Over at Sphere of Networks, I published a text that tries to give a simple overview of the workings of information production in the age of the internet, covering everything from free software to free culture. This article is a slightly modified version of a chapter of this text. I will show how peer-to-peer file-sharing networks work and how Big Media tries to prevent this sharing by means of random lawsuits and by using DRM. What does this copyright war mean for consumers and for our culture as a whole?

Figure 1: Computers continue to get smaller, cheaper and more powerful, and wireless internet is already available at many places. [shapeshift, CC-by-nc-sa 2.0]

Information technology

Since the 1970s computers have become ever faster, smaller and cheaper. This led to the availability of personal computers in most homes in the more economically developed countries. By 1995, the public started to realize the potential of the internet. Through the more recent introduction of broadband internet, most home computers are constantly connected to the internet at several times greater speeds than only a few years ago. Individuals have received the power to manipulate huge amounts of data ever faster, and (more importantly) to share the data they produce with others over the internet. Now it is possible for everyone to manipulate, for example, hours of homemade video and enhance it with some special effects. On the other hand, it has also become easy to mix and manipulate the works of others and share them with all the world, as demonstrated on sites like The Trailer Mash: here lots of people present new creative works they created—remixes of official movie trailers, rearranged to tell other stories. Use past cultural production to create something new. What only some lucky entrepreneurs like Walt Disney could do in the beginning of the 20th century, everybody can do today.

Networked computers enable individuals to manipulate huge amounts of data ever faster, and share the data they produce with others

Unfortunately, at the moment this is mostly illegal because of lengthy and restrictive copyright law. You can neither copy nor modify any work without the originator’s explicit permission. It isn’t like those derivative works were hurting sales of official movies or that nobody would listen to classical Mozart anymore (himself long dead) because his music was used and newly interpreted by a DJ. Nonetheless, copyright law has not been altered to let everyone make use of the new technologies. On the contrary, under the pressure of Hollywood and the Big Four record labels that dominate over 80% of the music market [1], copyright law has been tightened to prevent people from using these technologies. Under the pretext of protecting established artists’ revenues, new artists are prevented from rising. But the truth behind all this is that the record industry fears for its existence—rightly so.

File sharing

Today, some inexpensive home computers and the internet are superior to the distribution channels of the record industry with its CD manufacturing plants and many shops. Digital technology enables infinite copying of music and movies without any loss in quality.

Shawn Fanning, a then 17 year old student, released Napster in 1999. It was the first peer-to-peer file-sharing system to gain widespread popularity for sharing music. In peer-to-peer (P2P) networks, the data isn’t stored on a central server and accessed by clients (which is the case with web pages), but many peers, usually ordinary home computers, share their data with one another. Soon this technology was adopted and improved; after Napster was sued by the record industry and ultimately shut down, new networks emerged which were even more decentralized. Every user downloading information is at the same time making available that very same information he/she just downloaded to other participants.

Figure 2: A network with a central, expensive server from which the clients are downloading (left). A peer-to-peer network where every node is both a client and a server, downloading and uploading (right). [Wikimedia Commons]

The most popular networks as of today are eDonkey2000 (with client-programs as eMule or MLDonkey), FastTrack (with clients as Kazaa or Grokster) and Gnutella (with clients as LimeWire or Gnucleus) [2]. While these networks are searchable through a client program, in the BitTorrent P2P network, data is found through websites like The Pirate Bay where a small .torrent-file is downloaded and then opened in a BitTorrent client such as Azureus or BitTornado, where the actual download takes place [3]. Most of this software is free software, but some is also proprietary.

Peer-to-peer networks are heavily utilized, millions of users all over the world share thousands of songs over the internet

These services are heavily used. Millions of users all over the world share thousands of titles and even rare songs they wouldn’t find in stores. The major music labels don’t like that and have come up with the term “Piracy”, equating people that share music with one another with bandits that attack other people’s ships. The record industry argues that every downloaded song accounts for a loss in CD sales which ultimately hurts artists. However, it should be kept clearly in mind that not every song downloaded would have been bought. Also through sharing samples, people are exposed to new music and might come to buy CDs they otherwise would never have known of. And downloading old material that isn’t available in stores anymore surely doesn’t hurt artists. It is also a fact that under the current model of music distribution, the average artist gets something between 5 and 14 percent of the CD sales revenue [4]. The rest trickles away in the business that is the record industry.

But now a new distribution model becomes feasible. Lots of ordinary people, connected through the internet, outperform the record industry and make it essentially obsolete in a time where high quality recording equipment to supplement home computers becomes ever cheaper. It simply isn’t necessary to buy physical records anymore. Especially for unknown artists, the internet represents a very attractive marketing ground; with services like Last.fm or Pandora, it has become very easy to discover new music. Artists who release their music can earn money by performing and going on tour (like artists always did before recording technology was invented). Alternative payments systems have also been proposed: mechanisms like an easy way to donate small amounts of money to musicians over the internet, or to let every person downloading pay a small monthly fee which is distributed to the artists based on their popularity. This could for example be done by bundling a voluntary fee with the broadband bill (Broadband, unlimited legal downloading included!) [5]. With these distribution and compensation methods, artists would most certainly be far better off than now, but the major labels aren’t willing to adopt yet. Instead they are fighting windmills, with all means available to them.

Figure 3: The record industry has always been cautious about new technology—here a 1980s campaign logo against home taping cassettes

Lawsuits

As there is no single instance responsible for the operation of peer-to-peer file sharing networks, there is nobody in particular the music industry can sue. That’s why the RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America) turned to randomly suing people for copyright infringement that have allegedly participated in file sharing, in hope of deterrence. To find people in file sharing networks, they rely on tracing computer’s IP addresses. But it is often very difficult to find out who a specific IP belongs to and impossible to tell with certainty. That’s why the RIAA has already sued a 66-year-old grandmother for downloading gangster rap, but also families without a computer and even dead people were addressed [6]. The RIAA’s tactics are to intimidate defendants and force them into settlements outside the court under the threat that they are facing high legal fees.