Ten years ago, DC Comics published the seminal “Death of Superman” comic book series. In this storyline, Superman takes on a monster called Doomsday, who *spoiler alert* kills Superman. Doomsday was created in a lab on Krypton by a mad scientist named Bertron, who then subjected Doomsday to the harshest possible environments and situations. Consequently, Doomsday died. A lot. However, each time Doomsday died, he would be reconstituted by Bertron, and adapted to whatever killed him. He died thousands of times, and through this forced evolution eventually became virtually indestructible, at which point he turned on Bertron, killed him, and went on a galactic rampage.
New developments in file sharing software now threaten to release a digital Doomsday, and copyright and patent holders may sooner rather than later find themselves in the role of Superman.
In 1999, a small piece of software was released to the general public called Napster. Utilizing the power of the internet to facilitate file transfers, Napster allowed users to transfer music, often in the form of MP3 files, between themselves. Napster was not the first peer-to-peer network; that honor belongs to services like IRC and USENET. However, as anyone that’s ever tried to download anything from IRC over dial-up can tell you, Napster made it easy and accessible, which is exactly how you generate consumer interest.
At one point in time, Napster usage was literally choking the networks of major universities and corporations to death, to the point where they had to ban or restrict the software’s usage.
With popularity usually comes notoriety as well. Napster ran afoul of the freshly enacted Digital Millennium Copyright Act, and was subsequently sued out of existence by the Recording Industry Artists Association, who represent the interests of major record labels and their artists.
Unfortunately for the RIAA, people were hooked on file sharing. They had discovered a way to get their content that didn’t require a trip to a record store and buying an entire album of bad songs just to get the three good ones, where one dollar of a $17 album would actually go to the artist. Moreover, independent artists found a new avenue for putting their music in the hands of consumers, bypassing the traditional label model.
Going back to the original analogy, just as each iteration of Doomsday begat a stronger version, so was this true for peer-to-peer file sharing. Napster begat Gnutella, which begat Bearshare, LimeWire, and the rest of the Gnutella clients. It also begat eDonkey, which begat eMule. It begat KaZaA and Morpheus, which begat Shareaza. And all of these, eventually, begat BitTorrent.
Digital music files are, from a technical perspective, easy to transfer over a broadband connection; even at the highest quality, they’re rarely more than a few megabytes. To get anything larger such as movies, TV shows, software, etc. in a reasonable amount of time, you either had to split it up into multiple smaller files, or transfer it all at once over a speedy connection. The first option is time consuming, in that you have to download each piece individually, and the second is problematic in that if something happens mid-transfer, you could have to start downloading the whole file all over again. To solve this issue, developers came up with the idea of breaking these large files into small chunks, which could be downloaded from multiple users at once. This increased both the integrity of the files as everyone had the same file, as well as the speed of the download in that you could download multiple parts simultaneously. Prior to BitTorrent, this had been implemented but with varying degrees of success, especially when it came to very large files such as Linux distributions, which although free are several hundred megabytes to several gigabytes in size. BitTorrent, like Napster before it, made it both easy and fast.
BitTorrent has always relied on small files called torrents to power its service. These files contain information on the file being downloaded; how to break up the file into chunks, what it should look like when it’s done, etc. Torrent files also give the RIAA and their movie industry counterpart, the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), an avenue for attack in the form of sites like Pirate Bay, called indexes, which maintain large quantities of these files, if not the actual infringing material itself.
Consequently, these two industry lobbying arms have spent the better part of the last ten years playing copyright whack-a-mole, shutting down every new index as it comes up, and attempting to sue every user whose information they can get their hands on.
Copyright holders have the legal right to profit from their works and to defend their works from copyright infringement. But, when presented with an easier and cheaper alternative, it is human nature is to choose the path of least (and cheapest) resistance.
At the same time they have been busy filing lawsuits against everyone and their grandmother (literally, in some cases), the membership of groups like RIAA and MPAA have stubbornly refused to acknowledge the reality that although consumers want their content and are willing to pay for it, they also want it to come without onerous usage restrictions. Consequently, there is still a gap between the wants and needs of content consumers and copyright holders. Lately, progress has been made thanks to companies like Apple, Google, and Amazon, but there is still plenty of daylight between the two.
Now, ten years after the RIAA and MPAA kicked off the file sharing wars by suing Napster into oblivion, the children and grandchildren of Napster have begat something far more dangerous than Napster ever was: a combination of BitTorrent’s speed without the use of torrents, and the searchability of a service such as LimeWire and Napster. It’s called Tribler.
Tribler is the first BitTorrent client that does not need torrent files to work, and thus shutting it down would require the MPAA and RIAA to literally shut down the internet to stop it. Moreover, it’s free, open source, and available on every major platform.
To come back to the original analogy, much like Doomsday was killed over and over and over again and was forced to evolve into the ultimate weapon, so too has the RIAA and MPAA killed file-sharing service after file-sharing service and provided nothing legal to fill the void, thus forcing the creation of Tribler, their own Doomsday.
Something like Tribler, if not Tribler itself, could finally be what breaks the RIAA and MPAA. A fight over a decentralized, open-source, anonymous system where it’s impossible to shut down the entire network and everything is available would make for such a damaging conflict, both from a PR and financial perspective, that no sane institution would dare fight it. However, the MPAA and RIAA are not sane institutions; rather, as their actions over the past decade have demonstrated, they are both insane and overzealous, and they will fight this battle because it represents a profound threat to the bottom lines of their member organizations. Like Superman, who fought Doomsday because Doomsday was going to destroy Metropolis, so will the MPAA and RIAA fight Tribler and its children, because it’s a direct threat to their continued existence. Moreover, also like Superman, it is likely they will die trying to defeat it.
However, Tribler has greater implications than what we consider file sharing today. Our current scope is narrow; digital files like movies, music, software, etc. need no conversion and can be accessed by anyone running the right software. Looking beyond just digital files, where this situation begins to get really interesting is when you consider the rise of 3D Printing technology.
For those of you unfamiliar with 3D Printing, a device not unlike a computer printer uses a computer file to create an object from raw materials such as plastic or metal. For those of you familiar with Star Trek’s replicators, the concept is similar, if not nearly as advanced.
Right now, these devices are the tools of hobbyists and geeks, but we’re rapidly approaching the point where we could all have a nano-factory in our homes. Imagine being able to purchase raw materials in bulk, download schematics from the Internet, and automated machines would turn them into household items. This brings our current Internet age problems of copyright enforcement of purely digital files into the realm of patents covering physical objects.
So, what happens when you’re able to download a set of schematics from the internet and have a device in your home spit out a physical object? What happens when the transfer of that file is untraceable and unstoppable? What happens when patents become as meaningless as copyrights because there is a cheaper and easier way to acquire a desired physical object?
Ultimately, these are questions that will have to be answered sooner, rather than later. Unlike both Doomsday and Superman, all the parties involved have a choice here. If history has shown us anything, it is that either ignoring the problem or attempting to legislate and litigate it out of existence is a losing bet. After ten years of knocking down file sharing networks, the RIAA and MPAA are no closer to ending the problem today than they were when they first started. They’ve only made their opponent more adaptable and resistant to their methods. On the other hand, if the content providers were willing to work with consumers, ISPs, etc. to find a middle ground where all parties are at least satisfied, if not exuberantly overjoyed, it’s possible we could create a new 21st century copyright and patent framework that allows for us as a society to fully explore the benefits of these technologies for the betterment of all.
These are the choices we face. Do we embrace the old ways, and attempt to stifle this new technology because it can potentially lead to piracy? Or, do we chart a new path forward that is equitable to all?
