By Dr. Philip Baczewski, Director of  Academic Computing and User Services

The Newest "Napster"?

Maybe you remember Napster. I guess it would be more accurate to say, perhaps you remember the Napster controversy. Napster was the phenomenally successful music download service that raised the ire of the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), absorbed bandwidth on college campus networks, and was ultimately shut down by an RIAA lawsuit.

The RIAA won it's lawsuit by claiming that Napster was supporting the downloading of songs by those who had never purchased them. The RIAA had enough of a case to win in court, but they seemed to miss the point that a market existed for downloading music. Instead of embracing Napster or a similar model, they fought the technology and clung to their business practice of controlling the music market by controlling the media on which the songs were sold.

And then there was the iPod.

Apple Computer, with it's iPod hardware and iTunes software created a new phenomenon, sold millions of $.99 worth of music, and proved the RIAA to be a band of foolish idiots. OK, perhaps its harsh to say both foolish and idiots, because with Apple's help the RIAA companies are still making more money than their "artists" ever see, and in a short time, Apple has reshaped a large chunk of the music industry.

Still, after it's success with Napster, the RIAA has continued to paint any peer-to-peer file sharing as a crime and has set to shutting down Kazaa, Morpheus, Grokster, and any other P2P programs it can get in its sights. You'd think by now that the RIAA would have stopped suing and started selling, but I guess old habits die hard.

And now, there's BitTorrent.

BitTorrent, written in 2001 by Bram Cohen, uses a new approach to file sharing which allows large files to be downloaded in a shorter amount of time than previous methods allowed. BitTorrent splits a large file into smaller pieces. A BitTorrent client downloads a file by fetching all the small pieces it needs to make the complete file. The client can also serve up the pieces it has to others who want to download the file. The more people that are interested in a file, the more pieces that are out there, and the faster the download can happen.

BitTorrent is ideal for downloading CD images of new Linux releases or other large software. Of course, it is also idea for downloading digitized copies of movies, TV shows, and video games. Napster's downfall was that it used a centralized server to help clients locate songs to download. BitTorrent clients rely on "tracker" sites which keep track of where a client can find the different pieces of a file. Some of these servers also store "torrents" which are files which have the information needed by a client to start the download process for a particular file.

Enter the MPAA.

You might recognize the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) as the
forward-looking folks who tried to ban the VCR. Recent reports indicated that the MPAA had set its sites on BitTorrent trackers and torrent servers. Sure enough, it did not take long for the reports that some torrent servers had been shut down.

I have no sympathy for people that distribute intellectual property when they have no authority to do so, but you have to wonder about the sue-first/think-later strategy of the MPAA. Some of the items on the list of torrents bothering the MPAA were apparently episodes of ABC's "Desperate Housewives", that new TV show, featuring adultery and deception, brought to you by the pillar of family entertainment, Disney Inc. You'd think that if that many people were interested in the show, ABC would set up it's own torrent server and provide the show to folks commercials and all. It's not like its not already recorded on a bunch of VCRs, TiVos, or other PVRs out there.

But, instead of seeing a new way to distribute their show and increase it's popularity in an expanding market, the MPAA and their ilk cling to their fantasy of controlling the time and place where you see their show. Have they noticed the iPod yet? Have they yet to put quill to parchment and figured out it won't be long before an iPod-sized device will be able to store multiple movies?

Chaos theory, anyone?

Going after servers not only shuts down content which may be unauthorized, but also may prevent "perfectly legal" content from being served to the Internet world. There's another side effect. Going after centralized torrent servers promotes the development of decentralized methods for distributing files via BitTorrent. One such idea is called Kenosis.

Eric Ries, one of the project administrators for Kenosis, describes one of the advantages of Kenosis as follows: "The current Kenosis-enabled BitTorrent software provides automatic tracker failover. This prevents any single tracker from becoming the central point of failure for any given file. As soon as a tracker goes down or becomes unreachable, clients automatically switch over to another tracker." This approach allows an unlimited number of trackers and makes it much harder for people like the MPAA to stem the flow of downloads.

In response to the recent BitTorrent servers shutdowns, a site called monkeymethods.org decided to ask, "How big of a blow are these shutdowns?" They determined that "a small number of sites constituted a huge percentage of the torrents." But, they also went on to say, "For the people that aim to stop P2P, they have turned a centralized system like Napster - easily controlled, easily monitored - into a fully decentralized system in the form of Kazaa, as well as a fragmented ecosystem of thousands of centralized servers through BitTorrent. This was probably a bad decision."

Do you think that the MPAA will look up from their inkwells and take notice?

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