Sort of.

In Sweden.

For now.

Friday saw the long-awaited verdict in the trial of the founders of the Pirate Bay, one of the most famous (or indeed, infamous) sites on the Internet. A Stockholm tingsrätt (district court) had accused the Pirate Bay of aiding copyright infringements of materials such as movies, music and books. The four defendants, Fredrik Neij, Gottfrid Svartholm Warg, Peter Sunde and Carl Lundström, were each sentenced to one year in prison and ordered to pay 30 million kronor (£2.4 million) in damages. The case will now go to appeal and may be overturned, but it does mark a significant point in the battle against Internet piracy.

The Pirate Bay was set up by the four Swedes in 2003 as part of Piratbyrån (The Piracy Bureau), an organisation opposed to the current implementation of intellectual property rights. The Pirate Bay became a stand-alone organisation in 2004 and quickly became one of the most important centres for pirated material. By late 2008 it was servicing over 25 million unique computers, and had more than 3.5 million registered users (and many more unregistered users).

Detached ethernet cable [image © copyright Photos.com]

The Pirate Bay had previously run foul of Swedish authorities; a police raid in 2006 temporarily took the site offline. A series of controversies not directly related to piracy followed. In one case, confidential photographs of a child murder victim were placed on the site and, despite pleas from the police and the family, were not removed; in another, one of the Pirate Bay’s original funders was revealed to have links to the Swedish far-right.

Despite these set-backs, the Pirate Bay has continued to grow until it now sits comfortably amongst the most visited sites on the Internet. It even spawned a new Swedish political party, Piratpartiet, dedicated to reforming intellectual copyright in Sweden. Although Piratpartiet has had little direct effect on Swedish politics, it can probably be credited with changing attitudes towards file sharing inside the mainstream political parties. Pirate Bay’s influence is so undeniable that its existence became something of a political embarrassment for the Swedish government, who were committed to bringing Swedish intellectual property laws into line with the rest of the EU and with the United States. Eventually, prosecutors tasked with reviewing evidence seized during the 2006 police raid filed charges against four named individuals; not for piracy, but for aiding it. Why not charge the four with piracy?

Because, believe it or not, the Pirate Bay doesn’t hold any pirated material.

The key to the Pirate Bay’s success is a method (protocol) of distributing files known as BitTorrent. Perhaps confusingly, BitTorrent is the name of the company founded by its creator, Bram Cohen, as well as the name for the protocol that is used by a large number of other programs. In this discussion we will be concerned with the workings of the general BitTorrent system.

Lady using a computer
[image © copyright Photos.com]

We’re going to need two Internet users, Alice and Bob. If Alice wishes to distribute a file through BitTorrent, she needs to create a seed file, known as a torrent. Alice uses software distributed with her BitTorrent client to break the single, large file into many smaller chunks (ranging from 64kb to 4Mb in size). The same software then uniquely labels each of the chunks, using a mathematical technique known as cryptographic hashing which allows other BitTorrent client programs to correctly recognise them.

Finally, the list of hashes, as well as other information, such as the name of the uploader, the name of the album or movie, the artists and so on, are written to a torrent file, which is itself only a few kilobytes in size and can easily be distributed using email or the Web.  Alice publishes the torrent, (she is said to "seed" it), so it can be picked up by other BitTorrent users.

When Bob wants to download Alice’s file he first obtains a copy of the torrent. This is not difficult to do. There are many sites (of which Pirate Bay is just one) dedicated to holding copies of torrent files; and most search engines will also turn up torrent files in their results. Chances are, if you look for a movie or DVD online, at least one torrent file will be listed in the results.

Man using a laptop
[image © copyright Photos.com]

Once Bob has a copy of the torrent, he loads it into his BitTorrent client program. Bob’s client extracts a complete list of all the unique identifiers for the chunks - it only needs to find the chunks themselves. Bob’s machine does this by contacting another BitTorrent client, known as the tracker. This client holds a record of the Internet addresses of all the clients currently sharing the requested file. If Bob is the first person to download the torrent, then the tracker will be on Alice’s machine along with all of the chunks. If the torrent has spread more widely, Bob’s client will receive several, even hundreds of addresses. Bob’s BitTorrent client then makes direct links to a number of these clients and begins downloading random chunks of the whole file. When it has finished downloading a chunk, Bob’s client makes a request for the addresses of further chunks and so on until it has received all the chunks; at which point it assembles the chunks back into a perfect copy of the original document.

