hyperpeople :: the world is my hard drive

hyperpeople :: the world is my hard drive :: the day hollywood died

A few days before I sat down to write hyperpeople, the main hard drive on my PC - which holds the computer’s operating system, and all of its programs - began to fail. I was very fortunate in that it failed gradually, over a few days, so I had time to take the data from that drive and burn it to DVDs. I probably haven’t lost anything important. But I did have to purchase a replacement drive and reinstall Microsoft’s Windows operating system, if only so I could watch my DTV. The folks at Compaq, who manufactured my computer, thoughtfully supplied a CD with my purchase for such an eventuality. All you need to do is pop the CD in, restart the computer, and it will automatically restore the operating system. Only one problem: it didn’t work. Despite my best efforts (and, when those failed, swearing, shaking my fist, etc.) the CD steadfastly refused to restore the operating system to my computer. Now I was well and truly screwed; a computer without an operating system is about as useful as an electrified brick. I could have run down to the store and spent a few hundred dollars on a new copy of Microsoft Windows - but I already owned a copy, included in the price of my PC. I shouldn’t need to purchase another copy. What to do? I had the software “key” I needed to “activate” a copy of Windows - that key Compaq had, rather more thoughtfully, taped to the casing of my computer. So all I needed were the bits that make up the Windows operating system. I didn’t need a legitimate copy of Windows, because, with my key, I could legitimate it. And I already knew where I could find an illegitimate copy of Windows: at SuprNova.org.

I discovered SuprNova.org on the day Russ Meyer, that great director of schlock cinema, passed away. As a fan of cult movies, I truly believe that Meyer’s Beyond the Valley of the Dolls (with a script by the then-aspiring screenwriter Roger Ebert) is one of the great classics of camp cinema. I didn’t own a copy of the film, but I suspected if I toured the BitTorrent web sites, I’d find one. It took me about five minutes to track it down, and another hour to download it. As the film filled my hard drive, I took a long look around the site which offered it up through BitTorrent, SuprNova.org. It billed itself as the largest BitTorrent site on the web, and indeed, it felt like the Wal-Mart of digital media. Thousands upon thousands of films - new and old, classic and camp - together with more television shows than I could ever hope to watch, more cracked software than I could install on a dozen hard drives, video games, albums, everything that could be digitized and had been, all of it free for the taking on SuprNova.org. Many of the offerings were smuggled-into-the-theatre camcorder recordings of films that had only been released theatrically a few days before; others were “rips” of recently-released DVDs, complete with special features; or television series that had been shown on subscription cable channels like HBO. Almost all of it was clearly pirated material, probably worth several tens of billions of dollars to the copyright holders, and I could have any of it - for free - just by clicking the mouse.

The theft of tens of billions of dollars of anything is unlikely to go unnoticed. In an industry that depends on enforcement of copyright law for its revenues - film, music, software, and print publishing - such cases of copyright infringement are dealt with swiftly and severely. It all begins with a “Cease and Desist” order, a legal memorandum written by a highly-paid law firm, on behalf of their client - generally a movie studio or recording company - ordering the infringing party to immediately cease distribution of the infringing materials. Sloncek, the owner and operator of SuprNova.org, became a frequent recipient of these Cease and Desist orders, and replied to them, posting both the letters and his replies to the SuprNova.org website. Bitter and often hilariously funny, his responses went something like this: SuprNova.org was not in the United States of America, and so was not subject to American copyright law; furthermore, SuprNova.org held none of the infringing materials these lawyers claimed were being distributed through his web site. SuprNova.org was simply offering a service where people with various digital materials could locate each other.

