DIGC101 week 11

Pirates of the InterWebs

Andrew Whelan
awhelan@uow.edu.au
 Overview:
•where we are; the sorts of issues involved

•distributive mechanisms said to facilitate piracy

•what do people download?

•conventional arguments against online piracy

–the problem with these arguments
–evidence against these arguments

•conventional arguments in favour of piracy

–problems with these arguments

•the social organisation of online piracy

‘Piracy’ – you are here:

Creativity /
innovation

Increasing variety and

constant cost Copyright
of entertainment forms

‘Piracy’

Digitisation Diminishing storage

of content and broadband costs

Fandom /
subculture
 Money: the bigger picture
AFACT win:
http://www.computerworld.com.au/article/321658
/afact_has_already_notched_up_win_copyright_
case
Clubs turn to independents:
http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2009/10/11/2
710757.htm
Studio’s ads on BitTorrent:
http://torrentfreak.com/afact-v-iinet-day-4-
bittorrent-deals-irrelevant-091009/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline
_of_file_sharing
(how we got here)
 Mp3 and p2p as examples of
disruptive technology
The mp3 form is
“perfectly and lovingly shaped for the very purposes to which it is
not supposed to be put: the mp3 is perfectly designed for illegal
filesharing” (Sterne 2006: 828).

Which is to say, the format was specifically devised for

“quick and easy transfers, anonymous relations between
provider and receiver, cross-platform compatibility, stockpiling
and easy storage and access” (ibid.: 829).

Sterne, Jonathan. 2006. “The mp3 as cultural artifact.” New Media and
Society vol. 8; no. 5, pp. 825-842.

Piracy is more efficient:

http://mashable.com/2008/03/05/piracy-study/
Napster, ground zero for mass file-
sharing
Feb 2001: 26 million users, over 1
billion files shared
Other apps: Bearshare (Gnutella
client) – closed ‘06
 Other apps: DC ++ (Direct
Connect) -
http://dcplusplus.sourceforge.net/
Other apps: Soulseek
http://www.slsknet.org/
 Other apps: Torrenting – e.g.
uTorrent http://www.utorrent.com/
 Current trends
‘Overground’:
Forums, music blogs, and ‘DDL’ (direct download links,
e.g. Rapidshare) –
e.g. http://www.hhb.org.uk/
http://mutant-sounds.blogspot.com/
http://brutal-death-metal.blogspot.com/

DDL (for apps, movies, and music) now accounts for up

to 30% of all HTTP traffic - Anderson 2008
http://arstechnica.com/old/content/2008/09/p2p-growth-
slowing-as-infringement-goes-deeper-undercover.ars
 What do people download?
(http://www.ipoque.com/resources/internet-
studies/internet-study-2007)
 What do people download?
(http://www.ipoque.com/resources/internet-
studies/internet-study-2007)
 What do people download?

http://thepiratebay.org/top/all
http://isohunt.com/stats.php?mode=zg

• “file sharing accounted for between forty and

sixty percent of all bandwidth usage over
2002-2008” (Oberholzer-Gee and Strumpf
2009: 12).

http://www.hbs.edu/research/pdf/09-132.pdf
 Why do people download?
(http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/
06/16/bmr_music_survey/)
 Why do people upload?
(http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/
06/16/bmr_music_survey/)
 Arguments against piracy
You wouldn’t download a baby etc.:
• Piracy as theft (morally and legally)

• Piracy as the destruction of the creative

industries:
– Piracy as generating unemployment
– Piracy as leading to diminished content quality

http://www.riaa.com/physicalpiracy.php
The problem with these arguments

1 download ≠ 1 lost sale!

There is not “a simple
relationship between
song-by-song
downloading and album
sales” (Vaidhyanathan
2004: 49).
Vaidhyanathan, Siva. 2004. The Anarchist in
the Library: How the Clash Between
Freedom and Control is Hacking the Real
World and Crashing the System. New York:
Basic Books.
Evidence against these arguments
• ‘Pirates’ buy more music:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2009/apr/
21/study-finds-pirates-buy-more-music
• Litigation is more profitable than sales?:
http://torrentfreak.com/illegal-downloads-
150x-more-profitable-than-legal-sales-
091009/
Evidence against these arguments – p2p is used for market research:
BigChampagne
“has combined its P2P data with radio and television ratings by
partnering with Nielsen Entertainment (a leading US provider of
such data) to track trends and the effectiveness of different media
strategies. For example, a swell of underground P2P activity on a
brand-new band may create pressure for greater airplay … For
public relations reasons, these industries don’t want to draw
attention to their use of this data for market intelligence” (Jennings
2007: 71-72).
Jennings, David. 2007. Net, Blogs and Rock’n’Roll. London: Nicholas Brealey.

