Quote:
Originally Posted by Richey79
I don't pretend to know anything other than what I read (and I practise a healthy scepticism about that) about 'the scene'. However, these organisations do use the police in an attempt to do just this every once in a while. This was the last time they did so: http://torrentfreak.com/the-signific...-raids-100917/
What effect has this had on piracy? Nothing that the smallest consumers at the end of the chain would notice. Perhaps a handful of films might not be released for pirating before their cinema release - but that's essentially all that has been achieved. This by a massively expensive operation funded by taxpayers' money in the employ of private corporations. It's not the case that these organisations fail to effectively discourage piracy because they conduct their operations in an inept way. There simply exists no kill-switch for internet piracy.
It came to light recently that a state-sponsored university in Iran was seeding Microsoft and Adobe software to P2P networks ( http://torrentfreak.com/iranian-gove...server-100824/ ). How can piracy be stopped, as long as many countries in the world take such an attitude to copyright, without completely closing down the internet?
Other than that, I think your comment is a very good analysis of how piracy affects economic systems involving easily copiable media.
I do think that, where ebooks are concerned, the model is going to differ somewhat from how the music and film industries were affected by piracy.
I don't think this check will exist in the case of books. Ebooks are much smaller files than films and even MP3s; the publishing industry has far less money to make use of institutions such as the RIAA, and I suspect that the publishing industry is smart enough to realise that suing either your own customers, or people who would never have bought anything anyway, constitutes poor Public Relations.
Ereading devices are about to go mainstream. All of the people getting their new readers will be looking at the prices and availabilty of books online, as well as reading about the disadvantages of DRM employed by the online retailers. These people constitute the majority of the most serious readers in the relatively wealthy parts of the world.
Book publishing and retailing have to engage with ebooks quickly and seriously, deploying fair pricing-structures and getting rid of their DRM. If they don't, the only books they'll be making a profit on will be Christmas coffee-table books and YA / children's fiction. Of course, there will still be a living for writers who reach out to their readership and directly cultivate a relationship with them.
This shift will happen much, much faster than it did for the music industry, and we're on the tipping point right at this moment. |
You get it more than most. The thing is we are just beyond another tipping point due to the distributed nature of not only the torrent sites but (and this is only concerning books) but the content as well. For example, on a given torrent site you might find a link to a 1-gig compressed volume of several thousand ebooks, say all of the best scifi and fantasy books ever written. With the way the torrents work, that file is on hundreds of servers/home computers/whatever across the world and in many different jurisdictions. Over the course of a week that file gets downloaded by 10,000 more sharers which (in the way that torrents work) and also uploading to 10,000 more sharers even while they are downloading the initial material. At this point even killing the initial torrents won't do a thing because if even a fraction of those sharers leave the file/torrent as "active" they become another node in the distribution matrix and outnumber the original servers/sharers by a huge margin. The only way to detect this (which Net Neutrality laws can stymie) is with bandwidth spikes (700megs/1.4 gigabytes for a single feature film or 65-80 megabytes for an album, depending on compression method) but unlike with a movie or album where you would detect one of these spikes for each item down or uploaded, you have one spike with the book download and you are done; you have it all (of that category). Deep Packet Inspect doesn't work for books either due to the multitude of ways they are packaged (ebub, mobo, lit, prc, html, .docx (meh) .txt and more) not to mention the strong encryption built into torrent clients today. So if the authorities cannot catch this at the ISP/bandwidth/packet inspection end, they have to try to spoof the trackers and act like downloaders themselves to snag and log the IP addresses of other sharers. The problem with that approach is that these spoofed sites are quickly detected and their IP address is distributed (some automatically) to torrent clients in the form of "block lists" so if a sharer is sharing the book file and someone from that IP comes knocking, the request is ignored and the approach fails.
So the attempts at detection/prevention of distribution are doomed to fail; the final nail in the coffin so to speak is the practicality of storage. By that I mean you would need a server farm and NAS units to store every known song, movie, TV show, or bit of software ever published. This is way out of the reach of most due to expense and administration needs. When it comes to books however you can keep literally every book ever published (and certainly any book you actually care about) on a single USB keychain drive of about 8 gigs or better, available at any corner drug store or supermarket.
It is depressing if you love books and respect authors.
The pruning of the tree I was referring to (aka being smart about stopping it) is more of a divide and conquer approach. What you said about servers in Iran (China, Russia and more) is perfectly true. What would throw a wrench in the machine though is not to go after those server (which will fail due to jurisdictional issues) or go after the button pushers at the other end (which will win Pyrrhic victory at best) but to go after and take down the torrent link aggregation sites that act like a Google for these other servers. If Joe sixpack wanted say 100 ebooks on , oh say mechanical engineering (or whatever) he doesn't have to go to the individual pirate sites to hunt for them; he can just go to any of a hundred aggregators like Torrentz.com and do a search for "mechanical engineering ebook" and in a flash has a list of links to sites that carry a torrent link to a file matching that description. Try it; there is no crime in doing a search and it would blow most peoples minds what is out there.
Two clicks later (and about 80 or so megabytes) there is a package of thousands of dollars worth of mechanical engineering books sitting on his drive. If he leaves the client up overnight for example, he also becomes a distributor to possibly hundred of other people. The point is though if the aggregation sites were taken out of the chain it would move the effort/pain threshold to a new level and where Joe Sixpack had no problem using the above method (because people are basically lazy) he would be less likely to try to keep links to the originating servers in Iran, China, etc which go down and come up all the time. This is the method probably 80pct (SWAG on my part based on other conversations and personal experience) use to acquire anything. For books it would be enough to make most just say screw it, go to Amazon or whatever and purchase a real ebook or three.