communicating with each other) which allows computers to freely
and efficiently share information with one another. This free-for-all of sharing
is often called peer-to-peer or P2P, and it has become one of the most popular
activities on the Internet. Many of you have heard how the record companies are
deathly afraid that their markets are about to evaporate as their customers move
from buying CDs to downloading pirated music. This much is true: for the last
several years, peer-to-peer software has been used to help people find audio files
on the internet - files being offered up by other people for you to download,
anonymously. Find a song, click on it, and down it comes to your computer's hard
drive.

All of this song swapping began before most Americans had access to high-speed
"broadband" internet connections. But, as of a month ago, just about half of the
home users in the USA access the Internet through a broadband connection. These
connections are anywhere from 10 and 50 times faster than the earlier "dial-up"
connections which tied up phone lines and kept you waiting for what seemed like
weeks as you struggled to download the latest gossip from your favorite website.
While it takes some time to download music over a dial-up connection, you'd only
wait about ten minutes for an average song. Movies and TV shows, which are much
"richer" (more data), take a lot more time to download. The new U2 album, for
example, might contain 45 million bytes of data. But an episode of "Six Feet Under"
- roughly the same length - would probably run to 450 million bytes of information,
ten times the amount. Coincidentally, that's how much faster internet connections
are, compared to a few years ago.

This increase in bandwidth has led to an enormous underground trade in all sorts of audiovisual media. It's not just current movies - classics and cult films are available. (I downloaded Russ Meyer's Beyond the Valley of the Dolls the day he died, watching it that evening, my homage to the great schlock director.) And, more significantly, nearly every new TV show that airs in the US or the UK is almost instantaneously available globally, because someone watching that show is recording it to their hard disk, publishing the recording to the Internet. This isn't rocket science: computer peripherals which convert TV signals to digital data cost less than $100, and millions of them are out there already.

If you're just one person with one recording of one show, and it's a popular show, your computer's internet connection is going to get swamped with requests for the show; eventually your computer will crash or you'll take the show off the Internet, just so you can read your email. And in the early days of peer-to-peer, that's how it was. Someone would find a computer with a copy of the song they wanted to listen to, connect to that computer, and download the data. It worked, but anything that got very popular was likely to disappear almost immediately. Popularity was a problem in first-generation peer-to-peer networks.

In November 2002, an unemployed programmer named Bram Cohen decided there had
to be a better way, so he spent a few weeks writing an improved version of the
protocols used to create peer-to-peer networks, and came up with BitTorrent. BitTorrent
is a radical advance over the peer-to-peer systems which preceded it. Cohen realized
that popularity is a good thing, and designed BitTorrent to take advantage of
it. When a file (movie, music, computer program, it's all just bits) is published
on BitTorrent, everyone who wants the file is required to share what they have
with everyone else. As you're downloading the file, those parts you've already
downloaded are available to other people looking to download the file. This means
that you're not just "leeching" the file, taking without giving back; you're also
sharing the file with anyone else who wants it. As more people download the file,
they offer up what they've downloaded, and so on. As this process rolls on, there
are always more and more computers to download the file from. If a file gets very
popular, you might be getting bits of it from hundreds of different computers,
all over the Internet - simultaneously. This is a very important point, because
it means that as BitTorrent files grow in popularity, they become progressively
faster to download. Popularity isn't a scourge in BitTorrent - it's a blessing.
It's such a blessing that, as of November, 35% of all traffic on the Internet
was BitTorrent-related. Unfortunately, that blessing looks more like a curse if
you're the head of a Hollywood studio, trying to fill seats in megaplexes or move
millions of units of your latest DVDs releases. And, although BitTorrent is efficient,
it isn't designed to make data piracy easy; BitTorrent relies on a lot of information
which can be used to trace the location of every single user downloading a file,
and, more significantly, it also relies on a centralized "tracker" - a computer
program which registers the requests for the file, and tells a requester how to
hook up to the tens or hundreds of other computers offering pieces of the file
for download.

As any good network engineer knows (and I was a network engineer for over a decade), a single point of failure (a single computer offering a single torrent tracker) is a Bad Thing to have in a network. It's the one shortcoming in Cohen's design for BitTorrent: kill the tracker and you've killed the torrent. But network engineers know better than to design systems with single points of failure: that's one of the reasons the Internet is still around, despite the best efforts of hackers around the world to kill it. Failure in any one part of the Internet is expected and dealt with in short order. Various parts of the Internet fail all the time and you only very rarely notice.

Back to today, when the hammer came down. SuprNova.org and TorrentBits.com each played host to thousands of BitTorrent trackers. When these sites went down the torrents went Poof!, as if they'd never existed. This evening the members of the MPAA must be feeling quite satisfied with themselves - they see this danger as passed; never again will BitTorrent threaten the revenues of the Hollywood studios.

