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Sunday, Nov 8, 2009
George Lucas can sleep easy tonight. The FBI saved "Star Wars" from the evil rebels of the Internet file-sharing alliance.
May 27, 2005 | Haven't we seen this rerun before? A particular version of file-sharing software becomes popular. The entertainment industry starts paying attention. Lawsuits begin to fly. A few people get their fingers burned, and then we do it all over again. Napster, Kazaa, Grokster and now BitTorrent -- the names change but the story doesn't. The software will get better and the busts will get bigger. Same as it ever was.
The latest news in the file-sharing wars was delivered via a press release from the Department of Justice with all the solemn portentousness of an announcement that a major terrorist had been captured. "This morning, agents of the FBI and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) executed 10 search warrants across the United States against leading members of a technologically sophisticated P2P network known as Elite Torrents."
Ho-hum. It's not as if we didn't see this coming. Yesterday's big bust was inevitable from the moment the first geek gave BitTorrent a test drive, painlessly shared a huge file, and thought, wow, this works pretty well. BitTorrent is a fantastic way for Internet users to share the job of transferring huge files back and forth. But it's also a tool that, so far, has made little pretense at offering privacy. Those who upload and download files -- and given the way BitTorrent works, pretty much everyone who uses the service is doing both at the same time -- can be tracked. But naturally, every bust like yesterday's only encourages more programmers to try to figure out how to make it less easy to trace who's using the software.
What precisely prompted this most recent crackdown? Given the suspicious timing, it appears to be the horrifying news that "Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith" was being made available six hours before it started appearing in theaters, and that all told, some 10,000 copies were transferred before the authorities quashed the rebels. As of Tuesday, "Sith" had only raked in some $339 million worldwide, so something clearly had to be done. After all, "Internet pirates cost U.S. industry hundreds of billions of dollars in lost revenue every year from the illegal sale of copyrighted goods and new online file-sharing technologies make their job even easier," said Michael J. Garcia, Homeland Security assistant secretary for immigration and customs enforcement.
Hundreds of billions! Wow! It's amazing anything gets produced at all in Hollywood or Silicon Valley with those kind of losses! But hang on a sec. Come on. Please. The very idea that the people downloading "Star Wars" to watch on their computers might somehow be dissuaded from shelling out for the movie in theaters is so ludicrous that any movie studio executive who even hints at believing it should be locked up in a stockade and forced to watch nothing but Anakin Skywalker/Queen Padme love scenes in a permanent loop. OK, I confess, I don't have quantitative evidence to back this up, but I'll lay good odds that the Sith-stealing fanboys at EliteTorrents are the exact same people who will see the movie multiple times on the big screen, buy the DVD, own at least one light saber already, and otherwise will work all their lives to ensure that George Lucas' descendents live on easy street throughout the 22nd century.
Here's a news flash, folks. Call it the First Law of Piracy. The most popular albums, movies and TV shows are precisely the ones most likely to be shared on the Internet. It is a sign of success, not failure, that the demand for "Sith" was so high. And while we're at it, how about a Second Law: The First Law will be true for all time and there is nothing that entertainment industry executives can do about it, no matter how many lawyers they throw at the problem, no matter how many fines are assessed, no matter how annoying the digital rights management schemes they come up with, or how many times Congress and the judiciary kowtow to their bleating. Any phenomenon that hits big in the culture-at-large will be copied and shared online. Which leads us to the Third Law: This isn't about right or wrong, legality or illegality. It just is.