In a BitTorrent system, Bob is not merely a downloader, his client is also uploading chunks to other users. Each time Bob downloads a chunk, his client informs the tracker of the identity of the chunk and Bob’s address and will provide it to other users in the system. As more and more users join a BitTorrent network, the average speed of sharing files increases, making it a very efficient way of sharing files. Popular files are shared more quickly, whilst even unpopular files will exist on enough computers to allow them to spread. BitTorrent is also extremely resilient. In a normal download service, if a computer fails, it can prevent anyone from accessing files. In BitTorrent, hundreds of users can go offline and the files will continue to download, albeit at a slower speed.

BitTorrent has proved to be a very controversial technology and has had a profound effect on how the internet is used. A survey, conducted in late 2007, estimated that the BitTorrent protocol consumed the largest share of internet capacity, ranging from 49 per cent of all traffic in the Middle East, to 84 per cent in Eastern Europe; rising to an astounding 95 per cent of all traffic at night! BitTorrent has become by far the most important technique for sharing pirated materials, so much so that many ISPs have started to identify BitTorrent users and to restrict their service, or terminate their connections. However, BitTorrent has many legitimate uses, including:

• software upgrades and bug fixes for online video games;
• Internet storage services that make files available to large numbers of users;
• obtaining legitimate movies and music through Bram Cohen’s BitTorrent Inc.

The Pirate Bay is a giant index of torrent files and trackers. Users only connect to the Pirate Bay to download a copy of the torrent file, or to use one of its trackers. None of the copyrighted material is actually distributed by, or passes through, the Pirate Bay servers.

So has the trial changed anything? It has clarified the law in Sweden to some extent (subject to an inevitable appeal which may drag on for years), but it certainly hasn’t put the Pirate Bay out of business. At the time of writing, the site was still working as normal, and it is unlikely to close any time soon. Following the 2006 raid, the Pirate Bay moved many of its servers away from Sweden to countries with less-stringent intellectual property right laws. But, even if the Pirate Bay were to close, it seems inevitable that other sites will spring up around the world to replace it. Piracy is a huge problem for the media industry and it can’t be resolved by ever more stringent laws, such as those proposed (and rejected) in France which would have struck downloaders off the Internet. The trial has not clarified why people pirate content.

A man's hands touching a laptop
[image © copyright Photos.com]

A few people will pirate anything, no matter how cheap the original item; there's probably nothing short of legal action that can dissuade them. A good number of people pirate material that is no longer available - either because the original has been withdrawn from sale, or was never available in their part of the world. Better distribution and back catalogues would bring these people back into the legitimate realm. Some pirate because they own a version of a title on one format and resent having to buy it again when technologies change or the original wears out. This is a more complex field as it requires governments to change the law so that copying from one form to another is legalised, and it requires media companies to unlock their content to make it possible without specialist skills.

If the media industry is to survive, it must first of all accept there will always be a certain level of piracy that cannot be eliminated; but it must make its own offerings so attractive that most people will be willing to spend money for entertainment. A good example is the Apple iTunes Store. All of the music on that site can surely be found on the Internet, but those illegal copies are of variable quality, hard to find and have a certain stigma attached to them. By making the iTunes site so easy to use, relatively cheap, and unrestricted (so far as most users are concerned), Apple and the music companies have been able to convince users to pay for more than six billion songs in five years. Other online music stores, especially those that sell unrestricted content such as Amazon, are seeing similar growth in sales.

The evidence is clear – make it cheap, make it easy, don’t upset the customer and they’ll buy your product. The music industry seems to be learning - so are the movie industry and the government ready to listen?

On the same theme

Darren Waters, Technology editor for BBC News, speaks to Digital Planet about the Pirate Bay's plans to appeal.

US judge and academic, Richard A. Posner reflects on the ethics of copyright.

About the author

Mike Richards joined the Open University in 1996 to help trial teaching over the Internet. Since then he has taught courses ranging from an introduction to robots to the engineering works of Leonardo da Vinci; but has spent most of his time writing about security - everything from the Enigma machines to e-shopping. He is currently working on a new course exploring the world of ubiquitous computers; imagine a world where computers so small and cheap they can be put in everyday objects - smartphones today, smartclothes tomorrow.

