A Torrent Of Abuse

It is probably a reflection of the extent to which I was aware of such things, but I was blissfully unaware of the existence of “Oink” until earlier this week. There are probably some of you that are wondering how I could have lasted until I was 35 without being aware of the noise that a pig makes, but “Oink” was a private bit torrent site that was shut down earlier this week after a joint operation by the IFPI [International Federation of the Phonographic Industry], BPI [British Phonographic Industry], Cleveland [U.K.] police and the Fiscal Investigation Unit of the Dutch police. The site’s servers have been seized, one man has been arrested and information relating to the site’s users is now reportedly being “analysed”. Ho hum.

It has been a difficult twelve months for the ever-expanding bit torrent community. The ongoing sagas at The Pirate Bay and Torrent Spy are well-known, whilst other sites such as Demonoid have had problems staying online. It should be added that “Oink” didn’t exactly help itself – although early police reports spun the myth that “Oink” was profit-making (later statements were amended subtly to express the truth – the site took donations to cover running costs, but no more). It specialised in “pre-releases” – albums leaked, often presumably from insiders working within the industry itself. This is, one would have to say, one of the more morally dubious sides of bit torrent, and it’s easy to see how this could damage the record industry. There is also the argument that 99.9% of people involved in illegal file-sharing know what they’re doing, and know the legal status. There is little that one could say, if one was caught, other than “it’s a fair cop”.

However.  It would obviously foolish to paint this as a black & white issue, with the likes of the RIAA fighting some sort of “good fight”. When they paid a former Torrentspy employee $15,000 to syphon off information from the site’s server, they themselves were sailing very close to the wind in legal terms, and the accusation that they discussed setting up a fake torrent site with the intention of gathering information about users (including bank details) is easy to believe. It’s also fair to say that relevant “special interest groups” have no concern for morality when they’re prosecuting people, whether it’s a teenager who recorded a minute of a film to show his brother, or a grandmother who didn’t know that her grandson was using P2P technology to file-share music. It’s also worth pointing out that there are more shades of grey in file-sharing than the RIAA would like you to know about, and it’s reasonably common knowledge that they like to publicise raids on the less morally defensible sites. Sites like, for example, UK Nova only put UK-made television programmes that are not available to buy on DVD. Enthusiasts can, therefore, use the site like an online video recorder, and no damage is done to the companies producing the programmes in the first place. Finally, and this, to me, is the most significant point, they only go after smaller organisations and people that cannot afford to defend themselves. There is still, for example, thousands of hours’ worth of copyrighted material on YouTube but, asides from the occasional lawyers’ letters, no action is taken. They’re not going to risk taking on a company backed by Google, who could defend themselves and possibly, just possibly, win what would be a landmark court case, which might see the end of copyright laws as we understand them.

The RIAA are, ultimately, the losers here. Each of these raids is a public relations disaster, no matter what way they try to spin it. They will always be seen as suing their own customers, and as out-of-date and living behind the times. They react to digital technology with fear, rather than embracing it, loading CDs with DRM technology that (in the case of Sony) cross the line into being spyware. They restrict you how you can listen to it when you buy it legally, and they still make enormous profits for, largely, churning out middle of the road crap. And ultimately, the pirates will always be one step ahead of them. They closed down Napster, and they moved on to Soulseek and Limewire. They flooded Limewire with malware and fakes, so they moved on to Bit Torrent. And if they manage to strangle Bit Torrent, you can bet your bottom dollar that another file-sharing technology that it will replace it and that all the time the number of people using it will rise. Home taping is killing music? No. The music “industry” is perfectly capable of doing that on its own.