The Inevitability Of Internet Pirates

  Courtesy of Andy Kessler

Pirates are all over the news this year. They were off the coast of Somalia … and now they’re in Sweden? In April, a Stockholm court handed down a guilty verdict for "accessory and conspiracy to break copyright law" to the four owners of the Web site Pirate Bay, who now each face up to one year in prison.

Their crime? Setting up a site that allows 22 million users–and that number is growing–to search for and find pointers to (mostly) copyrighted material on the Internet. These so-called torrents are easily downloadable, perfect digital copies of music, TV shows, movies and, as it’s known on the Web, pr0n. Outraged at their courts, Swedish citizens got the last laugh when the three-year-old Pirate Party received 7.1% of the vote in the early June European Union elections, guaranteeing it a seat in the European Parliament. Argh.

The funny thing is, Pirate Bay doesn’t even host any copyrighted material for download, only directions to find it. If I were Google CEO Eric Schmidt, I’d hold off on that trip to Europe this summer. Because type "The Climb lyrics" into Google and you get pages of links to other Web sites with copyrighted lyrics to this Miley Cyrus song. Type in "Hannah Montana the Movie torrent," and you have a choice of download sites for a copy of the movie, all one click away. That’s "accessory and conspiracy," if you ask me.

Fortunately, we in the U.S. rarely pay attention to Swedish laws. Did you know it’s illegal in Sweden to repaint a house without a license and the government’s permission? But along the lines of Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s remark–"Why shouldn’t we look to the wisdom of a judge from abroad with at least as much ease as we would read a law review article written by a professor?"–I say bring on the Pirate Party!

Copyright law and its interpretations have been a mess for years. I’m always amused by pay-per-use Xerox machines in libraries bearing a warning label not to copy copyrighted material–as if there was any other reason for the copier to be there. In 1998 Congress was happy to pass an extension to existing regulation, practically written by Disney, that extends artist’s copyrights well beyond their deaths. Google has inflamed the anger of book authors, a dangerous group who can type faster than most, by claiming it is allowed to put the complete text of books on its site unless individual authors opt out.

Furious that Internet news sites are using Associated Press content without paying fees, the AP announced tougher enforcement of their copyrights. In an attempt to show how twisted this has become, I (illegally?) copied the following from an AP story I found on Google: "’We can no longer stand by and watch others walk off with our work under misguided legal theories,’ said Dean Singleton, the AP’s chairman and the chief executive of newspaper publisher MediaNews Group Inc. ‘We are mad as hell, and we are not going to take it any more.’"

No matter what laws are passed, copyright infringement is going to happen.

For the most part, Google and others hide behind a simple concept, that they are in the "link serving" business. Ingenious, actually. Others may violate copyrights, their argument goes, but we just serve up links to Web sites that are doing supposedly illegal things, like hosting downloads. Google’s implicit claim is that they are not the police of the Internet, which would be quite an expensive task to undertake. And if the Web were strictly regulated, search wouldn’t be as lucrative a business. But are they in the same business as Pirate Bay? Will they soon fund the Google Party?

And who are the Web’s police? In the end, it’s courtrooms in places like Sweden. They’re not very efficient; they don’t fit the Internet model of scalability. So really, it’s no one. Like it or not, the Web is and will remain the Wild West.

Hand out as many guilty verdicts as you like, but folks on the Internet will copy away–because, really, who can stop them? Google won’t do it, Internet providers like Comcast and AT&T, who can block a lot of this stuff, can’t do it without Network Neutrality proponents squawking, "Interference!"

Even authoritarian regimes fail. (The Great Firewall of China is quite leaky.) Plus, it is so easy to create a Web service to download copyrighted material that, like that arcade game Whac-A-Mole, if you take one culprit down with your mallet another five pop up in the next few nanoseconds. Sad but true, there is not much anyone can do.

If you want to understand how impossible it is to shut this stuff down, here’s an example. I’ve noticed that Pirate Bay’s servers go down every once in a while, for as long as a day. A note is put up that they have to travel to reset their servers, which are in an undisclosed location. My bet is Estonia. Or maybe Tuvula.

So make all the legal arguments you want. No matter what court decisions are rendered and no matter what laws are passed, copyright infringement is going to happen. So these folks should stop suing their customers and lobbying for more laws and instead come up with new business models that pirates can’t follow them into.

Rock groups Aerosmith and Metallica have had most of their library of songs stolen, so they have incorporated them into the videogame "Guitar Hero." In that format, they sell them again to millions of fans who want to do more than listen. High-definition movies are too big to download (for now), so Blu-ray disc sales continue to grow. The fact that iTunes is tightly linked to iPods legitimized digital music sales. The Amazon Kindle is kick-starting a protectable platform for electronic books. And newspapers and magazines need to create more than just a free display tablet to properly Webify their printed words.

New services–in areas from alerts to social networks to finance to interactive sports-fan participation–need to do things paper versions can’t do. These organizations aren’t in the railroad/media business anymore; they’re in the transportation/communications business. The distinction makes a difference. And in the meantime, expect digital pirates to remain a menace to the old way of doing things.