New Scientist reports that a company claims that they can stop filetrading at the source by tracking down the original culprit. Using certain techniques the company claims that they can find out who originally uploaded the file which may cause many people to rethink the supposed anonymity they have on peer-to-peer networks:

BayTSP, based in California, US, monitors peer-to-peer (P2P) trading networks using a technique called software “spidering”. The new software, called FirstSource, allows it to determine which user first uploaded a particular file for trading. It does this by mimicking the behaviour of a user on a massive scale - sending out multiple requests for a file extremely quickly. It deduces the culprits by assuming that only they will have the full 100% of the file, having uploaded the original.

The uber-geek that everyone loves to hate gave everyone a new reason to either laugh or loathe him when he announced in a CNET interview that those who didn’t support DRM were communists. Well Gizmodo decided to confront Gates during a brief interview.

Gates: No, I’ve said it exactly. We have your interests totally in mind, but that includes having… if there’s content that can only be there if it’s rights protected, we want to be able to have that content available to you. And so all we’re doing… in no sense are we hurting you, because if they’re willing to make the content available openly, believe me, that’s always the most wonderful thing. It’s the simplest.

If anything Gates is portrayed as a rather sympathetic character but the most amusing is the comments from Lessig’s Anti-DRM crowd...

It seems to me from the structure of his reaction and his delivery that he is regurgitating something which his pr experts cursorally briefed him on before appearing.

In short: i don’t believe a word of his in that interview.

You already know which of your friends own a Tivo because once someone buys one all they can do is talk about it. Even worse, if you do own one you start seeking out other Tivo owners so that you can compare what whacky selection your personal livingroom assistant has proffered for your perusal.

Tivo owners have been hanging by a thread for nearly a year to get that TivoToGo feature activated. In a nutshell: it allows you to transfer saved shows from your Tivo to a Windows PC. Ostensibly this would be your laptop so that you can catch up on the latest episode of the Sopranos while you commute on the train (clearly none of Tivo’s execs lives in LA).

Tivo is just a geeky Linux computer that lurks in your den in disguise. At its core is a bare-bones computer that records TV programs onto a computer hard drive as a digital file. Transferring that file to another computer isn’t really a challenge at all. In fact if you’ve ever joined the discussions on one of the many Tivo hacking sites you would know that your favorite neighborhood pirates have been, in fact, doing this for years. So why did it take so long to have this “feature” come along?

Note: Not all shows may be eligible for transfer from your TiVo box to your computer. Programming providers may restrict or limit the ability to record, display, view or transfer any particular program using a variety of copy protection mechanisms.

That’s right. Tivo allows random people wearing suits sitting in offices to decide what you can or cannot put onto your computer. That may not seem so bad until you realize that they can change their minds at any time and there is nothing you can do about it. If you buy a DVD from me you expect to be able to watch it whenever you want. What if a couple weeks later I decide to send a signal to your DVD player that I’ve changed my mind and you shouldn’t be able to watch that DVD anymore?

Well, this is basically what is starting to happen. This is also why the release of this new “feature” was met with so little interest. Anyone who really wants to watch Tivo files on their computer already knows how to do it anyways.

Wired News has a five page(!) article on Bram Cohen and BitTorrent. But what at first seemed to be an homage to Bram the brainy coder turned into a speculation on the future of TV and film. In fact, if there was ever a perfect article that represented the interests of this blog: this is it. It involves the death of TV as we know it, radical changes in film distribution, radical change in copyright and piracy and even quotes Jeff Jarvis.

Cohen knows the havoc he has wrought. In November, he spoke at a Los Angeles awards show and conference organized by Billboard, the weekly paper of the music business. After hobnobbing with “content people” from the record and movie industries, he realized that “the content people have no clue. I mean, no clue. The cost of bandwidth is going down to nothing. And the size of hard drives is getting so big, and they’re so cheap, that pretty soon you’ll have every song you own on one hard drive. The content distribution industry is going to evaporate.” Cohen said as much at the conference’s panel discussion on file-sharing. The audience sat in a stunned silence, their mouths agape at Cohen’s audacity.

The above quote is one of many gems to be found in the article and its author Clive Thompson seems to usually “get it” right.

Stop whatever you are doing and read this artcile now.

Boing Boing has a great posting on DVD cover art for pirated DVDs in China. What is most fascinating to me is how the economics and social acceptance of pirated DVDs has become so widespread. According to some Chinese nationals that I have chatted with, DVD sales are on nearly every street and the discs are of “professional” quality for a little less than a dollar each!