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So it’s time for me to eat crow, or depending on your taste, humble pie. Not so long ago I was confidently predicting a drawn out battle between two high definition disk formats; HD-DVD and Blu-ray. HD-DVD, backed by Toshiba and the DVD standards body offered cheaper players but only a limited range of titles; Sony’s Blu-ray was more expensive but had a larger library of movies. It seemed likely that the two formats would continue to co-exist, confusing purchasers who would continue to vote with their feet and carry on buying DVDs. Suddenly everything changed; HD-DVD is dead. On February 19th, Toshiba announced that it would immediately stop manufacturing HD-DVD players and recorders. In little over a month, HD-DVD had gone from a viable format for the future of movies to a technological cul-de-sac. What had gone wrong?

Two factors conspired to kill HD-DVD. The first was Sony’s technological wonder, the Playstation 3, which comes with a built-in Blu-ray player. After a troubled launch, the PS3 has begun to notch up impressive sales with more than 10 million sold to date (more than a million in the UK alone) – ten times the number of HD-DVD players that were sold during its lifetime. People may not have bought PS3 for movies, but they have certainly been experimenting with Blu-ray disks whose sales have been steadily climbing. The second nail in the coffin of HD-DVD was the decision by Warner Brothers to cease issuing new movies on the format. This left only Universal Studios and Dreamworks as committed to HD-DVD exclusivity for their movies. Within days of the Warner announcement; Woolworths in the UK and the colossal American chain WalMart said they were abandoning HD-DVD; the writing was on the wall for the format.

In the US and Japan, many retailers are compensating purchasers of HD-DVD players, either with cold, hard cash or with credits against the purchase of a Blu-ray player. On the software front, things are grim for HD-DVDs with most studios cancelling future releases; but HD-DVD users are enjoying a fire sale of existing titles as retailers dump their stocks, at the moment disks can be had for as little as £6 apiece – cheaper than DVDs! Existing HD-DVD players will continue to play regular DVDs, and in the event of one failing, Toshiba has stockpiled at least 8 years worth of spare parts. If, like me, you bought into HD-DVD, you will be able to enjoy it for many years to come.

The backers of Blu-ray, most notably Sony and the movie studios, are the victors. Toshiba might have lost this war, but it can easily afford to write off the costs of HD-DVD. The real losers in this war may well be consumers, and that is because we’re going to have fewer ways of enjoying our entertainment.

Region coding is part of a trend in media and computer software known as digital rights management (DRM) that aims to control how media can be used. DRM allows the publisher of a title to say where it can be played, on what machines, if it can be copied to another device, even whether the recording will evaporate after being played. You’ve almost certainly encountered DRM every time you play a DVD. When you first put a DVD into a player you will see a number of warnings about where the disk can be used and the consequences for pirating its contents. You may have noticed you cannot skip past these and get on with the movie – the DRM on the disk temporarily disables the functions that allow you to fast forward and go to the next track. The DRM on the disk also prevents you from copying its contents and from playing disks bought in one part of the world from working inside the UK. You can find a map of these ‘region codes’ on Wikipedia.

The DRM on DVDs was introduced as a reaction to the threat of piracy. Older, analogue technologies – such as audio and videotape can be easily copied, but the process is slow and the number of copies that can be created is very small. Crucially, as tape is repeatedly duplicated, the quality of the copies decreases – effectively limiting the number of pirated copies that could be circulated. However, when information is stored in digital form – such as on a DVD – it can be perfectly replicated an infinite number of times. These perfect copies can then either be written on to a blank disk, or distributed across the World over the Internet.

DVD’s DRM is a fairly elderly technology known as the Content Scrambling System (CSS). It was broken long ago and pirated versions of DVDs, stripped of all their DRM (often without the infuriating anti-piracy adverts found on genuine disks), can be found in most towns and cities and circulating on the Internet. When movie studios began to plan the move to high definition disks, they chose more powerful forms of DRM. Blu-ray’s protection is called BD+ and is generally thought to be superior to the AACS system found on HD-DVD as it allows manufacturers to continually upgrade their DRM against attacks. Unlike HD-DVD, Blu-ray also uses region coding to stop users playing and importing disks from other parts of the world. It is widely believed that the movie studios put their weight behind Blu-ray because of its stronger DRM, both because it offered better protection from piracy, and because it served to block the traffic in cheap disks from places such as the United States and Hong Kong.

