Answer Guy Central

Ah, to be Australian. Lower population density, plenty of beautiful places, great weather much of the year, and now a little bit more freedom to use the Internet to download movies illegally.

Hey! And Nicole Kidman is in Moulin Rougue!

OK, so that wasn’t her finest work, and not a great film, but many people disagree with me and at this very moment are trading little pieces of the film across the Internet. Which is illegal. But the Internet is such a wild and flexible place that the question of what exactly is illegal and who’s responsible has gone almost nowhere despite repeated efforts to create an answer. Today, a court ruling in Australia made things a little more clear. Or less. Or, if you don’t live there, had no impact at all.

Here in The States, where the number of people using the Internet and our prominent position in global business and politics makes us ” more important “, we’ve been struggling for years to find the right way to protect the rights of people who “own content”. It’s so complicated that even an intellectual property lawyer couldn’t really explain it, and certainly not before you lost interest. But the short is that when you create a movie (or music, or a book, or whatever) you own it and get to decide who can see it/hear it/read it, and under what conditions.

Or more simply: you pay when you go to the movies or buy a book or music, and whoever owns it gets some of that money.

But the Internet makes sharing those things very easy, and services like the original incarnation of Napster, file sharing libraries like The Pirate Bay, and software like BitTorrent make sharing more efficient and exist so that passing files around can be as simple and efficient as possible.

The Pirate Bay went away last year, when courts in several countries shut them down. Napster, of course, was shut down many years ago. The issue of why is still being debated, though. Napster held copyrighted materials for redistribution, and that’s pretty obviously a no-no anywhere with a developed legal system. The Pirate Bay, on the other hand, merely told people where they thought illegal materials might be stored, which if illegal is not the same thing as what Napster used to do. Nonetheless, they’re gone, too.

Bittorent, the best software that’s yet come along to make sharing files easy, has a unquestionably legal purpose, so it continues to exist. But given their non-success to date, people who want to clamp limits on how their property is passed around need somewhere new to go. So why not try to make ISPs, the companies that give us access to the Internet, responsible for policing what we pass around?

Today, at least in Australia, that terribly Orwellian idea has been squashed. Let’s hope that ruling becomes a trend, or we’ll see a whole lot of stories like this one. And I promise: that’s not a business change anyone wants.

Have you stolen a movie today? What about music? Or maybe you’ve just exchanged some really large files with your co-workers.

The last one is legal. The first two, by simple inclusion of the word “stolen”, are not.

This is about to get heavy, my maybe-a-thieving-pirate-torrent-criminal friends, so you might like to read this before we go any further.

Ready? Here goes:

BitTorrent is perhaps the most useful piece of software to come along in about a decade. Except it isn’t a piece of software in the way most of us think; it’s what’s called a protocol. BitTorrent is a way for people to share files, and if you want to take advantage of it you need a BitTorrent client. There are many; the most popular is called µTorrent. Install it, and you can use BitTorrent to exchange files with other people.

Not a big deal in its own right. You can do that with e-mail. But what if the files is really big? E-mail won’t work. You could post the file on a server somewhere (assuming you have one), but that’s not always the best solution, because just the phrase “post it on a server” is too geeky for most people to handle. What BitTorrent does is make it so that if you and a dozen (or more) friends or co-workers each have a copy of the file on your very own computer, then when someone new needs a copy they can grab pieces of it from everyone simultaneously. It reduces problems exchanging big files by an order of magnitude, and speeds things up tremendously. If you start grabbing the file from twenty people who were available when you begin to download the file, and while you are downloading three go off-line; the other seventeen still work and pick up the slack automatically. And you don’t have to know anything. It just works.

Trading movies and music (big files!) benefit tremendously from this approach, but without commentary to whether that is the primary purpose of BitTorrent file sharing or when or under what circumstances it’s legal, it’s clear that there are legitimate uses for the technology.

The thing about BitTorrent that makes it a little bit complicated is that since any time someone downloads a file using BitTorrent, they are not actually getting the file from anyone in particular, and don’t even know where they are getting it from. Meaning that there need to be libraries describing the files and helping each computer using a BitTorrent client find participants sharing the files they’re looking for.

In a few days, when The Pirate Bay either shuts down or starts working very differently that it has until now, a VERY important library will disappear. Unless you download it and share it with the world.

Decide for yourself. Change sometimes leads to more change before people even understand it. Pay attention.