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Pirate Bay Traffic Surges
June 12, 2006
P2P traffic is up, P2P traffic is down. Piracy is under control, piracy is wilder than ever before. Lawsuits inhibit piracy, lawsuits only encourage it. Opposing sides of the online copyright war often cite conflicting studies and research to promote their ideology, rarely expressing a unified snapshot of the online world.Such is the nature of propaganda. For every study that dictates the entertainment industry is winning the war against unauthorized file-sharing, there is one in contradiction. Want to demonstrate the RIAA’s lawsuits against file-sharers’ is working? Easy as pie. Want to demonstrate the opposite? Piece of cake.
With an endless supply of contradicting data, the debate of who is winning the online copyright war is difficult to solve by lobbing around statistics and research studies. Empirical evidence and observation by the individual provides some hope of understanding however. The most observable constant is the “action/reaction” relationship between the entertainment industry and file-sharers.
Before Napster, there was an online music void. Although IRC provided an exchange interface for file-shares, its complexity lacked mainstream appeal. That situation changed with the advent of Napster, the first mainstream P2P network. Its creation was the manifestation of widespread demand of digital music and the lack of a legal alternative. It also initiated hostilities and the cat and mouse game that continues to this day.
To the MPAA and RIAA’s credit, both trade organizations have been very successful in their judicial and legislative endeavors. Yet laws and court rulings designed to inhibit or curtail behavior for people that have little respect for such laws to begin with has only resulted in escalation.
Napster was successfully litigated out of existence in 2001. Napster’s centralized architecture was its Achilles heal, as was the case for the highly popular Scour Exchange P2P network. Naturally, any P2P network controlled by a central location was vulnerable to the entertainment industry’s enforcement efforts. Yet this didn’t stop P2P networking.
The next step in this technological arms race resulted in distributed, or decentralized, P2P networking. Gnutella, followed by FastTrack and numerous others, eliminated the vulnerabilities presented by communities such as Napster. With the indexing responsibilities distributed throughout the network by use of supernodes, it then became impossible to simply knock on Gnutella’s front door and demand their central servers be shut down. Supernodes, like card catalogs in a library, index the location of files throughout a network.
Escalation continued despite the apparent near-invulnerability of this new breed of P2P networks. The entertainment industry in the United States then opted to pursue the developers of this software. Lawsuits against StreamCast Networks (Morpheus) and Grokster were twice unsuccessful in 2003 and 2004; however a landmark decision by the Supreme Court spelled the end to their safe-harbor enclave in June of 2005. The Supreme Court ruled 9-0 that Grokster could be held sued for the actions of its users, and remanded the case to the lower courts. P2P development in the United States, with the exception BitTorrent, came to a screeching halt.
Concurrent with the legal action against developers, the entertainment industry represented by the RIAA and MPAA began litigation against individual file shares in June 2003. To date, over 16,000 individuals in the United States and over 3,000 people overseas have been pressured to settle. Most people cited by such potential lawsuits were for sharing an egregious amount of music or movies.
Did these tactics work? They work from a legal and legislative standpoint, in that both trade organizations have overwhelming support of the US Congress. They also worked in escalating the online copyright conflict.
The legal actions against individual file-shares also worked in discouraging the use of the most heavily targeted network, FastTrack (Kazaa.) While some have pursued authorized alternatives, many file-sharers adapted to the RIAA lawsuit by simply traversing different P2P networks.
Likewise, litigation against programmers has not deterred development of file-sharing communities. The actions against developers and individuals gave BitTorrent the catalyst necessary for it to become far and away the most heavily trafficked and populous network in the history of file-sharing. Litigation and prosecution also gave rise to The Pirate Bay.
Many see The Pirate Bay as the materialization of the growing escalation between both sides, and recent events serve as a microcosm to the entire history of file-sharing. The major music and movie labels have the RIAA and MPAA as their representation, while file-sharers see The Pirate Bay as theirs.
Interestingly enough, in the action/reaction environment that has become a constant in the file-sharing world, the MPAA, Antipiratbyrån and IFPI successfully persuaded Swedish authorities to extinguish The Pirate Bay on May 31, 2006. However like all prosecution efforts against alleged pirate operations, this action was successful only from a judicial and legislative perspective. The reaction from The Pirate Bay was to simply move its operation from Sweden to the Netherlands.
