Category: Piracy

In response to Caitlin Dewey re. TPB

Photo by GlobalIP
Photo by GlobalIP

Dear Caitlin Dewey:

I have read some really dumb, cloying, and earnestly written ideological gibberish in the past three years,  but you have reset the bar with your recent love letter to online piracy.  To be clear, I am confident that piracy itself is a serious problem for both culture and the economy, but this particular disease is nothing compared to the metastasized cancer that has scrambled brains like yours into believing that piracy is actually about something.  You write, “See, the Pirate Bay is as much an idea and an orientation to entrainment media as it is/was a torrent-tracking site.”  Really?  Are you so culturally illiterate that you don’t know a cheap sales pitch when you hear one?  The boys of TPB are not the first thieves in history to justify their crimes by claiming to be leading the world toward some New Jerusalem.  And being a sucker for that message is more socially toxic than the piracy itself.  If you’re going to pirate media, then have the intellectual honesty to say “I’m stealing and I don’t care.”  And then shut up about it.

Piracy isn’t an idea or an ideology or a principle.  It’s a cheap, tawdry, and frankly sexist (note the ads) enterprise of lazy opportunists who profit from other people’s hard and real work.  Profit is why the Pirate Bay and sites like it have existed; and consuming media for free is why people use these sites.  It doesn’t take a degree in psychology to understand either the “buy” or the “sell” side of these transactions, which make pirate sites profitable; but if pundits like you would at least spare us your banner-waving social revolutionary horse shit, then perhaps actual thought might survive this digital slaughter bench of reason that seems to flip your proverbial kilt.

Again, you write:  “But even if TPB doesn’t return, the politics and the conventions it advanced — that content should be free, and if you torrent, they can be! — will be very difficult to eradicate.”

That’s positively adorable, like something a child might write, especially the way your ebullience almost masks the lack of subject/verb agreement.*  But that’s the thing, Caitlin, writing is work, and good writing is hard work.  And so is making music, television shows, and motion pictures.  And it is not in fact the Internet “created by The Pirate Bay” that enables you to jump on this facile bandwagon and spill out a few hundred words for The Washington Post.  In truth, you are able to get up in the morning, buy yourself a latte, and have at it with your keyboard because you live in a society in which free people are rewarded for their labor by compensation.  And that fundamental, economic principle has a hell of a lot more to do with the freedom you claim to love than does your petulant desire to watch Game of Thrones without bloody well paying for it.

 *NOTE:  To be fair, Dewey’s error is a singular antecedent with plural pronoun, which sounds like subject/verb disagreement but isn’t quite.  See, good writing is hard work.  Thanks to one reader for noticing.

Zombie Jamboree – Google “Helps” Fight Piracy

You know the deal.  Kill one zombie while ten others are infecting hundreds more who in turn infect thousands until, well, you’re basically toast.  Not only because it’s Halloween but because I am so damn bored with the Whack-a-Mole simile to describe anti-piracy efforts, I’m switching to zombie fighting.  Even TorrentFreak uses the word resurrect in the title of this article to describe how one particular torrent site, FileSoup, is using Google’s database of takedown notices to re-establish live links to infringing material.  It’s a bit confusing for the non-techie (including me), and I won’t do a better job summarizing the mechanics than the TF article, but here’s the big picture as I understand it:

Google receives about 20 million requests per month from rights holders to remove links to infringing URLs.  I suspect those are requests from major rights holders like studios and does not include independent rights holders who don’t have the resources to send out notices in significant volume.  Despite the fact that the overwhelming majority of takedown requests are legitimate and the DMCA is nearly useless for rights holders, Google and its PR machine continue to promote a general message that DMCA takedown requests are, by default, an attack on free expression.  To help reinforce this idea, the company dons a populist costume, claiming to be pro-transparency, and files all takedown requests with Chilling Effects Clearing House and produces a Transparency Report detailing the notices it receives. With the aid of so-called digital rights activists at The Berkman Center and the EFF, a publicly available database like Chilling Effects becomes a two-headed monster for both rights holders and the public.

