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Online Sharing: An Unstoppable Force Home
Sun, 03 Jun 2013 Linux-libre
If numbers are to be believed, millions of people share file with each other. Everyone's
sharing something these days, even the FBI, major record labels, the U.S. GitWeb
government, the Vatican, and even the Canadian police and government. In fact,
research published by Jean-Paul Van Belle at the University of Cape Town, South How To
Africa said that only 11% of respondents claimed to have never engaged in sharing
with their friends. Even the RIAA admits there's an ocean of sharing going on and Articles
there's no end in sight.
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This is a good thing: There are lots of people sharing files and more money being
spent by those that do because study after study shows that by and large people that
share files actually spend more money than those that don't. About Me
Despite this, companies routinely spend hundreds of millions of dollars a year trying to Contact Me
prevent people from sharing with their friends through various legal and technological
means. There are several technical measures employed across the board to try to GPL enforced
stop it, but are unreliable, and some are downright lousy:
First up is DNS blocking. This technique consists of ensuring that someone doesn't If you appreciate any of the things I
get the proper response to their DNS query. They might be told the domain doesn't am doing you can make a donation.
exist or perhaps the DNS response returns a different IP address, such that someone
ends up at a different website with a message that access to the site in question is
blocked. It seems like it would work in theory. Not so fast. World famous torrent search
engine The Pirate Bay proved DNS blocking largely ineffective by simply moving their
site to a different domain name. ISPs could block the new domain, but The Pirate Bay
would simply opt to move again. In addition to this, people can use various proxies to
bypass DNS blocking, use alternate DNS servers, or even a VPN connection where
the DNS queries also go through the VPN. The ISP would not know which sites their
customers were even accessing in the first place.
URL filtering is similar to DNS blocking, and is about as useful. The URL filtering
system requires ISPs to maintain a database of blacklisted URLs. These URLS may
be entire domains or subdomains. While this may seem like a workable solution at first
glance, the solution falls flat because it is almost impossible to keep the database up-
to-date and is also easily bypassed through the use of proxies and VPNs.
Enter swarm poisoning, a more clever, if not smarter, solution. Swarm poisoning is the
practice of posting fake files on peer-to-peer networks in hopes of gleaning the ISPs of
everyone participating in the swarm. This strategy worked well in the era of LimeWire
and the like, but it can't compete with the one-two combo of the torrent and the VPN.
Even a fingerprint system has an achilles' heel. In a fingerprint system, an ISP "sniffs"
packets of data as they pass through and assigns them a value, or fingerprint. The
fingerprint is then associated with a particular item and stored in a database. From
then on, if someone downloads something and there's a match in the database, the
ISP and the copyright trustee can be alerted immediately. Unfortunately, the
technology hasn't been shown to be practical for real-time operation. The Achilles
heel? Digital fingerprinting is virtually blind to files stored in compressed and
encrypted archives and to people using a VPN or a properly configured proxy.
By far the go-to technology is DRM, or Digital Restrictions Management. Reviled by
everyone except companies, DRM is essentially a virtual lock on digital files. The
noblest of hackers see it as their duty to crack DRM and release the goodies to all
who would have them, and that's exactly what they spend their days doing. DRM is
also completely ineffective.
Why then, when so much of the world sees nothing wrong with sharing copies of
things they like, are companies trying to stop it? When will they realize they're
ultimately playing a game of Whac-A-Mole where the mole always wins? When will
they try to start working with their customers instead of against them? Indeed,
research has shown that file sharing is directly related to the availability of other
options and that availability is directly under the control of the industry.
If not, the people of the world will go on doing what they've been doing and sharing
files amongst themselves and companies will lose out on the money that they could
have recieved. File sharing really isn't a problem but an indication that people are
unhappy with the current offerings. People that engage in file sharing, then, are really
underserved customers.
Some have argued that it's impossible to compete with free. While it may be difficult
it's certainly not impossible, but it is impossible when you offer an inferior product.
File sharing communities provide the ideal model for what Big Media should do:
• Worldwide simultaneous release, within minutes of the show airing on
television anywhere in the world
• Make it available in many different formats and resolutions for maximum
device compatibility
• Make it free of DRM
I think it's time for the industry to give up fighting their customers and start listening to
them. The world has changed and the people in it are speaking up loud and clear
about what they expect. Is the industry listening?
Copyright © 2013 Jason Self. See license.shtml for license conditions. Please copy and share.