Features

net.wars: A storm of bits to rent

A couple of years ago, when the first online movie services came out, I remember reading that the movie industry was being - and going to be - smarter about the online world than its sibling, the music biz. Then in the last month we've seen the lawsuits go out against some of the leading file-sharing sites for TV shows and movies, and the truth is clearly visible: they're not smarter, they're just on a different schedule.

If you've heard of Bittorrent, the latest target, you're probably one of those evil file-sharers. For those who haven't, it's sophisticated peer-to-peer software that speeds up the process of distributing very large files and it is probably the currently most popular method for swapping video files.

Torrent sites host links to trackers - computers that manage connections for a particular file. These also do not necessarily host illegal copies of copyrighted material but they point to "seeds" - computers with whole copies of the file being distributed. The would-be downloader clicks on a tracker link, and downloads a tiny file that communicates with the tracker, kicking off the process of connecting you to peers you can download from.

Bittorrent is not particularly protective of privacy: it's easy enough to view (and log) all the IP addresses of the multiple folks you're downloading from at any one time. But it can be mercilessly efficient. Using it, I picked up Microsoft's Windows XP Service Pack 2 in an hour or two (until Microsoft sent in its attack dogs to stop the site from offering the file), and you can download last night's half-hour episode of Scrubs in as little as half an hour if you have a good connection. The popularity of a file has a lot to do with its download speed; the opposite of traditional downloading systems like FTP, with Bittorrent the more people who are downloading a particular file the faster you get it - because they are also uploading it. Something that's not in as hot immediate demand, say an 8.5Gbytes entire season of Angel, can take as long as a week to download - but if you have broadband, what do you care?

You can see why Bittorrent quickly became popular among people wanting to swap digital copies of TV shows, movies, and games. These types of files are huge compared to those itty-bitty (3-4Mb) MP3s music-lovers bat around. Long-term, the demonstration of what it can do for mass distribution of popular material (as in the XPSP2 demonstration) is the more significant thing about it - the technology unquestionably does have substantial non-infringing uses

In the last few weeks, some of the most significant TV/film Torrent sites have disappeared, notably Suprnova. These sites were not, of course, hosting copyrighted material, as noted above, though it's not clear how far that argument will get them in the current legal climate. Only one Bittorrent site so far, Lokitorrent, seems to be fighting back, raising funds to mount a defence. This follows last summer's jihad against eDonkey, which significantly slowed down that P2P network.

The obvious comparisons aside, TV and film swapping is really not the same as music-swapping. Music file-sharing really took off among US college students who had hot and cold running ethernet in their dorm rooms. Video-swapping, in my experience, skews more heavily towards Europeans. The key is time-shifting. Do you want to wait six months to see the latest episode of your favourite American show on British television with the commercial breaks in all the wrong places? Or do you want to see it the day after broadcast? Neatly edited, without commercials?

It's that last bit, at least for TV, that's the real kicker, and it's the reason why file-sharing is not the most important thing the MPAA should be hysterical about. There's still a lot of debate about how much or if music-sharing has hit CD sales; I've always maintained that music-sharing is more akin to radio listening than to buying music. But the most significant thing about TV viewing these days is that people are sick of commercials, particularly but not only in the US, where ads now take up as much as a third of a TV show's scheduled slot. The increasing popularity of TiVos and ad-skipping VCRs reflect this. TV producers and networks should be most concerned about how to fix those economics of their industry. Forcing people to watch ads is not going to be the answer for long, even after July, when the US adopts the broadcast flag

The movie industry, on the other hand, seems to have long forgotten that what they are selling is an emotional experience. Instead of wrecking the theatre-going experience by carving up movie theatres into uncomfortably angled spaces or building screens (as in Leicester Square's Warner West End complex) that make it permanently impossible to show a fully in-focus picture, theatres need better sound and vision than viewers can achieve at home. Instead, increasingly they seem to rely on the human desire to see something when it's new - the very point on which file-sharing is the biggest threat. They seem far more casual about DVD sales; Chinese bootleg DVDs have unusably overrun eBay's DVD section. The MPAA should be squelching commercial pirates, not suing private individuals sharing files for no commercial gain.

Either way, you know what will happen next. Court cases. Media coverage. And then new file-sharing technology that's a little less easy to attack.