The amount of pubic attention brought to The Pirate Bay’s situation appears to have only helped this BitTorrent tracker’s prominence and achieve a significant public relations victory for file-sharers. Since its return online, The Pirate Bay has not only regained its original traffic, but nearly doubled it.
Reacting to the initial database problems earlier this month, Pirate Bay spokesperson “Peter” told Wired.com the influx of new users has presented its fair share of challenges.
"The database problem is actually that we have so many new users and the current hardware setup isn't tuned perfectly," he told Wired News in an IM interview. "It takes a while to get everything right in a complex system like The Pirate Bay.... We've had some 404 problems with torrent-downloading, but that is due to overload and some bugs in our software. They will be fixed in a couple of days."
Considering the amount of media attention surrounding the events surrounding May 31, 2006, it’s not difficult to believe The Pirate Bay’s popularity has skyrocketed. With The Pirate Bay's database issues resolved, Peter’s contention is further backed up by Alexa.com, which serves adequately in determining the general growth or decline of a website.
Setting aside contradicting statistics and studies on P2P networking and piracy interdiction (from both sides), what remains is growing escalation. One action leads to another action, which only serves to further the conflict. But escalation by its very nature implies growth, and by observation alone this growth doesn’t appear ready to subside any time soon.
Concurrent with the legal action against developers, the entertainment industry represented by the RIAA and MPAA began litigation against individual file shares in June 2003. To date, over 16,000 individuals in the United States and over 3,000 people overseas have been pressured to settle. Most people cited by such potential lawsuits were for sharing an egregious amount of music or movies.
Did these tactics work? They work from a legal and legislative standpoint, in that both trade organizations have overwhelming support of the US Congress. They also worked in escalating the online copyright conflict.
The legal actions against individual file-shares also worked in discouraging the use of the most heavily targeted network, FastTrack (Kazaa.) While some have pursued authorized alternatives, many file-sharers adapted to the RIAA lawsuit by simply traversing different P2P networks.
Likewise, litigation against programmers has not deterred development of file-sharing communities. The actions against developers and individuals gave BitTorrent the catalyst necessary for it to become far and away the most heavily trafficked and populous network in the history of file-sharing. Litigation and prosecution also gave rise to The Pirate Bay.
Many see The Pirate Bay as the materialization of the growing escalation between both sides, and recent events serve as a microcosm to the entire history of file-sharing. The major music and movie labels have the RIAA and MPAA as their representation, while file-sharers see The Pirate Bay as theirs.
Interestingly enough, in the action/reaction environment that has become a constant in the file-sharing world, the MPAA, Antipiratbyrån and IFPI successfully persuaded Swedish authorities to extinguish The Pirate Bay on May 31, 2006. However like all prosecution efforts against alleged pirate operations, this action was successful only from a judicial and legislative perspective. The reaction from The Pirate Bay was to simply move its operation from Sweden to the Netherlands.
The amount of pubic attention brought to The Pirate Bay’s situation appears to have only helped this BitTorrent tracker’s prominence and achieve a significant public relations victory for file-sharers. Since its return online, The Pirate Bay has not only regained its original traffic, but nearly doubled it.
Reacting to the initial database problems earlier this month, Pirate Bay spokesperson “Peter” told Wired.com the influx of new users has presented its fair share of challenges.
"The database problem is actually that we have so many new users and the current hardware setup isn't tuned perfectly," he told Wired News in an IM interview. "It takes a while to get everything right in a complex system like The Pirate Bay.... We've had some 404 problems with torrent-downloading, but that is due to overload and some bugs in our software. They will be fixed in a couple of days."
Considering the amount of media attention surrounding the events surrounding May 31, 2006, it’s not difficult to believe The Pirate Bay’s popularity has skyrocketed. With The Pirate Bay's database issues resolved, Peter’s contention is further backed up by Alexa.com, which serves adequately in determining the general growth or decline of a website.
Setting aside contradicting statistics and studies on P2P networking and piracy interdiction (from both sides), what remains is growing escalation. One action leads to another action, which only serves to further the conflict. But escalation by its very nature implies growth, and by observation alone this growth doesn’t appear ready to subside any time soon.
This story is filed in these Slyck News categories
BitTorrent :: Trackers/Indexers
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