So said Rodney King, appealing to the citizens of his (and my) city Los Angeles in 1992 after a jury acquitted four police officers of using excessive force against him, causing the city to erupt into an orgy of burning, looting, and rioting. I am saying the same thing to the citizens of the filesharing community, in light of events at TPS that one member here likened to, of all things, a riot.

First of all, I want to say that all of my blog articles are my own ideas, and never influenced by anyone else. Furthermore, decisions I make at TPS as a forum moderator are also entirely of my own volition. I know that there’s been talk outside of TPS that the junior staffers are minions/sycophants/yes-men/apple polishers of the senior staff. (The actual words used were cruder, but you get the point.) Actually, the senior staff gives us plenty of leeway when it comes to exercise our own judgment. Finally, I have said a few times that outside of TPS, I shed all my ties to the place. So at my trackers, I am just me, not a representative of TPS in any capacity and certainly am not going to get involved in any drama involving TPS whether it be to criticize OR defend the place.

So, getting back to King’s plea, we as filesharers ultimately need to be on the same side. If we continue to tear each other apart, we will weaken each other and ultimately weaken the filesharing community at large. Here’s a small example. Suppose you have someone who is fully dedicated to the community at large, and is an active sharer when it comes to seeding and even uploading. Someone like this gets involved in the drama, gets sick of it, and quits filesharing. Who just lost? All of us. I’ll also say blame and fault-finding are things which tear us apart. Let’s move on from this and let bygones be bygones. I fully appreciate there were misunderstandings and feelings were hurt. I admire those who have the strength to move forward from what just happened.

So here is my appeal. The latest TPS drama has hurt everyone involved, from those who left (voluntarily or otherwise) to those who have stayed. For me it causes some awkwardness when I go to an IRC channel or post on a tracker forum and see the names of former TPS members. I hold no personal animosity towards anyone who used to be at TPS and hope those I used to talk to on the forums can at least get along with me and everyone else still at TPS. Please don’t think of us as the “enemy!”

Can we all get along?

[Originally submitted by TPS member Satellite, who gives Russia as his home location. Edited by othersna]

After reading stories of piracy in Russia today, you could think,  “What is piracy in Russia? In that place where bears walk the streets of cities, and all people there drink vodka in fur-lined hat-caps…” I want to inform you, this is far from the case.  Russia is a highly developed country with a good infrastructure.  Internet also exists in nearly  every home (with the exclusion of villages).  In all fairness we say that there are bears in Russia , but in the far north.

Piracy has existed in Russia for a long time. It developed because the average  Russian person does not earn enough money to pay  for licensed software and films. Further, the prices of licensed products  is high for the majority of the people  (particularly considering the low salary of the average person). Even large companies have not all agreed  to buy licensed  software  for the all their computers.  But after years of piracy law-enforcement organizations have begun to fight  back. The first under  fire turned out to be small companies.  Such companies  were very afraid of the raids in style of the Mask-show.  [othersna adds: The "Mask-Show" sounds like something scary!]  After the raids, these companies remained without computers, and then faced judicial persecution. But in most of cases businessmen managed to pay to avoid this.  Not so long ago there is have started to beginning of judicial persecution against individual persons , instead of organizations. But so far actions against individuals remain as rare events (I hope it will remain so).

Most recently the government of RF began to fight internet-piracy.  The government is proposing to place responsibility on ISP providers to control pirate traffic.  Providers would  have to give the IP address of pirate users when given first notice from public prosecutor’s offices. But while this law has not taken  effect because they  have not been able to come to the total opinion what the “internet” is. Certainly, anti-pirate organizations in Russia are not as powerfully developed  as in Europe and the USA, but they are developing.  And soon they will rise to the European level.