Nothing could be further from the truth.

As Hollywood is so fond of sequels, it seems perfectly fitting that today's suppression of the leading BitTorrent sites bears an uncanny resemblance to an event which took place in July of 2000. Facing a rising sea of lawsuits and numerous court orders demanding an immediate shutdown, the archetypal peer-to-peer
service, Napster, pulled the plug on its own servers, silencing the millions of
users who used the service as a central exchange to locate songs to download.
That should have been the end of that. But it wasn't. Instead, the number of songs
traded on the Internet today dwarfs the number traded in Napster's heyday. The
suppression of Napster led to a profusion of alternatives - Gnutella, Kazaa, and
BitTorrent.


Gnutella is a particularly telling example of how the suppression of a seductive technology (and peer-to-peer file trading is very seductive - ask anyone who's done it) only results in an improved technology taking its place. Instead of relying on a centralized server - a fault that both Napster and BitTorrent share - Gnutella uses a process of discovery to let peers share information with each other about what's available where. The peers in a Gnutella peer-to-peer network self-organize into an occasionally unreliable but undeniably expansive network of content. Because of its distributed nature, shutting down any one Gnutella peer has only a very limited effect on the overall network. One individual's collection of music might evaporate, but there are still tens of thousands of others to pick from. This network of Gnutella peers (and its offspring, such as Kazaa, BearShare, and Acquisition) has been growing since its introduction in 2001, mostly invisibly, but ever more pervasively.



If Napster hadn't been run out of business by the RIAA, it's unlikely that any need for Gnutella would have arisen; if the RIAA hadn't attacked that single point of failure, there'd have been no need to develop a solution which, by design, has no single point to failure. It's as though both sides in the war over piracy and file sharing are engaged in an evolutionary struggle: every time one side comes up with a new strategy, the other side evolves a response to it. This isn't just a cat-and-mouse game; each attack by the RIAA, generates a response of increasing sophistication. And, today, the MPAA has blundered into this arms race. This was, as will soon be seen, a Very Bad Idea.



Pointing up the single greatest weakness of BitTorrent take down the tracker and the torrent dies - has only served to energize, inspire and mobilize the resources of an entire global ecology of software developers, network engineers and hackers-at-large
who want nothing so much, at this moment, as to make the MPAA pay for their insolence.
Imagine a parent reaching into a child's room and ripping a TV set out of the
wall while the child is watching it. That child would feel anger and begin plotting
his revenge. And that scene has been multiplied at least hundred thousand times
today, all around the world. It is quite likely that, as I type these words, somewhere
in the world a roomful of college CS students, fueled by coke and pizza and righteous
indignation, are banging out some code which will fix the inherent weakness of
BitTorrent - removing the need for a single tracker. If they're smart enough,
they'll work out a system of dynamic trackers, which could quickly pass control
back and forth among a cloud of peers, so that no one peer holds the hot potato
long enough to be noticed. They'll take the best of Gnutella and cross-breed it
with the best of BitTorrent. And that will be the MPAA's worst nightmare.

Hey, Hollywood! Can you feel the future slipping through your fingers? Do you understand how badly you've screwed up? You took a perfectly serviceable situation - a nice, centralized system for the distribution of media, and, through your own greed and shortsightedness, are givin birth to a system of digital distribution that
you'll never, ever be able to defeat. In your avarice and arrogance you ignored the obvious: you should have cut a deal with SuprNova.org. In partnership you
could have found a way to manage the disruptive change that's already well underway. Instead, you have repeated the mistakes made by the recording industry, chapter
and verse. And thus you have spelled your own doom.

It's said that the best sequels are just like the original, only bigger and louder. Ladies and gentlemen, prepare yourselves for one hell of a crash. This baby is now fully out of control.



Mark Pesce Sydney/Hobart 20 December 2004
Released under the Creative Commons Attribution
License 2.0 www.creativecommons.org

Speaking of very bad ideas...

The record company behind some of Britain's biggest boy bands has been recruiting schoolchildren to promote the groups in classrooms and playgrounds, a Guardian investigation has revealed.

Universal Records, the label behind Busted, McFly and V, encourages children to sign up to a scheme under which they put up posters in schools and distribute flyers to classmates.

With single sales in decline, record labels are resorting to more sophisticated tactics. Fans are encouraged to become "school chairmen", and to distribute promotional material in schools. In return, they are promised free merchandise, "special recognition" and even personal phone calls from the bands.

The label also enlists minors for "street teams", who are urged to vote for the bands in polls and awards, email DJs with play requests and change their user names on internet chatrooms to advertise forthcoming releases.