First, as stated in an earlier post, the name and positioning of Chilling Effects is a pretty sleazy PR move designed to sustain that message that all takedown requests inherently violate free speech; and then, as a reporting “service,” these databases provide an efficient resource for prospective infringers to bring dead links back to life with relatively basic coding skills.  To quote TorrentFreak quoting someone from FileSoup, “We created a technology that crawls DMCA notices and resurrects the torrent webpage under a different URL so it can appear in search results again. It was rather complicated to sharpen it, but eventually it works pretty well. We will use it on FileSoup.com for all the websites we proxy.” 

Recently, Google rewrote its search algorithms to demote major pirate sites in the results queue, and this is a good thing. Despite having dragged their feet for years on taking such action and insisting search had no influence on pirate traffic, these demoted positions do seem to have had a mitigating effect already.  Of course, while giving a fist bump to rights holders’ with one hand, Google is using the other hand to feed links that have been lawfully removed by DMCA notice into a database that feeds this URL reassignment process to infringe exactly the same material against which Google can still sell advertising. 

And as bad as that is, I am even more concerned with the ideological agenda behind the more insidious message conveyed by an initiative like Chilling Effects that IP rights (or any other rights) infringe speech just because it’s the Internet. It is not wild speculation to say that the ultra-libertarian ideology of Silicon Valley’s elite envisions a future that looks and sounds populist and egalitarian for now, but that can become a real zombie apocalypse in just a few years.  In this zombie apocalypse story, everyone and everything is wired, and we’re all smiling at the free stuff on our devices and the conveniences brought to us by the Internet of things, and nobody notices that we’ve become commodities ourselves.  

Like a good horror movie, it begins subtly with consistent behaviors among the tech industry elite encroaching on various civil liberties.  Google does all it can to play fast and loose with piracy, and only so many people really care because they figure “it only affects big media conglomerates.”  Years later, Reddit balks at taking down stolen nude celebrity photos, and a few more people care about that because they begin to see this kind of rights infringement hits a little closer to home; those are people not companies.  Meanwhile, Google scans Gmail, and Facebook turns our connections, comments, and apparent interests into a commodity that can be traded like pork belly futures.  Then, Amazon exerts pressure on suppliers and labor with a monopolistic power we haven’t seen since John D. Rockefeller.  And because the pattern is asymmetrical and subtle, just like a zombie movie, we overlooked patient zero, which in this story was a song, illegally commoditized by a “file-sharing service” back in the early 90s.

Happy Halloween!

Unrepentant Bad Thinking on Piracy

Jenna Wortham, technology writer for The New York Times, offers this article in which she questions the illegality of IP theft online.  Titled, The Unrepentant Bootlegger, Wortham begins with a description of what some may consider an unjustifiably heavy-handed raid by DHS officers in the arrest of Hana Beshara, a co-founder of the illegal media site NinjaVideo, shut down in 2009.  One can argue that non-violent criminals should be arrested in a less dramatic way (though I wonder how that sentiment might apply to insider-trading felons), but that isn’t the point of Wortham’s article.  No, her thesis asks wether or not Beshara’s actions ought to be illegal in the first place; and I’d like to jump to her quote about SOPA near the end of the article because so much of her inquiry poses naive questions based on false premises like the following:

After the seizure of NinjaVideo and the other sites, the M.P.A.A. pushed federal legislation to continue to crack down on illegal downloading. But the bill, SOPA, was so loosely worded that it could have required all websites to be responsible for monitoring their services for potential violations — an expensive and nearly impossible challenge — prompting sites like Wikipedia, Tumblr and Craigslist to rally online sentiment against the legislation. Outrage about the bill came to a head in 2012, and lawmakers backed off.