Over the weekend I had the pleasure of having lunch with my cousin, who is one of the rare people I know in real life who is a serious internet pirate. He happens to be a DDL/Newsgroup kind of guy but he knows about as much about torrenting as I know about Newsgroups (just the basics). For example, he was asking me how I was doing my torrenting nowadays with The Pirate Bay and other public sites going down. I mentioned that I use private trackers, entities that he had no knowledge of.  After telling him what the private tracker world was like he felt that just too much work for him, and he’d rather just pay for bandwidth and use DDL. A funny moment came up when he mentioned that he changes the names of all the files he gets from “the scene,” since he likes to delete the “.XviD.Releasegroupname” part of the file and asks me if I do the same. I told him I can’t since I keep the files seeding and changing file names would screw everything up. (As a DDL pirate he has the luxury of altering his files.) I asked him why scene and release group files are named “This.Film.Here.Xvid.Name” and he told me that Linux servers don’t take file names with spaces in them and therefore the files use periods and underlines to separate the words. (Learn something new every day!)

Now when it comes to the actual content, we actually were speaking the same language. For example, we were talking about music files, and I asked what the purpose of “FLAC Fingerprint” and “Checksum” files were, and he said they were to check the integrity of FLAC files. I also picked his brain on .log, .cue, and .m3u files as well. Just note my cousin helped me  study for the what.cd exam back when I was still trying to study the preparation materials. Being a physics major he probably gave me more information about spectral analysis than I needed to know, but I can say that his help greatly assisting me in passing that exam.

We also talked about video content as well. In the past he helped me understand basic video encoding and pointed me in the right direction when I was looking for video ripping software. Lately he’s been into collecting HD video, but told me that if there is a movie out on Blu-Ray that he really likes, he would buy it. Heresy from a pirate? His explanation is that a compressed file of Blu-Ray content doesn’t reach the quality of an actual disk when played on an HD TV. He notes one can download an uncompressed Blu-Ray disk, but at 36 GB that’s a huge amount of data and that blank Blu-Ray disks are rather pricey so it wasn’t worth it to him to burn his own Blu-Ray disks.

Before I conclude the article I want to add we talked about other things besides pirating like the Lakers.

othersna notes: This article was written by member “noshelter” as part of a paper he wrote for his Comparative Government class. I publish it unedited in its entirety.

* * *

Recently, IFPI, the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry, ordered a Norwegian Internet Service Provider, Telenor, to block access to a file-sharing site. Telenor refused, saying that the IFPI didn’t have any legal authority.  The IFPI decided to sue Telenor in Norwegian court.  After a short trial, the Court ruled that it wasn’t Telenor’s responsibility to control their users’ internet activity.  I think that the decision was the right one and one that wouldn’t have been made in America.

File-sharing is an extremely popular, but misunderstood, topic.  Most cases aren’t related to what citizens think they are.  The problem with most cases pertaining to online filesharing is that the artists are never involved.  Luckily, most European courts recognize this and deal with the cases accordingly.  Copyright laws are good because they make sure that artists are compensated for their works and therefore able to continue to produce music/movies/art etc.  However, the cases in which individual citizens are sued for enjoying the artists’ work for free have nothing to do with protecting the artists that produced it.  Several studies have shown that while record labels’ profits are decreasing, more people than ever are buying shirts and online music, going to concerts, and promoting musical artists than ever.  In the movie industry, box office earnings are at an all time, breaking last year’s all-time record.  DVD sales are down, but Blu-Ray sales are skyrocketing and On-Demand, PPV, and online rental services are thriving.  The reason that these lawsuits take place is the studio’s role as a middleman is no longer necessary thanks to technological advances.  The industry(especially music) realizes this and is fighting to maintain their old business model that benefits them more than the individual artists.

The artists are beginning to realize that they don’t need to be tied to people who do nothing except take money from them to be succesful.  Most notably, the English band Coldplay released their latest album with the policy that you could pay whatever you wanted and ended up distributing 3.5 million copies downloads.  Obviously it’s a lot easier for a large, popular band like Coldplay to do this than some small band just starting up, but it shows that it’s now possible to get your music out to millions of people without having to be tied to a record company or agency.  All an upcoming musician needs is a computer to record his/her music on, a computer, and some general technical knowledge.  Also, the internet and file-sharing provide a historically unparalleled way for consumers to discover new music.  It’s so much easier and convenient to surf around different sites and find new, intersting artists than it is to buy individual tracks or even entire albums in order to discover new music.

