Blogs by Magic

Thoughts & ideas from a digital magician.

Resistance is futile

Today marks the end of an era, as The Pirate Bay team announces that the world’s largest BitTorrent tracker is shutting down for good. Although the site will remain operational for now, millions of BitTorrent users will lose the use of its tracker and will instead have to rely on DHT and alternative trackers to continue downloading.
via torrentfreak.com

Today The Pirate Bay tracker went down for good. May it rest in piece.

What's interesting is that in its place is DHT – which is, essentially, a distributed tracker. I believe there is a "Yo dawg" hidden in here somewhere, along the lines of, "Yo dawg, I heard you like to pirate movies. We put a torrent in your torrent so you can download while you download!"

My biggest criticism of the the RIAA and MPAA is that they never try to fight piracy through economics. You've never seen them try to slash prices to get people back into a store buying CDs. Or mandate that labels and publishers drop DRM so that more paying customers can enjoy content without restriction. Instead they try to fight piracy by attempting to filibuster technology and innovation. It's futile.

And while you might want to hate on the RIAA and MPAA, the great irony is that they are the ones essentially pushing people to innovate. Every time their politics result in a "landmark victory", the resistance engineers a better, faster, and more distributed way to share content. Can you imagine if they never touched Napster? People would still be downloading single songs at 100 Kbps. Instead, today people download entire albums and whole discographies at 10 Mbps. So, they killed The Pirate Bay. Big deal. This time next year there will be another solution that will be 10 times faster, have 10 times as much content, and be more difficult to manage from an IP perspective than anything that has come before it.

They have music on the Internet

Question Of The Day: What Is Your Excuse For Not Paying For Music?
via npr.org

It's interesting how people justify their own actions. Take a look at what's going on in the comments. You've got all sorts of justifications for how people deal with the fact that virtually every song that's ever existed is floating around on the Internet. I find it particularly interesting, because if people acted wholly rationally they'd pirate everything. The odds of getting caught for pirating music are effectively zero. The only ones who ever feel the wrath of the RIAA's hammer are those seeding content to others.

iTunes came along and made buying music online so streamlined that people started buying music again because it was just easier. I've never purchased a song through iTunes. It's just not something I'd do. I still buy CDs. My usual process for purchasing music consists of pirating music until I find something I like, at which point I order the CD on Amazon. I like the physical disk. I like the art.

I wonder what I'll do when they no longer sell CDs. I wonder what the RIAA will do when they eventually realize they lost the battle years ago, all music is freely available, and artists make money purely by touring.

Filed under  //

Comments [0]