Internet Piracy Prevention

Is It Worthwhile?

16 October 2017
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All societies have been affected by theft over the centuries. Thousands of years ago, the

ancient Mesopotamians dealt with this same crime in severe ways. Thankfully, humans today

have (mostly) become more merciful. Where the Mesopotamians would take your hand or kill

your wife, we only fine or imprison today. As our punishments have advanced, so has the

methods that our criminals use to steal. In our ever changing, digitally-fueled, world, cyber

thieves have created communities and protocols specifically designed to circumvent modern

copyright laws. Throughout this paper, I plan to discuss how the United States government has

addressed this crime in the past, how criminals have evaded detection, and if prevention of this

crime is even worth our law enforcement's time, effort, and resources.

Before I can explain how the United States courts deal with digital copyright theft, I

should explain what exactly piracy is. This term is thrown around loosely nowadays, but it can

effectively be summed up as the digital theft and/or redistribution of copyrighted content such as

video games, movies, television shows, eBooks, music, and more. Think of it this way

anything that can be downloaded legally through digital marketplaces such as Amazon, iTunes,

and Steam can also be downloaded illegally through websites such as thepiratebay.org, rarbg.to,

and 1337x.to.

One would think that a government could easily take down infringing content that is

hosted on the internet within its own countryand they couldbefore the invention of the

BitTorrent file-sharing protocol in 2001. According to the BitTorrent protocols own homepage,

BitTorrent is a free speech tool that allows scalable and robust distribution through the use

of a distributed peer to peer (P2P) network. To illustrate the difference between a BitTorrent

download and a normal host to peer download, please see figure one.
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Fig. 1 Diagram showing the differences between a traditional (direct) download and
a P2P download.

After the invention of BitTorrent, governments have had a very difficult time determining

exactly how to address digital copyright infringement because of the distributed nature of the

BitTorrent protocol. With the click of a button, a torrent file can be downloaded from one of the

previously mentioned sites and is then used alongside a BitTorrent client to download any type

of file from many peers at once. Not only does this distributed-network style prevent a single

point of failure from stopping a download, but it also has additional benefits. According to Cee

Jay in his article about BitTorrent speeds, The faster your Internet connection, the faster you

can download [with torrents]. Direct downloads from the web are limited by the upload speed of

the source. Torrents circumvent this problem by breaking downloads into chunks and receiving

pieces of the file from multiple sources at once, which increases overall download speed.

Now that we understand what exactly computer piracy is and how the BitTorrent protocol

works, we can examine how the United States courts have addressed this growing concern in the

past. Before record labels and other infringed-upon entities can take an individual to court they

need to first determine who on the internet is pirating their content. With the BitTorrent protocol,

downloaders of a file can have their IP address monitored by other downloaders because of the
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inherent peer-to-peer structure of the network. Because of this, record labels can spy on digital

pirates and collect their IP addresses by downloading the same file. Once they collect enough IP

addresses, they are free to pursue legal action against the copyright pirates.

Before ~2010, record labels would typically take individuals to court and sue them for

hundreds of thousands of dollars. For example, a federal jury ordered Joel Tenenbaum, a

previous college student, to pay $675,000 to four record labels because he pirated 30 songs in the

early 2000s (Lavoie). There are dozens of other cases where major record labels in America

would attempt to make an example out of everyday citizens and their goal was to deter people

thinking about becoming digital pirates. Unfortunately for them, their goal was not met because

the vast majority of pirates were never punished. In fact, the RIAA came out around the year

2008 and claimed that they would stop suing people for pirating copyrighted content

(Silverman). Around the same time that the aforementioned trials were taking place, the Motion

Picture Association began airing its public anti-piracy campaign focusing around the mantra

You wouldnt download a car.

After ~2010, infringed upon companies started a more lenient campaign in association

with internet service providers (ISPs) and local governments to prevent piracy. This campaign

focuses on warning possible pirates of a denial of service from their ISPs and removing pirating

safe-havens from the internet. The FBI, and other global law agencies, have been battling with

websites like thepiratebay.org to remove their domain and physically seize their servers.

According to Ernesto Van Der Sar, the maintainer of TorrentFreak.com, popular sites like

thepiratebay.org have gone up and down several times throughout the past decade following

legal pressures and domain seizures.

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This more-lenient campaign against digital piracy has allowed pirates to get away with

downloading whatever their hearts desire for nearly the last decade. Suresome pirates were

stopped by denying them internet access and others were thwarted because they couldnt access

their favorite torrenting site at a specific time, but most pirates were not inhibited by these

efforts. Any technology-savvy pirate could easily pay for a cheap VPN service to mask his/her IP

address, which is all that is needed today to avoid trouble with modern anti-piracy campaigns.

Some popular VPN services that are preferred by pirates are Private Internet Access (PIA),

TunnelBear, and Hide.me.