Like Napster before it, BitTorrent does require a centralized server, a piece of software known as the “tracker,” which allows BitTorrent peers to find each other. That tracker must be accessed by anyone who wants to join in a BitTorrent transfer before the transfer can begin. The tracker is the key into the private club of peers. Unlike Napster, each BitTorrent tracker grants you access to only one piece of media; you can’t get access to the entire universe of available media through a single BitTorrent tracker. One tracker per file, that’s it. SuprNova.org offered a tracker “hosting” service; if you had a file to share, you could fill out a form on the SuprNova.org website, and it would automatically create a BitTorrent tracker which would allow you to share that file freely. It was simple, elegant, and it kept SuprNova.org’s computers free of any infringing materials. You wouldn’t find any music or movies on SuprNova.org, just pointers to others who were simply sharing those albums and films with their friends. Nothing wrong with that, is there?

This is almost exactly the same line of defense that Napster had used in court back in 2000; it didn’t work for them, and it wouldn’t work for SuprNova.org. Any inducement to the infringement of copyright is, in the eyes of the law, tantamount to copyright infringement. If you provide the tools to pick the lock, you are an accessory before the fact to the theft.

Just about fifteen minutes after I’d finished my download of a replacement version of Microsoft Windows, during the evening hours of the 19^th of December 2004, whilst in the middle of a download of the 1968 Rankin/Bass classic Frosty the Snowman (I loved that film when I was a kid), SuprNova.org died. My download stopped, stuck at about 35% of the total. I tried to restart it. Nothing happened. Again. Nothing. And again. Finally, I just gave up, assuming there’d been a failure somewhere on the Internet between Sydney and wherever-in-the-world SuprNova.org housed its computers. (That, as it turns out, is in the new European nation of Slovenia.) I went to bed.

The next morning I got a panicked instant message from one of my Sydneysider friends. “They’ve shut down SuprNova.org!”

“What?” I typed in reply. “How’d you know that?”

My friend passed along a URL which sent me to an article on Slashdot, telling of how the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) had shut down three of the most popular BitTorrent tracker sites on the Internet - torrents.youceff.com (France), TorrentBits.com (USA) and SuprNova.org. I read Sloncek’s brief note, published on the SuprNova.org website:

As you have probably noticed, we have often had downtimes. This was because it was so hard to keep this site up!

But now we are sorry to inform you all, that SuprNova is closing down for good in the way that we all know it.

We do not know if SuprNova is going to return, but it is certainly not going to be hosting any more torrent links.

We are very sorry for this, but there was no other way, we have tried everything.

Then Sloncek pulled the plug on the SuprNova.org’s trackers.

The MPAA, understandably anxious to stop the wholesale copyright theft through the three biggest BitTorrent tracker sites, used all the legal means at its disposal (which are substantial) to take them out of commission. It worked; these sites are dark, and there’s no indication that they’ll ever come back online. The MPAA has vastly more legal and political power than a web site operator; torrents.youceff.com survived on $350 a month in donations from loyal users, while SuprNova.org earned only a little more money from advertising on its web site. None of these sites had really profited from the trade in copyright; all were essentially one-man shows, and none could afford the costs of a protracted legal proceeding. The MPAA’s straightforward strategy is a staple of all modern warfare: pull out the big guns, and wait for your enemy to surrender unconditionally. Of course, the assumption here is that you really do have the bigger guns.

“Oh no.” I wrote back to my friend. “Oh god no. They don’t know what they’ve done. The fools. They don’t know what they’ve done!”

Nietzsche said that history repeats itself: first as tragedy, then as folly. George Santayana said that those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. And Einstein believed the definition of insanity to be “repeating the same act, expecting different results.” To these I must add one more: Hollywood loves a sequel.

Everyone had seen it coming; from early October 2004 the MPAA had been making ominous rumblings, widely reported in the media, about cracking down on the file-sharing web sites which trafficked in their intellectual property. Perhaps SuprNova.org’s Sloncek, safely squirreled away in a land far from American jurisprudence, really thought he could escape the inevitable. But where the MPAA can’t apply the pressures of the legal system, they can put other forces to work. No one really knows what happened (at least, no one who’s talking), but I imagine that an official from the American embassy in Slovenia paid a call to Slovenian law enforcement authorities, and informed them of the situation; a situation which, if left unchecked, could escalate into an ugly international incident. At the very least the MPAA could threaten to cease distribution of American-made films in Slovenia; that’d create quite political storm there, as American films are the most sought-after movie properties throughout the world. But for the MPAA, with its enormous political clout in the US Congress, that would only be the opening shot. The MPAA could very likely place enough political pressure on Congress to get sanctions on Slovenian exports to the United States. I’m sure the conversation never got that far. The Slovenian officials got the point, and Sloncek was told to shut SuprNova.org down. Now.

