Posted by Orin Kerr:
Inside the World of Software Piracy:
[1]Wired has a fascinating article on how movie and other software
files first appear on peer-to-peer networks.
It's a commonly held belief that P2P is about sharing files. It's
an appealing, democratic notion: Consumers rip the movies and music
they buy and post them online. But that's not quite how it works.
In reality, the number of files on the Net ripped from
store-bought CDs, DVDs, and videogames is statistically negligible.
People don't share what they buy; they share what is already being
shared - the countless descendants of a single "Adam and Eve" file.
Even this is probably stolen; pirates have infiltrated the
entertainment industry and usually obtain and rip content long
before the public ever has a chance to buy it.
The whole shebang - the topsites, the pyramid, and the P2P
networks girding it all together - is not about trading or sharing
at all. It's a broadcast system. It takes a signal, the new U2
single, say, and broadcasts it around the world. The pirate pyramid
is a perfect amplifier. The signal becomes more robust at every
descending level, until it gets down to the P2P networks, by which
time it can be received by anyone capable of typing "U2" into a
search engine.
This should be good news for law enforcement. Lop off the head
(the topsites), and the body (the worldwide trade in unlicensed
media) falls lifeless to the ground. Sounds easy, but what if you
can't find the head? As in any criminal conspiracy, it takes years
of undercover work to get inside. An interview subject warned me
against even mentioning Anathema in this article: "You do not need
some 350-pound hit man with a Glock at your front door.
I have enabled comments, but there's a slight catch: please do not
comment unless you first read the article. Thanks to [2]Michael
Cernovich for the link.
References
1. http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/13.01/topsite.html
2. http://federalism.typepad.com/crime_federalism/
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