Since the entertainment industry has chosen to make active enemies of many people who were once their best customers, myself among them, I avoid giving their members money wherever possible.
Business school graduates may understand why this is less than desirable for them to do. I'll leave it to you to figure out what's wrong with them.
In any case, so I was pirating away from the Pirate Bay last night (only downloading stuff that I've bought in the past and have backup rights to, of course!) when I noticed, not for the first time, that the bittorrent tracker was not thepiratebay.org, but something called openbittorrent.com. I finally got around to checking them out, and what I found was quite interesting.
If you don't know how torrents work, I point you to my earlier post on that subject. Suffice to say, that torrent sites don't host actual files, but merely point to where you can find pieces of them on various machines connected to the internet--generally the users themselves.
I've also talked before about the nature of linking. I think it's an important concept to understand.
Well, openbittorrent takes the link abstraction one step futher--they don't even know what they are linking to.
If you want to share a file, you create a tracker file, which is basically just a list of numbers--and simply list them as a tracker. Some other site would need to index that file in a searchable way if you wanted people to find it. But they don't do that. They don't even store the tracker file. They just repeat numbers on command.
So, are they pirates? They host no actual files other than torrent link/hash files, which they don't know what those hashes describe, and they have no index of what torrent is what data. They are just a big anonymous random data sharing facilitator.
It's so cool. This is exactly the sort of thing we need to be doing to draw a lin under the preposterousness of trying to control data on the internet. The only way for someone to go after opentorrent is to accuse them of linking to links to links.
In other words, you cannot speak of piracy, at all.
So what is your opinion? Are they dirty pirates? How dare they enable sharing data on the internet without knowing what it is!
Since the entertainment industry has chosen to make active enemies of many people who were once their best customers, myself among them, I avoid giving their members money wherever possible.
ReplyDeleteThis reminded me of the essay last week How Hollywood is Encouraging Online Piracy.
Over the weekend I was in both Target and Fry's and suddenly became hyper-aware of the enormous amount of floor space given over to DVDs.
This is frankly amazing.
In today's world, where many businesses are forced to rapidly adapt or die, there are industries with huge companies that can still pretend it's 1995.
The confounding irony of all this is that the neglect resulting from that fantasy, fosters attitudes and actions among the populace that those companies then attempt to repress with propaganda, legislative tampering and judicial abuse.
It was plain to just about everyone by 1999 that if the record companies put everything they had online and charged $5/mo for total access that, along with the money they'd save from not printing, storing, shipping and merchandising CDs, they'd make billions.
We do live in interesting times.
I suspect it's because many people are still foolish enough to spend that kind of money to own the plastic disc.
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