The main page of the SuprNova.org web site kept track of the number of files which had been shared through it’s BitTorrent trackers. That number regularly ranged into the millions. At any point at least a few hundred thousand individuals, all across the world, were happily using its trackers. And, on the 19^th of December, all of those trackers died. Given what is already known about many of the individuals who participate in file-sharing - they’re of college-age, well-educated and technically adept - it’s easy to imagine reactions of SuprNova’s loyal base of users to the MPAA’s act of economic self-defense. They would feel as though someone had snuck into their rooms, and yanked the TV out of the wall. They’d feel robbed, violated, and very, very angry. To quote Bugs Bunny, “This means war.”

Although the MPAA holds all of the legal and political cards, and can enforce its will throughout the world, they stepped into a hornet’s nest when they had the main BitTorrent tracker sites shut down. Due to the centralized nature of the BitTorrent tracker, the MPAA could strike at a few sites and shut down the majority of BitTorrent file-sharing. Most of the users of BitTorrent had never really considered how a centralized BitTorrent tracker made their activities so vulnerable to the influences of others. Now they were forced to confront it. The weakness of BitTorrent - the tracker - would have to be fixed. And the people who could fix it - those with backgrounds in computer science and network engineering - were among the most avid users of BitTorrent. In short, the MPAA had angered the specific group of individuals most empowered to do something about it.

It’s not as though we couldn’t have seen it coming. By its actions, the MPAA seemed committed to a replay - a sequel, if you will - of the RIAA’s battle against Napster. While the RIAA won that battle, they lost the war, driving the file-sharing networks underground, and into technical evolutions like Gnutella, which, because of their distributed nature, have become essentially impossible to root out. By applying pressure to the ecology of file-sharing which grew up around BitTorrent, the MPAA is forcing it to evolve into forms which will forever elude its grasp. They aimed for the head of the beast, and instead shot themselves in the foot.

In the days that followed the death of SuprNova.org, you could read two different types of reportage about it: stories in the mass media, in which the MPAA congratulated itself for a job well done, having avoided the fate which befell the recording industry; and others, which appeared on geek sites like Slashdot, that told a very different story. The anger at the MPAA was matched by impassioned arguments about the importance of respecting copyright. As was inevitable in such an overheated situation, a “flame war” erupted, with ad hominem attacks, insulting and dismissive replies, and much, much more heat than light. Yet, occasionally, another voice came through, with a different message: “None of this matters at all. Exeem is coming.”

“What’s that? What’s Exeem?” someone would ask.

Then I’d read in reply:

Exeem is a new file-sharing application being developed by the folks at SuprNova.org. Exeem is a decentralized BitTorrent network that basically makes everyone a Tracker. Individuals will share Torrents, and seed shared files to the network. At this time, details and the full potential of this project are being kept very quiet. However it appears this P2P application will completely replace SuprNova.org; no more web mirrors, no more bottle necks and no more slow downs. Exeem will marry the best features of a decentralized network, the easy searchability of an indexing server and the swarming powers of the BitTorrent network into one program. Currently, the network is in beta testing and already has 5,000 users (the beta testing is closed.) Once this program goes public, its potential is enormous.

