Free Content Forever

With the latest shutdowns of Bittorrent tracker sites, the genie of widely and easily available free content is completely out of the bottle, forever. As Mark Pesce explains in this new article at Disinfo:

Pointing up the single greatest weakness of BitTorrent - take down the tracker and the torrent dies - has only served to energize, inspire and mobilize the resources of an entire global ecology of software developers, network engineers and hackers-at-large who want nothing so much, at this moment, as to make the MPAA pay for their insolence. Imagine a parent reaching into a child’s room and ripping a TV set out of the wall - while the child is watching it. That child would feel anger and begin plotting his revenge. And that scene has been multiplied at least hundred thousand times today, all around the world. It is quite likely that, as I type these words, somewhere in the world a roomful of college CS students, fueled by coke and pizza and righteous indignation, are banging out some code which will fix the inherent weakness of BitTorrent - removing the need for a single tracker. If they’re smart enough, they’ll work out a system of dynamic trackers, which could quickly pass control back and forth among a cloud of peers, so that no one peer holds the hot potato long enough to be noticed. They’ll take the best of Gnutella and cross-breed it with the best of BitTorrent. And that will be the MPAA’s worst nightmare.

Hey, Hollywood! Can you feel the future slipping through your fingers? Do you understand how badly you’ve screwed up? You took a perfectly serviceable situation - a nice, centralized system for the distribution of media, and, through your own greed and shortsightedness, are giving birth to a system of digital distribution that you’ll never, ever be able to defeat. In your avarice and arrogance you ignored the obvious: you should have cut a deal with SuprNova.org. In partnership you could have found a way to manage the disruptive change that’s already well underway. Instead, you have repeated the mistakes made by the recording industry, chapter and verse. And thus you have spelled your own doom.

It’s said that the best sequels are just like the original, only bigger and louder. Ladies and gentlemen, prepare yourselves for one hell of a crash. This baby is now fully out of control.

Wow, I'm normally a fan of p2p. I've always thought that content companies would get a clue before it's too late. Now the final nail is being driven into their coffin. A sad day for them. The good is that content can more freely move around without censorship. Creative artists of all stripes will now more easily be able to distribute their creative work widely and more easily than ever before. The downside is the lack of revenue. Will this mean the end of big budget blockbuster movies? How will someone like Peter Jackson make Lord of the Rings without a couple of hundred million dollars and a means to get that money back? It's hard to say. Some claim that strong DRM will prevent it, but that idea has been disproven time and time again, when someone like a 15 year old can circumvent it in an afernoon, and another can write a p2p application in only 6 lines of code.

This may spell the beginning of the end for large creative content projects. The future of film, music and art may now come from smaller producers who are willing to produce their work without nearly as much financial reward. Stupid hollywood... stupid MPAA, RIAA... stupid all the way to the very end.

For some more on the positive side read my Counter Culture 2.0.