Media Guardian has spoken to a number of children who have signed up to the scheme. One 13-year-old regularly hands out leaflets in her school corridors, and even did a presentation in her English lesson about McFly. In order to qualify for the promised freebies, she emailed pictures of herself carrying out promotional activities to Universal. Children interviewed by Media Guardian say no one forced them to sign up for the programme. But John Bangs, head of education at the National Union of Teachers, said: "These methods are unacceptable."

A spokesman for Island records, the Universal imprint that releases Busted and McFly, said: "We've been running the school chairman scheme for over two years now, and we've not had one single complaint from any child, school or parent. What's more, the children do really enjoy doing it."

Suprnova went down due to bandwidth exploding because they were mentioned on Slahsdot regarding the current MPAA blitz on torrent sites. Not because of the MPAA assualt itself. They simply could not handle the massive influx of visitors. AFAIK Suprnova is working on Exeem still, a serverless bittorrent application that will still provide verified links etc but where the bandwidth is shared (Probably through updatable XML for the actual links page).

DeadMan: not true

It was indirect pressure caused by the threats on other sites.

Suprnova already handled roughly 3 million hits a day before slashdot, not to mention they would go right back up after a simple outage.

By the way.. i have yet to really feel any pain from suprnova's death.

I have yet to have a hard time finding anything i seek.

Deadman: Your information is incorrect. Suprnova released a statement stateing their reason for closure. They have not been attacked by the MPAA, but realised it would only have been a matter of time. So they decided to quit while they were ahead. The site is down. It may be back one day, but never with more torrents.

Great artical, the flood gates are open and the next generation will be that much better . I'm not having any trouble finding what i want anyway and all its going to do is make the system stronger.

I think the article kinda sucked. The guy is talking like he has some firsthand knowledge that clans of coders are busy and dutifully at work, coding away, like a pack of Allies in a military bunker. how the hell would he know? All this article is is wishful thinking. Perhaps there are some coders working on new stuff, but "quite likely" which is the key phrase in the article, isn't definite enough to write as if you have some firsthand knowledge of organized code warriors.

actually exeem is well into its beta phase and should be going public in the next year

exeem: bit torrent/gnutella hybrid

whats happened every time a site is shut down or they put on pressure is a pretty good indicator of whats going to happen just look at the past to see the future Fobix

I sort of agree with the basic tenents of the article. Naptser was shut down for hosting and having said infringing files on their computers.

What resulted was decentralized servers. Where no one hosting server was also the resident of the problem files.

There are other p2p's being made and they take a lot of development. From the article the other day where a college professor made what was proclaimed the worlds smallest code for p2p (which was also mentioned in the article to be almost instantly broken by another smaller code) to things like WASTE that are encoded and require a key to even access connection.

More and more these are springing up all over. The day of control management is long gone. Truely a day short (so to say) has Hollywood responded to this. The day of the ability of containment has long passed and whether the media monguls agree or don't agree is a mute point. Since the public itself demands this (or there would be no use of p2p) it isn't going to go away. It isn't going to evaporate no matter what happens. If outlawed it will move to other countries to host where it isn't illegal to operate such sites.

The contining ramp up of sophiscation in p2p is the sign it is here to stay. Simply the demand is there and as such will remain. All Hollywood can do is accept it and it is a matter of time before they can come to grips with that. When they do the only way they can beat free is with something that adds value to it and makes it worth paying for. Something they are failing at miserably for the present. Erecting a nonexistance fence isn't containment and will never be.

The present day of DMCA and DRM is in for a fight and not many are accepting that this is a valid law or a practice, no matter how they try to enforce it.

This economic terrorism that is being practiced on the consuming public is going to have a back lash. Already the majors are squalling about loss of money, yet it appears that there is an endless supply of it to buy legislators and attempts at passing laws in their favor. Backlashes are starting to form. Manufactures and citizens are starting to respond. Colleges are now seeing this as an active political movement. Even the policital candadites are seeing oppurtunites for election by saying they are against it.

This movement to further restrict the use of copywrited materials is starting to run out of steam as those who oppose it wake up to the fact of what it means to each and how far along it is in its process. This is one is a matter of time till the responce is facing them in the halls of Washington and it will soon be the kiss of death to be associated with Hollywood publicly for any elected offical.

These things take time and responces are slow in forming. Once formed they too have a snowball effect. One that is coming.

Couldn't happen to a better bunch...

"The present day of DMCA and DRM is in for a fight and not many are accepting that this is a valid law or a practice, no matter how they try to enforce it. "

I would say both interests will wake up when this new copy protection (designed to "revoke" players/rippers used to rip files to the internet) is eventually broken, or at least nullified(it is dynamically updatable on a weekly basis).

Theyll realize the most sophisticated minds and the best of plans wont stop it.. theyll stop using drm.

"it will soon be the kiss of death to be associated with Hollywood publicly for any elected offical."

Really? Does this happen before or after the constitutional amendment to allow Ahnold to run for president?