Gabrielle Taylor's "Cockluck"
February 25, 2002
"Napster is not a danger today," wrote Miles Copeland, founder of IRS Records, in 2001. "It may even act as a listening booth leading to increased record sales -- it is tomorrow that is the problem. As technology (players, broadband) becomes commonplace, three to five years from now, Napster-like sites will spell the death of the record stores and a total rethink, if not disaster, for the record companies."
Napster and gnutella are based on Blind Man's Bluff, where the user wanders around randomly grabbing anything that interests him that he happens to be able to find. The instant gratification offered by these services mask the pirate communities attached to Hotline, Carracho, IRC, and similar softwares based on servers and accounts and, in some cases, conversation.
Some servers let anybody come along and download or upload anything. However, these free lunches tended to clog up fast with dozens of users, resulting in multiple hour waits for a free slot before the download even started. More likely, the server has a focus, such as jazz music, graphic design software, or movies that are still in theatres.
If an account is required for download access the server tends to have fewer users, which means quicker downloads. There are two types of download accounts: general and personal. A personal account is like an email account: a unique login, unique password, and don't share or you might get in trouble. Personal accounts are usually granted for substantial uploads, but sometimes all one had to do was ask, depending on how overloaded the server was and if it only hosted shareware or Eskimo poetry mp3s.
To get a personal account you have to wait, and Carracho servers are mostly based on personal accounts free for the asking. Many of them are free lunches.
Carracho sites are less likely to clog than Hotline, because Carracho software is exclusively available on the Macintosh, which has less than 10% market share on a good day.
Hotline started on the Macintosh and was ported to Windows, and with Windows proliferated the automatic access general accounts. These are usually accessed by completing a web treasure hunt where the payoff goes to the site administrator. It could be "Go to my web site, click the second banner, the password is the first yellow word on the page you go to and the login is the first blue word."
More often than not, though, one has to subscribe to a service, like eBay or a pornographic mailing list, and give the site admin as a reference so he gets a kickback. The login may be "the second and third word on the congratulations page after you're verified". Then again, half to three quarters of the automatic accesses don't work, either because the service changed the words in their congratulations page, or it wasn't clear if logos and buttons were words, or because the site admin was a cheat and he'd get his click money no matter what.
General access sites are impersonal. Often in addition to sending you out to the web to get the admin a referral bonus, he'd also demand you upload for the duration of your download, and disconnect you if you stopped. Uploads typically move two to three times as fast as a download, so to pirate, say, a three CD game at 1.8 gigs, you might have to have 5 or more gigs on hand to upload. Not just junk, either, good stuff, or you get the boot.
General access sites tend toward games, Microsoft software, Adobe software, and expensive graphic and web design packages, and gargantuan mind-blowing quantities of pornography. Porn accounts for 20-40% of the material on these servers, ranging from mild pin-up shots all the way to hardcore full-length feature films.
Personal account sites often have enormous music collections, substantial and exquisite, jazz, blues, and classical music. Some specialize in bootleg concerts. A growing swath deal exclusively in trance, ambient and technopop, and also often offer pirate copies of software to let users compose their own music. Many of them ban all porn as aggressively as a nun at a nun convention, but not for moral reasons -- it simply takes up too much space.
A small but growing percentage of these sites actually charge their users for access to their pirated collections. This was more common among the sites hosting pirated movies, because the files are extremely large and consume huge amounts of bandwidth. It is quite easy to find copies of pirated movies that are still in theatres, if one is willing to pay a little -- usually not more than $10 USD a month and often a one-time membership fee of $20 USD or less -- for the privilege.
Pirated music alone, according to the RIAA, has drained over $10 billion from the global economy in a few short years. This prompted lawsuits spearheaded by Metallica and Dr. Dre, intended to shut down Napster. Napster has since switched to a proprietary system involving theoretically secure music encoding. Microsoft is also pushing their own proprietary system and threatening to exclude MP3 support from Windows altogether. The RIAA has since extended its suits to include MusicCity and others, saying they constitute a "21st century piratical bazaar where the unlawful exchange of protected materials takes place across the vast expanses of the Internet."
Artist reaction varies. Bruce Springsteen was reportedly livid at his 2001 "Live with the E Street Band" appearing on Napster months before its official release. Similar problems plagued Radiohead's "Amnesiac" and Eric Clapton's "Reptile".
Conversely, the Cowboy Junkies, angry about a Best Of released without their participation or even foreknowledge, told their fans to just build their own Best Of from pirated tracks. Rage Against the Machine was blocked from Napster on request by their label, then unblocked on request by the band, who then made special tracks available for download off their official site as an apology to their fans.
"Those who get it (e.g., you) are pathetically apolitical," wrote Lawrence Lessig. "You're proud of your apathy. You're disgusted with people who try to persuade politicians. So am I. But while you do nothing, the future of creativity and innovation is sold in DC - typically to the highest, and most disgusting bidder."Posted by gtaylor at February 25, 2002 11:48 PM