Man, my student Jacob Margolis got himself into a deep tub of digital hot water the other day over at KPCC-FM public radio in Pasadena, CA. Jacob took my telecommunications history class up at UC Santa Cruz and now he’s an intern down there. His crime? Explaining the mechanics of P2P file downloading on one of KPCC’s cool new local programs, the Madeleine Brand Show.

The show topic was How do you watch television?

“What if you can’t afford TiVO or Apple TV or you simply don’t want to pay for it?” Brand asked. “There is a way, and it’s an illegal way, and who better to get the skinny on illegal downloads than our intern Jacob Margolis.”

Who indeed? I can second this endorsement, and Jacob got right to it.

“Let me stop you right there and say that I do not download any of these things illegally,” Margolis began. But he acknowledged that he knows lots of students who can’t afford cable TV subscriptions and video on demand fees (which are indeed expensive).

So “what do you do?” he continued. “You need a broadband connection, go to a torrent website like PirateBay.org and you can download the torrent file.”

Jacob showed Madeleine the site.

“I see Dexter there, and, oh, it looks like the Fifth Season, and that hasn’t even aired yet!” she exclaimed. “Wow, looking at all the offerings here, the networks must just be furious.”

“They are,” Margolis replied, but they’ve “kind of hit back” with Hulu.com and other legit online video sites. “And a lot of people go online and watch there.”

“Legally,” Madeleine emphasized.

“Legally,” Margolis agreed.

The sanctimonious responses to this perfectly factual and non-endorsing examination of the issue (which ended with tips on where to view legal content) can be read at the bottom of the podcast page.

Here’s my favorite; note the veiled threat in paragraph three:

Everyone should know that Internet piracy doesn’t only hurt the rich studios and fat-cat producers, directors, writers–the “above the line” people. It hurts all the “little” people who work on a film or TV show; the Set Dresser who is picking up all the furniture for the sets of Mad Men, the Prop Maker who is building the village scenery for Indian Jones and the Temple of Doom, the greens-man who is digging and planting rice paddies on the hillside of New Zealand to make it look like Japan, they all rely on residuals from sales of DVDs and LEGAL Internet downloads, etc. This is money they will never see in their bank accounts, but it is money that directly funds their health insurance accounts. Every time you steal a film or TV show from the Internet, you are stealing someone’s healthcare. Perhaps a family will eventually loose a child for lack of funds.

It might also be interesting to note that the Russian mafia runs most of the illegal download sites. So you see, Identity Theft is a close cousin to Internet Piracy. Is it worth risking that just to be able to watch a TV show for free?

Madeline, your show is in its first week of airing. You are based in Los Angeles, one significant center for production of film and TV content. Your inclusion of such information shows a serious lack of judgment at best, and at worst a profound lack of understanding as to the ramifications of the content of your fledgling show. I suggest you could do some educating of yourself and your audience as to the REAL harm of Internet piracy. Every major studio has a piracy crimes department who would gladly speak with you about the topic. I suggest you start with Paramount Pictures.

That’s right Madeleine and Jacob, shame on you for not following the Motion Picture Association of America’s party line on P2P file downloading right down to the last dot, failing to roll out big content’s bogus statistics on job losses due to file sharing, and not posting a picture of a homeless child or two to boot.

Anyway, one thing is for sure. If you want to get your radio audience’s attention, illegal file sharing is the topic to air.

PS: I like Dexter too.

source: wikipedia commons

A recent survey performed by Princeton senior Sauhard Sahi under the supervision of Edward Felten attempted to discover the types of files available on BitTorrent, a popular file distribution website. According to the study, 10 percent of the  shared files contained music:

“For the music category, the predominant encoding format for music was MP3, there were some albums ripped to WMA (Windows Media Audio, a Microsoft codec), and there were also ISO images and multi-part RAR archives. There is still a bias towards recent albums and songs, but it is not as strongly evident as it is for movies—perhaps because people are more willing to continue seeding music even after it is no longer new, so these torrents are able to stay alive longer in the DHT. In descending order, we found that 78% of music torrents in our sample were in English, 6% were in Russian, 4% were in Spanish, 2% were in Japanese and Chinese each, and other infrequent languages appeared 1% each.”

The survey analyzed a uniform, random sample of files “via the trackerless variant of BitTorrent, using the Mainline DHT.” The files, totaling 1021, were then organized based on their file type, language, and apparent copyright status. Before providing their results, Sahi and Felten also explain that their results only apply to the Mainline trackerless version of BitTorrent (admitting that “other parts of the BitTorrent ecosystem might be different”) and that “all files that were available were equally likely to appear in the sample.”

Depending on your personal experience with BitTorrent, the survey’s results may or may surprise you. With regard to file types, Sahi discovered that non-pornographic movies and shows comprised 46% of the sample, games and software 14%, pornography 14%, books and guides 1%, and images 1%, leaving only 10% of the files as music files followed by an unclassifiable 14%. Of these categories, each classification did not necessarily have a dominant file format, although each group was dominated by files in English.

Each file was also analyzed based on apparent copyright status and was classified as “likely non-infringing” if it “appeared to be in the public domain, [was] freely available through legitimate channels, [and was] user-generated content,” an admitted judgment call. Based on this definition, Sahi and Felten concluded that only 10 of the files in the entire sample were “likely non-infringing,” meaning that roughly 99% of the entire sample was illegal with each of the total 98 music files classified as “likely infringing.”

Although Sahi and Felten deserve to be commended for their work, the study either omits or ignores a number of important factors. Because the survey focused only on the trackerless version of BitTorrent, it’s likely that the users are knowingly distributing copyright-infringing files, so the percentage of “likely infringing” files is not very surprising. The post, including only a summary of the survey’s results, also fails to provide an accurate time frame or a geographic focus as well as specifics regarding the surveying process, all of which could be very helpful in further analyzing the available data.

Furthermore, although this survey (well, at least the summary) provides a decent amount of information about file availability on BitTorrent, it should not be considered representative of torrents or “likely-infringing” material as it offers a very limited scope of information and fails to mention torrenting websites completely dedicated to a specific file type (all music, all movies, etc).