Essentially the DVDs are straight rips of the American films with Chinese subtitles added. Since English is not the native language of the people involved, the inevitable typo or mistranslation crops up like this “Here comes the brine.” With such a good product available for such a good price, what can the entertainment industry even do to challenge this situation?

I ask this question because recently the MPAA has become obsessed with shutting down internet filetrading. I believe that trading movies and music online is indefensible. According to our current version of copyright law it is illegal and no amount of debate can change that. However, since the invention of recordable media there have been people willing to rip it off for profit or for the mere enjoyment of sharing something with their friends.

However, the MPAA is misguided if they think that the greatest threat to major film studios are crappy quality, low-res Divx files shot of a shaky digicam in a theater. One day soon, hard drives will become so cheap that people can swap entire studio back-catalogs on a chip the size of a stamp that costs nearly nothing. This is the kind of piracy we are looking at when we talk about places like China. DVD technology has made it economically feasible to sell identical quality movies at a ridiculously low price without the loss in time and quality that piratng over the internet presents. Perhaps the Asian mafiosos that dominate the piracy industry don’t have a large foothold in North America but with the price of storage dropping like a rock they won’t be needed.

You’ve probably already seen the headlines swamping your inbox, news sites and RSS feeds: ”Hollywood wants BitTorrent Dead” or some other similar sensationalistic tease. On closer examination it appears that Dan Glickman (the new head of the MPAA) has wised up in regards to P2P and copyright issues over his predecessor Jack Valenti.

MPAA anti-piracy chief John Malcolm said the trade organization’s actions were not aimed at criminalizing P2P technology itself, citing “legal torrent” services that specialize in public-domain material as examples of the technology’s non-infringing potential.

Part of this change in tone has to do with the relentless campaigns by Bram Cohen and sites like Legal Torrents that demonstrate BitTorrent’s utility in downloading large files regardless of their copyright status. But the MPAA’s approach also reveals that they’ve learned some technological lessons as well. Instead of suing individual file sharers they are instead suing “tracker servers” which do not (usually) in themselves hold any copyrighted files.

I’m afraid that this approach reveals the one achilles heel of BitTorrent. Suing the tracker servers (or merely intimidating ISPs into shutting them down) will eventually crush BitTorrent trading. It’s also important to note that eDonkey and DirectConnect servers were also targeted.

So what happens now? Will people abandon these protocols and move onto new uncharted P2P lands? Is it possible to code a P2P protocol that doesn’t require indexing of some kind? It is going to take a while before any new technology can replace BT, eD or DC but most of the noise will come from those who felt that they were immune from the MPAA’s attacks. BitTorrent will live on as a useful protocol for distributing Linux ISOs and other legal content but DirectConnect will almost certainly die out considering its focus on almost exclusively trading copyrighted content.

BitTorrent is the tool that those “in the know” use to download large files. Amazingly BitTorrent has managed to fly totally under the radar in the entertainment industry. Having grown up amongst academics and hackers in San Francisco it was only a matter of time before I would have run into Bram Cohen. Bram is one of those colorful characters that populate the world where software engineering meets politics. Bram had been working at a startup that rewarded users with micropayments to reinforce good netizenship a perfect job for an idealist like him. He felt that users should not only be encouraged to upload but that the system should only work if users contribute as much as they take. Think of it as a sort of enforced good samaritanism.

This was the genesis of BitTorrent, a P2P technology that forces all users to upload as they download. This is why in recent weeks more than one third of all internet traffic is now BitTorrent traffic. Part of BitTorrent’s success lies in the fact that its ideological underpinnings have made the software a bit more geeky than the average Kazaa user can handle. I always laugh when talking to suits in Hollywood about piracy. They all talk about people downloading movies online, but have no idea how they download such large files. That is because, secretly, they all go home and log onto Kazaa and see how long it takes to download.

Anyway, Bram struggled in poverty and obscurity for three years before his baby became the most important invention nobody had heard of. Valve, on of the largest videogame firms, recognized the advantage of Bram’s system and have hired him to work on their new videogame distribution system called “Steam.”

To play the PC game Half-Life 2 for my review, I didn’t wait for a
copy from the publisher or have to take a break from my day job to trot
over to Wal-Mart, likely only to be told the store was sold out anyway.

Instead, I paid to download the game from the internet, directly from
the servers of developer Valve, specifically from its service called
Steam. The experience was nearly flawless. I have seen the boxless,
CD-less future of game distribution, and I’m lovin’ it.