“there's a legal rationale, too. The record industry's lawsuits against

file-sharing companies hang on their assertion that the programs
have no use other than to help infringe copyrights. If the labels
acknowledge a legitimate use for P2P programs, it would undercut
their case as well as their zero-tolerance stance. ‘We would
definitely consider gleaning marketing wisdom from these networks
a non-infringing use,’ says Fred von Lohmann, staff counsel for the
Electronic Frontier Foundation” (Howe 2003).
Howe, Jeff
(http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/11.10/fileshare.html).

http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2007/09/leaked-e-mail-s/
Conventional arguments in favour of piracy
- the cultural archive as the commons:

“the sharing of culture is constitutive of culture

itself and corresponds with a deep human need
to communciate. Indeed, communicating is
sharing and in an information society producing
culture is a way of taking part in society. P2p
technology then is simply giving new power to
this defining feature of human existence, which
was only somewhat subdued in the analog
media environment” (Stalder 2008).

Stalder, Felix. 2008. “Review: Steal this Film, II.” Posted to the nettime
mailing list, January 4. (http://www.nettime.org/Lists-Archives/nettime-l-
0801/msg00005.html).
Conventional arguments in favour of piracy
– the content industries as alienating:
p2p users:

“seek to consume music in ideological opposition to the well

established principles of a functionally differentiated system of
modern music production and consumption in the triangle of
commodification, copyright and corporations and against the
ongoing de-sacrilization of music into the profane sphere of capitalist
markets throughout the past 130 years” (2003a: 4).

Giesler, Markus and Mail Pohlmann. 2003a. “The Social Form of Napster: Cultivating the Paradox
of Consumer Emancipation.” In Advances in Consumer Research, Punam Anand Keller and
Dennis W. Rook (eds.), Provo, UT: Association for Consumer Research, vol. 30.
Conventional arguments in favour of piracy
– piracy as a gift economy:
Conventional arguments in favour of piracy
– piracy as utopia and as radical critique:

“Digital piracy and the insurrectionary tactics of the

information warfare guerrillas continue a form of
resistance to global capitalism that the pirates of the
golden age pioneered and take it straight to the heart of
contemporary processes of capitalist accumulation”
(Land 2007: 188).

Land, Chris. 2007. “Flying the black flag: Revolt, revolution and the social organization of piracy in
the ‘golden age’.” Management and Organizational History vol. 2, no. 2, pp. 169-192.

http://p2pfoundation.net/
 BUT:
“for all the romantic, counter-cultural associations of its
apparent challenge to the commodity culture and
property relations of late capitalist society, there is
nothing inherently emancipatory, oppositional, Leftist, or
even politically or cultural progressive about digital
piracy. The politics of digital piracy depends on the
decisions that are made in relation to it, the specific
tactics and strategies that are adopted, and the particular
conjunction of time, situation and context in which such
actions and activities take place” (Hall 2009: 25).
Hall, Gary. 2009. “Pirate Philosophy Version 1.0: Open Access, Open Editing, Free
Content, Free/Libre/Open Media.” Culture Machine vol. 10 ,
(http://www.mininova.org/tor/2620411).
 The social organisation of online piracy

Piracy is a mass phenomenon, e.g. Sarkozy:

http://www.boingboing.net/2009/10/08/nicolas-copyright-sa.html

Piracy relies on an extremely restrictive

proprietary model, e.g. Lilly Allen:
http://www.smh.com.au/technology/technology-news/lily-allen-quits-
music-after-abuse-over-filesharing-fight-20090925-g5ie.html

But pirated material comes from somewhere

The social organisation of online piracy (according to the MPAA):
 The social organisation of online piracy

warez scene / release groups

topsites
0-day http://www.0daymusic.org/
nfo files http://nfodb.net.ru/
‘darknet’
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/13.01/topsite.html
aXXo! http://www.slate.com/id/2204367/pagenum/all/#p2
Like piracy, copyright has a history
and a mode of social organisation
http://www.copyrighthistory.org/htdocs/map.html

The current copyright system as

“the latest and onerous manifestation of ‘low intensity conflict,’ of a

cultural guerrilla war that pits a subset of well-heeled and well-
positioned Boomers against their children and grandchildren … The
conceptual coherence and persistence of these efforts point to a
demographically-defined, and increasingly probable period of Digital
Prohibition. The politics of Prohibition are alive and well; the
population and objects have changed, but the general game
resembles that of 1930s America” (Dennis 2009).

Dennis, Dion. 2009. “Domestic Wars Redux: Obama, Digital

Prohibition and the New ‘Reefer Madness’.” CTheory rt003,
(http://www.ctheory.net/articles.aspx?id=607).