This narrative about SOPA has been repeated so many times that even a writer for the NY Times can get away with presenting it as fact. But it just ain’t so. There was nothing about the wording of the SOPA/PIPA bills that could be used to hold US-based websites any more responsible for infringement than they already were in 2011, or than they still are at this moment.  In fact, language in the bills explicitly stated that they do not trump precedent, domestic law. The bills were specifically designed to starve foreign-based sites, dedicated to piracy, of their revenue streams strictly because the site owners themselves operate beyond the reach of U.S. law enforcement.  Wortham’s own emotional introduction to her article, describing the flack-jacketed arrest of Hana Beshara ought to indicate to anyone how utterly unnecessary it would be to have introduced SOPA/PIPA as domestic-focused laws.  Clearly, what Beshara and her NinjaVideo colleagues were doing is already enforceably illegal in the U.S., hence the guys busting into her condo and the 16 months she spent in prison.

The notion that SOPA could have shut down Facebook, et al was the result of well-orchestrated, and well-funded fear-mongering; and I stand by the assertion that (issues of piracy aside) the anti-SOPA campaign was the most successful corporate-serving bamboozlement of the electorate in my lifetime.  The campaign was holistically corrupt in that the very tools being employed to manipulate the political process simultaneously created the illusion that people believed themselves empowered through information to take action.  Never have I seen so many intelligent friends motivated to reaction based on such illogical, let alone unsubstantiated, claims.  Did it not occur to any of my progressive, educated colleagues at the time that in all likelihood no member of congress, no matter what we may think of his/her other politics, would sign the “shut down Facebook and Twitter” bill?  Yet, here we are, almost four years later, and NY Times writers are behaving as though the Internet industry talking points are historical facts.  And that brings us to the crux of Wortham’s article, summed up in this quote:

 Ms. Beshara, however, still can’t accept that what she was doing deserved the heavy hammer of the law. She served 16 months in prison for conspiracy and criminal copyright infringement, but she still talks about NinjaVideo as something grand.

Something grand indeed.  It is astonishing that even when independent artists recite their stories of working for years on a project only to have it hijacked by a pirate site, they’re accused of whining; but when profiteering site founders are busted, they’re treated like martyrs to the cause of culture and smarter business practices.  This narrative that we should credit the NinjaVideos and Megauploads of the world for giving us iTunes and Netflix is another false premise; and it is always perplexing to read declarations about the public “wanting 24/7 on-demand everything for free or really cheap” as though those making such statements believe they’re revealing some profound ethnographic discovery. Really?  People would like instant gratification and would prefer to pay next to nothing for it.  That is a shocker.  If only there were a Pulitzer Prize for the Numbingly Obvious.

The problem is that when writers like Wortham, under the imprimatur of venerable publications, repeat this self-evident observation about consumers and then pose the rhetorical question about the illegality of piracy, they fail to recognize through the fog of their own presumed humanism that they’re in fact promoting an anti-fair-trade market.  This is because it simply isn’t possible to produce all major motion pictures and television in a manner that makes all of these works instantaneously available in every market worldwide and for prices that compete with the unlicensed option of free.  To make such a demand on motion picture producers, both great and small, implies that the stake-holding subcontractors whose skills, labors, and constituent products used to produce these films must have their interests (i.e. means of living) subverted to the exigencies of black-market economics.

Going forward, I expect we will see more and more film projects organized at the contractual stage of development to facilitate early release on legal, web-based platforms — we’re already seeing this occur in some cases — but the conclusion Wortham implies is that the attitudes about piracy are so socially ingrained at this point that we ought to simply accept them and perhaps even praise them as enlightened. This isn’t surprising of course.  Normalizing negative behaviors or trends does have a tendency to screw up perceptions about the consequences of those behaviors.  Articles like Wortham’s remind me of a moment back in college when I bumped into a fellow film major — he wasn’t  the sharpest tool in the shed — one afternoon and he told me he was bummed because his friend had been expelled.  I asked why, and he said that the friend had “set his dorm room door on fire.”

“Um, Dude, that’s arson,” was all I could think to say.

“Yeah,” he replies, “but there’s so much other shit he did that the school never caught him for.”

This was sound reasoning in his mind.  His friend’s miscreant, even dangerous, behaviors had become so normalized that it seemed entirely unreasonable for the college to take disciplinary action.  And that’s the thing about the many thousands of words at this point that have been dedicated to re-contextualizing media piracy.  Call it what you want, but, at a certain point, all we can conclude is, “Dude, that’s larceny.”