Into Uncharted Waters
Tuesday, February 17th, 2009
Excerpt from Watchmen, by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons
If you’re at all interested in how copyright law is evolving with technology, you really ought to pay close attention to The Pirate Bay’s trial. Currently underway in Sweden, the case pits the founders of the BitTorrent search engine against music industry representatives. This might seem like a clear-cut case in favor of the plaintiffs, but there’s a significant grey area: The Pirate Bay doesn’t actually host any of the files on its site, nor does it produce its own torrent links to copyright material. Instead, the site merely lets a user upload torrent files, which another user’s BitTorrent client of choice can use to connect to the host user’s computer to download the file directly.
The real beauty of BitTorrent, as you probably know, is that it pioneered the concept of distributed file sharing — that is, everyone who downloads from the host (a “leecher”) is also a “seeder” who actively hosts bits of the file to other downloaders. In this way, everyone’s computers collaborate to ensure that the more users there are downloading a file, the faster everyone obtains it. It also relieves the majority of bandwidth pressure from a host, and theoretically enables download speeds to increase exponentially as more users seek the same files.
It’s important to know how BitTorrent works because it may explain why, just one day into the trial, the prosecution has dropped half of its charges against The Pirate Bay. The site’s founders are no longer being accused of “assisting copyright infringement,” which leaves only the less sinister charge of “assisting making available copyright material.” While the site’s founders suggest this is indicative of the prosecution’s failure to understand the technology of the site, the prosecution countered by suggesting they were just simplifying the charges.
If you’re interested in following the case closely, I suggest you head over to TorrentFreak.com. They’ve established themselves as the definitive source for torrent-related news, and they’ve been following the case intently.
I’m not sure how I feel about The Pirate Bay’s position in this case. I’d be a hypocrite if I said I’d never torrented copyrighted material, but I can’t condone my actions as ethical. I think that The Pirate Bay’s best-case scenario is they’re found guilty of negligence by fostering a Web community where people connect to exchange copyrighted files without being stopped. But all the same, I think this is going to be a landmark case in shaping how people can interact and share information over the Internet.
What do you think? Should sites like The Pirate Bay be shuttered to protect copyright holders? Should BitTorrent use be regulated? Or should filesharing continue unimpeded?