Why You Can’t Beat Online Piracy

Let’s face it; much like pornography, prostitution and gambling, you cannot get rid of piracy. It’s human nature after all and bad habits never die, they just take a break and come back for more.

Online piracy, much like spamming, cracking and ID theft are ripe these days and the big corporations are struggling to keep up with what is going on. As expected they first ignore the situation, then fight it and in the end join it. Yes Napster has had a personallity make over but names, brands and all that is holy in the real world has no meaning in our brave new wild west. Napster, just as an example, was great. Then it was destroyed and – wonder and marvel – replaced by three new breeds. Each taking a slightly different approach and continuing where Napster left off. The same with our beloved Bit Torrent system, although Bit Torrent isn’t another Napster as such but a very effective way to share large files (i.e. Linux distributions or your latest promotional video).

Where Cisco likes to speak of their “self-defending network”, the online piracy community likes to talk of evolution and survival of the fittest. What one needs to understand is that there are few main players, hiding deep underground (or next door in your block of flats) and they are highly organised. We are not talking about a small group of kids ripping the latest DVD, but a business like organisation that copies and distributes the latest blockbusters on a massive industrial scale.

The Internet in its current form allows for people to hide and the only way to effectively track them down is through good old fashioned detective work, offline. People make mistakes, people talk too much, and people can be careless and greedy. That’s usually why police find them out but not particularly because they do a very good job. In fact the international police forces are pretty bad and it’s not their fault. Lack of funding, training and a general lack of understanding their foes is the cause. The primary reason being the people in charge (politicians for example) don’t care and don’t know what the fuss is all about anyway.

The common Internet user and pirated file abuser are the ones that get caught usually and are presented to the rest of the unknowing public as “told you so” or “see how great we are” cases. Arresting a 16 year old kid for sharing the latest Shrek movie with his mates is hardly new, much less a serious offence. It’s plain stupid and just shows how little the folks running big corporations understand and care.

Instead of ignoring and then trying to beat the pirates they should have done what the FBI, CIA, BND, etc have been doing for ages with crackers: hire them and let them define new distribution methods. Apple used its sideliner cloak to bypass the majors and run to the top of online music distribution with a perfect delivery and playback system (iTunes and iTunes Music Store). The same will eventually happen with movies and TV, once more people have broadband connections and content producers begin to realise that they are about to be overtaken by indie film producers selling their goods online to an ever growing audience.

Online piracy and is distribution channels are run by geeks, people with a very good understanding of what can be done. Born problem solvers and people with little or no respect for old fashioned, out dated thinking of sluggish, capitalist corporations. They will find ways around the latest copy protection, ISP port blocking or privacy disabling chips. They have done it before, they will keep doing it and there is nothing governments, police or corporations can do about it.

They can pass laws, they can get lucky, and they can even hire some key people or lock them away. But there are millions of consumers out there that are fed up with nannying politicians, giving up their right to privacy and having their requests for more usability go unheeded. People want to enjoy content wherever, whenever and preferably without being ripped off.

I admit to downloading the latest 24 or Battlestar Galactica episodes via Bit Torrent. Why? Because I want to watch the program and hate to wait till my local channel decides it wants to air it. Does that mean the producers will loose their last shirt? No, of course not. I wouldn’t watch it if I weren’t enjoying it. And when I enjoy it I usually want to watch it again and have the DVD collection.

Imagine Sky would enable me to watch what ever I wanted whenever I wanted for a little charge of course. Would I be likely to subscribe? Absolutely. TV advertising is so passé anyway, the world is changing and the advertisers better had found a new way to promote their products because in the future there will be no regular TV schedule, but one that I control.