The dirty war against file sharing
Three strikes, Six strikes
MAFIAA agents crucified two unlucky American users of file sharing, they have established a system of threats and on-line censorship against sites promoting “piracy” but all of this isn’t enough to satisfy the “enforcement” needs of the copyright lords: the ultimate weapon against users’ sharing activity is called “gradual response”, a mechanism made popular by the three strike law introduced by the French president Nicolas Sarkozy and that stirred up a worldwide debate.
Lately the USA have adopted their own version of the “Sarkozy doctrine” with the creation of the Center for Copyright Information (CCI) organization, a partnership between MPAA/RIAA (ie MAFIAA) and the five largest local ISPs with the task to manage the new “Copyright Alert System” (CAS). The USA anti-piracy plan includes “six strikes” at most instead of three, it has started operating on February 2013 and is expected to send out five or six warnings to users caught sharing unauthorized contents on P2P networks beyond which “mitigating” measures will be imposed on the Internet connection.
The USA Copyright Alert System completely bypasses the judiciary system and enforces penalties on users (including connection slowdowns and restrictions to Web access) with no concrete possibility to rebut, but the CCI folks care to say that the plan’s only goal is to “educate” the public and it does not possibly include a forced interruption to the Internet connection. The warnings sent by AT&T prove however that this is not the case, because among the punishments suggested by the ISP there is disconnection as well. The letters sent by the majors to users of those ISP not taking part in CCI, furthermore, sound like a true legal mafia.
And while the USA started off the CAS six strikes, in France the three strike law has been dismissed for good: the pro-major initiative of the former president Nicolas Sarkozy has been rebutted by a bulky study as an ineffective measure, and it has finally been officially cancelled – together with the HADOPI agency – with a decree by the new Ministry of Culture dated July 9 2013. The results obtained by the three strike law in three years of service? A 150 euro fine and a single user unable to access the Web for 15 days.
The French government abolished disconnections but it didn’t remove the risk of facing “serious consequences” for sharing copyright-protected contents: P2P users will be identified by the local ISPs as requested by the industry and they will risk an “automatic” fine up to 1,500 euros. Not that measures like the three strike law are useful to anything, of course: music sales in France are worse than in other countries and the academic studies confirm the futility of the anti-P2P gradual response adopted in several parts of the world. In the USA the Copyright Alert System is running for six months now, and yet the Pirate Bay popularity has done nothing but grown.
The Pirate Bay lives
Talking about The Pirate Bay, it’s worth highlighting that the BitTorrent indexing site is fundamentally immortal: four years after the “Spectrial” conclusion and the conviction of its three admin plus financier and businessman Carl Lundström, TPB is the Internet most popular file sharing site, it became a cultural phenomenon with its due place in a museum and lead to the making of the TPB-AFK documentary funded, among the others, by the BBC and other important European broadcasters.
The Bay of P2P pirates radically changed from a technical standpoint as well, shutting down the internal BitTorrent tracker and relying on decentralized protocols (distributed hash tables/DHT, peer exchange/PEX) for content sharing among users. The dismissal of traditional .torrent files in favor of magnet links greatly reduced the database dimensions, so much that it is now possible to download a complete TPB copy taking just a few hundreds of Megabytes. The site abandoned “physical” servers as well, following a “cloud” approach and relying on virtual machines provided by third-party hosts for an even higher resiliency level.
And yet The Pirate Bay has become one of the most censored sites on the Internet, with significant transitions for network bandwidth supply and non-stop domain and IP address relocations in Greenland, Iceland and finally in the Caribbean island of Sint Maarten (thepiratebay.sx). Away from keyboard, the life of the Spectrial protagonists also became pretty complicated: Fredrik “TiAMO” Neij and Peter “Brokep” Sunde had their conviction appeal rejected by the European Union Court of Human Rights, Carl Lundström was forced to go bankrupt and Gottfrid “Anakata” Svartholm lost himself in a sea of legal troubles beyond the Pirate Bay case.
Censoring TPB is useless, a study by the University of Amsterdam states, and the most obvious proof of such futility is the tenth birthday celebrated by the Bay this past August: the P2P invincible hydra keeps serving the sharing needs of BitTorrent users after a decade of tormented history, police raids and trials, marking the important anniversary with the release of an anti-censorship customized browser based on Firefox and TOR – but with no anonymity guarantees.
The future of piracy
The Pirate Bay is one of the sharing platforms survived (even though it’s declining, some say) to the anti-piracy zeal of the contents industry, an industry that in a few years tried everything to solve in a “definitive” way the issue of on-line copyright infringement. Before trying the Copyright Alert System and other “x strikes” mechanisms card, the American majors lobbied politics for introducing new harsh laws against pirates and promoting sites. The effort was in the end dismissed after the joined protests of users, ONGs and tech corporations againsts laws like SOPA (Stop Online Piracy Act) and PIPA (PROTECT IP Act) – laws that the contents industry itself classified as useless and ineffective.
Beyond the six strikes and the ISPs forced cooperation, the MAFIAA collective is committed to spreading pro-copyright propaganda starting from American kindergartens. The Swedish Pirate Party founder and “political evangelist” Rickard “Rick” Falkvinge is optimistic, conversely, about the likelihood that today teenagers will finally dismantle the copyright oppressive institute once they will have become the adults of tomorrow. The copyright monopoly must be profoundly reformed otherwise it will not survive, Falkvinge states, because sharing of digital data established itself as a cultural idea and the so called “piracy” amounts – according to the NetNames estimations – to a quarter of the entire Internet traffic with 432 million users in a year and almost 10,000 Petabytes of data transferred on-line every month (in 2012).
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