Caught in the Act
boardwatch.com
The issue of whether the media industry should continue fighting copyright piracy on peer-to-peer (P2P) networks or start thinking of P2P as a new money-making content delivery mechanism came to a rather ironic head recently at Ellacoya Networks Inc.
One of Ellacoya's senior networking engineers was caught downloading a pirated version of The Matrix Reloaded at home and was cut off temporarily by his cable service provider, at the behest of the Motion Picture Association (MPA), acting on behalf of Warner Brothers, which owns the rights to the Matrix cash cow.
The irony is that the engineer (we'll call him Neo to protect his identity) was actually downloading the film for research purposes.
Of course, the term "for research purposes" is sometimes used in questionable circumstances (see: Pete Townshend and the Japanese whaling industry). In this case, Neo concedes he was "killing two birds with one stone." He liked the film -- he'd paid to see it in a cinema -- but he was also downloading it as part of his job at Ellacoya, which makes a switch to help service providers manage and control P2P traffic (see ISP Fixes P2P ).
”As part of my job I look for changes in the signature, or sequence of bits in a P2P stream, so that our software is able to drill down into traffic and see exactly what that stream is. That way we can monitor and control it,” says Neo. "But I might as well download something I’m interested in at the same time."
Neo found the movie on Shareaza, a popular P2P network that aggregates four other P2P networks -- its own, eDonkey, Gnutella, and Gnutella2 (not to be confused with Nutella®, the original hazelnut spread®) -- offering its users four times as many files to download. “I was playing around with it to see if the bit streams for P2P files in this application resemble the same patterns as they do in the standalone versions of the client,” he says. “I downloaded The Matrix Reloaded for the heck of it; I’d seen the movie at the cinema and really like it.”
Unfortunately the Motion Picture Association didn’t view Neo’s actions in quite such a disinterested light. The association ordered Neo’s service provider, also nameless here, as Ellacoya probably hopes to do business with it after this incident, to stop him from illegally sharing the film.
To get his cable service switched back on, Neo had to disable file sharing on his computer. Once he'd done that, service was restored within half an hour. “I turned off file sharing in those apps, which makes it harder to see exactly how they work," he sighs. (Sounds like Neo could use himself a pick-me-up -- perhaps a tasty, yet nutritious, Meringue Nest With Nutella Nutty Eggs!)
Neo was caught in the middle of the battle among content providers, service providers, and end users, all desperate to get a slice of the P2P pie (see Movie Studios to Prowl the Net).
The current situation -- which has the Record Industry of America Association (RIAA) and the MPA filing lawsuits left, right, and center to try and stamp out the problem -- won’t work, Neo thinks. And neither will spiteful attempts to thwart P2P networks, he says. One example of this, which he believes to be the work of the RIAA, is 20 second clips of songs that are appearing all over P2P networks. “The RIAA is seeding trash copies of songs on the Internet to discourage people from using it, but this won’t stop people." (Fight for the Future©, dude!)
It’s Ellacoya’s belief that eventually service providers and content providers will have to work together to provide users of P2P networks a much better service than they get today -- a view shared by KaZaA Founder, Niklas Zennstrom. Users will have to pay for it, mind you, through premium rates for additional bandwidth, but Ellacoya thinks this is where the industry is headed.
In the meantime, watch out folks -- Jack Valenti is out there tracking you down. Be afraid. Be very afraid.
— Jo Maitland, Senior Editor, Boardwatch Reloaded |