Now that we understand what pirating is, how it has been campaigned against, and how

its prevention can easily be circumvented, we can finally ask the big question: is it even

worthwhile to prevent piracy? My answer to that question is simply no. While prevention

methods may stop a few people from browsing over to thepiratebay.org, most efforts have been a

grand waste of money. The media industries in America have spent hundreds of thousands of

dollars on legal costs taking people to court and possibly even more on some of their anti-piracy

campaigns that have been run on TV and the Internetand to what end? The digital piracy

community is larger than ever and thrives in smaller sub-communities found throughout the

Internet on Reddit, gaming websites, and torrenting forums.

Of course, piracy is still illegal so we should educate our public that they should pay for

the content that they consumeespecially if they would like to see more content produced in the

future. However, several studies published in economic journals have found that the advent and

popularization of internet piracy has not had a significant impact on the amount of sales that a

producer receives (Smith). In fact, many people seem to believe the opposite. Some economists
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speculate that most digital pirates would not purchase the content that they steal anyways, so

producers gain a word-of-mouth advertisement that they may not otherwise have had.

While many consumers believe this, producers and copyright protection groups (such as

the MPA, RIAA, and European Commission) are having trouble coming to terms with this

possibility. Recently in 2017, the European Commission got into trouble after it was found out

that they withheld a $430,000 study that discovered piracy did not affect sales of copyrighted

material (Dent). The news of the study being withheld angered many pro-piracy activists on the

web and seemed to confirm their suspicions that piracy was a victimless crime. Additionally,

Matthew Yglesias brings up in his New Scientist article that while content producers are not

getting paid for the material they pirate, its not as if the money vanishes into a black hole.

Suppose Joe Downloader uses BitTorrent to get a free copy of Beggars Banquet rather than

forking over $7.99 to Amazon, and then goes out to eat some pizza. In this case, the Rolling

Stones loss is the pizzerias gain and Joe gets to listen to a classic album. Its at least not

obvious that we should regard this, on balance, as harmful.

Even so, governments around the world still need to come up with a solution to combat

piracy if the current copyright laws are to stay in effect long-term. One unpopular solution would

be to remove or modify the standing copyright laws that outlaw piracy in the first place. A

second solution might be to empower and request industries to create innovative services and

allow them to thrive, as Mike Masnick suggests in his article entitled The Right Way To Stop

Piracy. In this article, Masnick cites the music streaming service Spotify as an example and

claims that anti-piracy laws have little to no long-term impact on piracy. Any impact is, at best,

short term. However, when innovative services are allowed to thrive, and when there's real

innovation, the public is more than willing to sign up in droves, often leaving their pirating ways
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behind. Hopefully in the future, industries that experience heavy pirating rates can take Mikes

advice to heart and create interesting alternatives that are more convenient to use than opening

up your favorite torrent client and starting a download.

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Works Cited

What Is BitTorrent? BitTorrent.org, 2015, www.bittorrent.org/introduction.html.

Dlpic.png. Napzo.com, Napzo, 5 Sept. 2015, napzo.com/wp-

content/uploads/2017/05/dlpic.png.

Jay, Cee. How Can I Get Faster Download Speeds with Bitlord? Techwalla, Leaf Group

Media, www.techwalla.com/articles/how-can-i-get-faster-download-speeds-with-bitlord.

Silverman, David. Why the Recording Industry Really Stopped Suing Its Customers. Harvard

Business Review, Harvard Business Publishing, 22 Dec. 2008, hbr.org/2008/12/why-the-

riaa-stopped-suing.

Lavoie, Denise. Jury Orders Student to Pay $675,000 for Illegally Downloading Music. ABC

News, ABC News Network, abcnews.go.com/Business/story?id=8226751&page=1.

Van Der Sar, Ernesto. The Pirate Bay Goes Down Following Legal Pressure. TorrentFreak, 17

May 2010, torrentfreak.com/the-pirate-bay-goes-down-following-legal-pressure-100517/.

Van Der Sar, Ernesto. Pirate Bay Domain Back Online, Waving a Pirate Flag. TorrentFreak,

21 Dec. 2014, torrentfreak.com/pirate-bay-domain-back-online-waving-a-pirate-flag-

141221/.

Smith, Michael D. The Truth About Piracy. The Technology Policy Institute, 2 Feb. 2016,

techpolicyinstitute.org/2016/02/02/the-truth-about-piracy/.

Dent, Steve. EU Withheld a Study that Shows Piracy Doesn't Hurt Sales. Engadget, Oath Tech

Network, 22 Sept. 2017, www.engadget.com/2017/09/22/eu-suppressed-study-piracy-no-

sales-impact/.

Yglesias, Matthew. Why Should We Stop Online Piracy? New Scientist, New Scientist Ltd., 19

Jan. 2012, www.newscientist.com/article/dn21373-why-should-we-stop-online-piracy/.

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Masnick, Mike. The Right Way To Stop Piracy. Techdirt, Floor64, 8 Oct. 2015,

www.techdirt.com/articles/20151007/14402732471/right-way-to-stop-piracy.shtml.