DRM is not only found on DVDs, it is used by games companies to protect their products, in satellite and cable set-top boxes, on most music bought from online stores, even in the expensive HDMI cables needed to connect to high-definition television sets. Although there are a huge number of DRM technologies being used by various companies, most of them share a common technological root known as encryption; a field of mathematics concerned with scrambling information to shield it from prying eyes. Crucially, encryption is always reversible – that is the scrambled material can be restored to its original state by performing a decryption. Media documents controlled by DRM are distributed in an encrypted form and can only be decrypted by a user if they own both a decryption program and a second piece of information known as the key. The decryption is performed by dedicated microprocessors in the player using decryption keys stored in the player’s memory. If you use a software application such as Apple’s iTunes to play media files, your computer’s processor performs the decryption and the keys are stored in hidden files on your computer’s hard disk.

Some DRM schemes such as Apple’s FairPlay and Microsoft’s PlaysForSure tie media files to particular authorised computers. When you authorise a computer, the player software extracts information from that machine which might include information including your name, your registered email address, the unique serial number of machine’s CPU, the serial number of the operating system and so on. This information is used to generate the key needed to decrypt the media file. For both FairPlay and PlaysForSure users are restricted to playing a file on no more than five computers; if you try to play a file on an unauthorised computer or to authorise a sixth computer you will be unable to do so.

In Microsoft’s PlaysForSure scheme, machines need to be reauthorized when users upgrade from one version of Windows to another. Information about the machine is gathered, sent across the Internet to the PlaysForSure servers and a new key issued. And this process is now causing a problem because Microsoft is abandoning PlaysForSure in favour of its own Zune music player.

PlaysForSure was an attempt by Microsoft to eat into Apple’s dominance of the music player market. Rather than build a single device to compete against the iPod, Microsoft produced the PlaysForSure standard. Any manufacturer could then build devices PlaysForSure compliant devices with Microsoft collecting a small fee for each machine sold. Music, wrapped in DRM, could then be bought from a number of online stores that supplied music in Microsoft’s Windows Media Format. The idea was that competition between manufactures would quickly drive the price of their players below that of the iPod and users would gradually switch to the more affordable product, allowing Microsoft to steal Apple’s crown.

For any number of reasons, PlaysForSure was a failure and have Microsoft switched to copying Apple’s business model. They designed their own music player, the Zune (so far only available in America) that plays music bought through the dedicated Zune Marketplace online store. Rather than have Zune compete against iPod and PlaysForSure, Microsoft has chosen to kill PlaysForSure by simply switching off the authorisation servers. As soon as the servers are switched off it will no longer be possible to get new PlaysForSure keys from Microsoft. Anyone buying a new machine or upgrading their version of Windows after that date will find they can’t play music purchased from Microsoft’s old MSN Music store. Microsoft originally intended to switch the servers off on August 31st 2008, but after a furious customer reaction, have since extended the scheme, now excitingly branded 'Certified for Windows Vista', until 2011. Hot on Microsoft’s heels, the troubled Yahoo! corporation announced that it would be shutting down the DRM servers that authenticated its Unlimited Music Store from September 2008. This time, following angry complaints from customers, Yahoo! agreed to refund the purchase cost of any music bought through Unlimited.

DRM is turning into a public-relations disaster for media companies. Customers are increasingly chaffing against the artificial restraints placed on their use of products, and more and more of them are realising that DRM only affects law-abiding customers. Pay for a DVD or Blu-ray and you can’t make a copy for your laptop or your iPod, you’re forced to sit through adverts, you can’t even buy a cheaper version of the disk from another country. Pirate copies of TV programmes, music, movies and video games are available on the Internet; they look identical but have none of the restrictions. Piracy exists because it serves consumers’ desires and until the movie studios make their official disks every bit as attractive as the illegal copies, piracy will continue to thrive.

But it is possible that DRM is nothing more than a passing phase in the media industry. Amazon in the US and iTunes now allow people to purchase MP3 versions of music which can be freely copied between devices. As a testament to its popularity, it took just a few months for Amazon to become the second-largest retailer of music in the United States after the iTunes Music Store and it is growing at a much faster rate than the Apple Store. Despite fears from the industry, there has been no explosion in piracy; just many more satisfied customers and an expanding marketplace. Perhaps it’s time for Hollywood to wake up and begin treating the people who pay its wages like responsible adults.

About the author

Mike Richards joined the Open University in 1996 to help trial teaching over the Internet. Since then he has taught courses ranging from an introduction to robots to the engineering works of Leonardo da Vinci; but has spent most of his time writing about security - everything from the Enigma machines to e-shopping. He is currently working on a new course exploring the world of ubiquitous computers; imagine a world where computers so small and cheap they can be put in everyday objects - smartphones today, smartclothes tomorrow.

Subscribe to Mike Richards's posts