The Pirate Party has picked up a seat in the European Parliament in Sweden. No, they aren't the swashbuckling, cutlass-carrying, West-Country-accented kind sporting wooden legs and parrots, rather anti-copyright activists.
You may be aware of the long-term disputes over bittorrent (file-sharing) website thepiratebay.org, which is hosted on Swedish servers. Earlier this year four men, Peter Sunde, Fredrik Neij, Gottfrid Svartholm and Carl Lundström were found guilty of assistance to copyright infringement. An appeal is being mounted now, but the Pirate party gaining ground set me thinking.
What is the future for peer-to-peer (P2P), BitTorrent, file-sharing and downloading music and films? Will outlawing it simply drive it underground, or make it even more popular? (they say the best way to get a teenager to do what you want is to tell him not to!) Well, many services already use P2P technology - the BBC's iPlayer a notable example. Similarly, not all Bittorrent trackers or torrents are illegal. Shareware software and software or content released under the GNU General Public License may be distributed by Bittorrent. This may include any Free OSs, such as those in the Linux/Unix family, virus scanners such as AVG and Avast! and media players such as Musiic and Winamp. In general, anything that is free to download may be downloaded any way you wish - including bittorrent - but be careful to read the licences to see whether you may redistribute it yourself (GNU can be altered and distributed as much and by whatever method you wish).
So, what actually is the illegal aspect here? It's purely the content. Albums are copyright, films are copyright, TV series are copyright. These are illegal to distribute via bittorrent. But what is the difference between getting album by P2P and borrowing a CD from your friend and recording it on cassette tape? Or how about downloading South Park from thepiratebay.org onto your computer and recording the series onto VHS and keeping it longer than the legally permitted six months? People have always circumvented the need to pay for the content, all that's happened is the technology involved. On the other hand, is it any different from walking into HMV, dropping the CD into your rucksack and walking out again?
Gluing the hairs back together for a moment, we come to the conclusion that downloading is theft. But ought it be? Sticking firmly to the issue of music now, I do not mind admitting to having downloaded a few albums illegally in my lifetime. However, I do not think that this has hurt anyone. When I get an album, one of two things happens. Either I like the band, or I don't. If I like them, I'll buy albums and T-shirts and go to gigs. For example, from downloading one album by the band Modest Mouse, I've since paid for eight of their CD's (including the one I downloaded in the first place) and been to three gigs. If I dislike the band, I'll not buy any CD's, and the band is not deprived of any revenue as I'd not have bought a CD anyway.
What can be done? The options are endless, but more independent record labels and cheaper legal downloads would make a good start. The price of legal downloads via iTunes/Tesco/Amazon etc, is a real bugbear of mine. I object to paying 79p/track to download a 10-track album when the physical CD would only cost me £9.99. This £2.08 difference seems to magically include the CD's artwork, the CD and case itself and the distribution costs, plus a larger profit for HMV to cover these overheads (and what if the CD has 14 tracks?). Add to this the DRM issue, that you may only be allowed to put the mp3 you have paid for onto five or six devices (doesn't leave much room to manouvre if you have your desktop PC, a laptop, an mp3 player, phone, and mp3 player in you car) and the far poorer quality (the mp3's you download are usually around 192kbps for most mp3s, and even the best are only around 320kbps, compares to a 'CD quality' of 1.4Mbps, or 1440kbps, at least 4.5 times higher than an mp3 - see what the audiophiles think), and downloaded mp3's begin to look like a ripoff. Whilst we're paying almost as much for an inferior product, with terms and conditions attached and without it's artwork, I'm afraid illegal downloading will continue.
Good luck to Sweden's Pirate party!
You may be aware of the long-term disputes over bittorrent (file-sharing) website thepiratebay.org, which is hosted on Swedish servers. Earlier this year four men, Peter Sunde, Fredrik Neij, Gottfrid Svartholm and Carl Lundström were found guilty of assistance to copyright infringement. An appeal is being mounted now, but the Pirate party gaining ground set me thinking.
What is the future for peer-to-peer (P2P), BitTorrent, file-sharing and downloading music and films? Will outlawing it simply drive it underground, or make it even more popular? (they say the best way to get a teenager to do what you want is to tell him not to!) Well, many services already use P2P technology - the BBC's iPlayer a notable example. Similarly, not all Bittorrent trackers or torrents are illegal. Shareware software and software or content released under the GNU General Public License may be distributed by Bittorrent. This may include any Free OSs, such as those in the Linux/Unix family, virus scanners such as AVG and Avast! and media players such as Musiic and Winamp. In general, anything that is free to download may be downloaded any way you wish - including bittorrent - but be careful to read the licences to see whether you may redistribute it yourself (GNU can be altered and distributed as much and by whatever method you wish).
So, what actually is the illegal aspect here? It's purely the content. Albums are copyright, films are copyright, TV series are copyright. These are illegal to distribute via bittorrent. But what is the difference between getting album by P2P and borrowing a CD from your friend and recording it on cassette tape? Or how about downloading South Park from thepiratebay.org onto your computer and recording the series onto VHS and keeping it longer than the legally permitted six months? People have always circumvented the need to pay for the content, all that's happened is the technology involved. On the other hand, is it any different from walking into HMV, dropping the CD into your rucksack and walking out again?
Gluing the hairs back together for a moment, we come to the conclusion that downloading is theft. But ought it be? Sticking firmly to the issue of music now, I do not mind admitting to having downloaded a few albums illegally in my lifetime. However, I do not think that this has hurt anyone. When I get an album, one of two things happens. Either I like the band, or I don't. If I like them, I'll buy albums and T-shirts and go to gigs. For example, from downloading one album by the band Modest Mouse, I've since paid for eight of their CD's (including the one I downloaded in the first place) and been to three gigs. If I dislike the band, I'll not buy any CD's, and the band is not deprived of any revenue as I'd not have bought a CD anyway.
What can be done? The options are endless, but more independent record labels and cheaper legal downloads would make a good start. The price of legal downloads via iTunes/Tesco/Amazon etc, is a real bugbear of mine. I object to paying 79p/track to download a 10-track album when the physical CD would only cost me £9.99. This £2.08 difference seems to magically include the CD's artwork, the CD and case itself and the distribution costs, plus a larger profit for HMV to cover these overheads (and what if the CD has 14 tracks?). Add to this the DRM issue, that you may only be allowed to put the mp3 you have paid for onto five or six devices (doesn't leave much room to manouvre if you have your desktop PC, a laptop, an mp3 player, phone, and mp3 player in you car) and the far poorer quality (the mp3's you download are usually around 192kbps for most mp3s, and even the best are only around 320kbps, compares to a 'CD quality' of 1.4Mbps, or 1440kbps, at least 4.5 times higher than an mp3 - see what the audiophiles think), and downloaded mp3's begin to look like a ripoff. Whilst we're paying almost as much for an inferior product, with terms and conditions attached and without it's artwork, I'm afraid illegal downloading will continue.
Good luck to Sweden's Pirate party!
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