In the case of films, things are a bit more complicated.  Directors obviously still need studios’ funding if they want to do a large-scale and/or expensive film.  The redeeming quality of films, though, is that there are so many ways to financially support the films.  You can now go to the theater, buy the DVD, buy the Blu-Ray, rent it at Blockbuster, rent it on Netflix, buy it On-Demand, or buy a digital copy of the film.  I think that with so many ways to support the directors, actors, and film crews, the film industry has so many platforms on which to make a profit.  The problem, however, is that the larger studios are refusing to see these platforms as a viable way to profit from the films.  They still push DVD’s even though they’re obsolete, but resist releasing the movie online and have yet to consistently take advantage of the superiority Blu-Ray disks.  The Blu-Ray disk can hold up to 128 gigabytes of data (though the usual commercial Blu-Ray is only 50), while the DVD can only hold 8, obviously meaning that this new disk format allows for over 6 times as many content and vastly superior video quality.  In addition, Sony is currently working on a disk that holds four terabytes (4000 gigabytes), but that project probably won’t be completed for years.  People are now building extreme home theater systems, complete with a giant television, sound systems better than the theaters’, and of course very comfortable seating.  The movie industry needs to see that people are eager to watch movies in their own environment with the equipment that they bought and built themselves.  With this new form of media (Blu-Ray), the studios have the power to make consumers really want to buy Blu-Rays by packing it full of extra material not seen in theaters, interviews, insanely superior video and audio quality, and a way to really take advantage of their home theater systems.

Both the music and industries seem to be resisting digital distribution.  Consumers are much more likely to “impulse shop” online because they don’t see their money being taken away or put much thought into whether or not to buy it.  American film companies, especially, have practically declared war on digital distribution.  They think that they’ll make a lot less money and that no one will buy it because piracy will be much easier.  However, piracy is just as easy now, and making $9.3 billion every year instead of $9.8 billion isn’t exactly going into an industry depression.  With proper education and government encouragement, companies may be able to make the transition to digital distribution without all of the fuss they’re creating currently.

Across the world, but mostly in America, anti-piracy companies and music and movie industries see piracy as a way to make profit now.  Several European countries, most notably Spain, have been active in preventing this.  That’s one of the biggest problems with this issue.  Copyright laws, in their traditional form, are good and should still be respected.  If artists aren’t compensated for their work, they’ll be unable to continue to do their work, and it’s even worse when an individual or company sells their work without their authorization.  The problem occurs when the law is twisted in order to benefit someone who didn’t make the artistic content (the studios, anti-piracy companies, etc).  Looking at it that way, I think that the anti-piracy companies are worse than the file-sharers because they cash in on the success of the artists they claim to protect.  Recently, the Obama administration has taken a few good steps in the right direction.  During a Supreme Court hearing in which the Motion Picture Association of America was claiming that piracy took $300 million from them every year, the judges asked them to prove their stats, and of course they couldn’t.  Obama followed this up by sending a message that the companies will have to prove what they claim from now on.  What governments around the world need to do is create a new concept of copyright laws that applies to the modern day.  No longer can the government say, “You can’t download music for free because it’s illegal,” or, “It’s not up to the consumer to pick and choose, deciding who deserves your money.” because times have changed, and the consumer can now easily pick and choose from different artists without even leaving the house.

Back in the 20^th century, American film and music was the best in the world.  People in other countries dreamed of coming here to become a movie star and saw us as the leaders in creativity.  Lately, though, foreign films have been more successful due to increased exposure and independence from large studio funding.  I think that we can return to the top of the film world, but the government needs to take steps to force the music and movie industries to take advantage of new technology instead of trying to make it illegal in order to keep their draconian systems alive for their own benefit.  It’s now easier than ever for a single person to turn an idea into a work of art and spread that idea across the world for practically no cost. Countries like Norway and other European states have done a good job in encouraging content creators and providers to explore these new forms of media distribution, and I’d really like to see America do the same.  Norway and Denmark, among other countries, have very fair file-sharing laws that make it so consumers can enjoy all of the content without hurting the artists.  They have a “fair use” policy which states that it’s legal to download copyrighted material as long as the individual isn’t making a profit from it.  This ensures that the copyright laws are working as they’re supposed to and adapting to new technology.  If America could adopt similar policies and laws, our arts would be the envy of the world again thanks to our advanced use of new technology as it is implemented.