At first, the details about Exeem were sketchy; it was a piece of software that was reportedly already finished; it had recently entered a “beta” test involving 5000 volunteers, scoured from the most prolific contributors of torrents to SuprNova.org. These volunteers were shaking out the bugs out in the software before its public release. Then, two days before the end of 2004, more details about Exeem appeared on Slashdot. It was a commercial software package, supported by advertising, and it provided “a blending of the tracker, BitTorrent client, and decentralized indexing.” That last item, the “decentralized indexing”, meant that someone, somewhere had already figured out how to combine the best feature of Gnutella (its decentralized search mechanism) with the best of BitTorrent (it’s ability to turn the Internet into a very efficient system for sharing files). Since the programming “source code” for both Gnutella and BitTorrent is freely available - both are “open source” software projects - it would have been only a modestly difficult engineering effort to blend the two together. Any reasonably competent college student could probably do it. And, in doing it, they would realize the MPAA’s worst fears: a file-sharing network with no center to shut down.

The MPAA took a bad situation - the theft of billions of dollars of copyright - and made it worse, by attacking the most visible infringers upon those copyrights. By highlighting the problems with BitTorrent, the MPAA inadvertently pushed BitTorrent users to develop and adopt a comprehensive solution. That said, the earliest reports of Exeem make it seem less than perfect. It is “adware,” meaning that you’re forced to watch a display of advertising as you use it to locate and download files. And that means that there is a commercial entity paying for the development of Exeem, an organization which is clearly hoping to recover its development costs through advertising sales. While that may not be a bad business model, it is a very dangerous legal practice: if Exeem has been created by a company (this company has remained in the shadows, and is as yet unidentified), at some point they’ll need to step forward and pick up payments from their advertisers. When that happens, the MPAA will certainly sweep in and shut it all down. And the crazy spiral towards the invisible and all-pervasive sharing of motion pictures will tighten, and intensify.

It could have happened differently. The MPAA took the wrong lesson from the troubles of the recording industry. They thought it enough to nip the problem in the bud. Shut it down before it gets out of hand, and you’ll keep control over your copyrights. But that’s not the real lesson of the RIAA vs. Napster, even if it is the obvious one. The real lesson is that you can’t defeat file-sharing: you must learn to develop strategies to profit from it. If, instead of suing SuprNova.org out of existence, the MPAA had said, “let’s make a deal,” they could have worked to develop a strategy which would have allowed them to monitor and possibly control properties under copyright. The beautiful thing about SuprNova.org was that it was centralized; with one stop the MPAA could have had its fingers deep inside the hard drives of nearly every BitTorrent user in the world. From there, anything could have been possible. But now, with SuprNova.org gone, there is no center. And there never will be again.

The film industry, one of America’s largest export industries, is facing exactly the same challenges which confront the recording and television industries. File-sharing allows anyone, anywhere in the world, to possess the properties which, through their own marketing efforts, the movie studios have made so intensely desirable. The more marketing dollars spent to promote a film, the more it occupies public awareness, the more widely it will be illegally traded. Add to this the rise of the global superdistribution of digital media, which gives every film maker direct access to every person with an Internet connection, and Hollywood now finds itself forced to compete against a planet of film makers who don’t care as much for box office receipts as that their works be seen by the largest numbers of people. Film, like television and music, is an art form, and many people do it just for the love of it. You could call them amateurs, but quality is in the eye of the beholder, and a great many great films have been made by amateurs. Now they can reach the rest of us with their work.

The age of mass media is already over. Through inertia, financial power and political connections, the media giants who dominate the landscape of the communications industry will continue in their present form for at least a few more years. But these colossi, like Hollywood sets, look more substantial than they really are. A wind, which is already rising, will push them over like houses of cards. If any survive, it will be because they have adapted themselves to the world as it is, not the world as they would like it to be. The days have passed when many passively consumed the productions of a few; but we are only just learning our way around this new landscape, where everyone can reach everyone else. It offers us some enormous opportunities, but will present us with such an overwhelming and seductive set of choices that, unless we carefully manage this transition, the world will become far more confusing, chaotic, and fragmented than ever before. With that, it’s time to examine the technique already emerging to manage this madness: social networks.

© Copyright 2005, Mark D. Pesce
This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.0/ or send a letter to Creative Commons, 559 Nathan Abbott Way, Stanford, California 94305, USA.