Put your copyleft foot in, pal.

Not only do they have one of the most awesome logoes ever, but they have a truly impressive torrent collection. The Pirate Bay

Pirate Bay is a Swedish site that distributes torrent files for use in BitTorrent file sharing software clients. They are unrelated to the BitTorrent guys that I discuss at length below. There are several levels to this new "industry." The users, who make and use torrent files; the mass-distributors of torrents, like The Pirate Bay; the guys who came up with BitTorrent, Bram Cohen and Ashwin Navin; and the independent programmers who develop softward clients that run on the BitTorrent protocol, BitComet being one of many.

"Who are these guys and what the sam-hill is a torrent collection," you ask? Well let me start by telling you about BitTorrent. Well these two guys up North came up with this new data sharing protocol and called it BitTorrent. There is a common misconception that BitTorrent is just another file sharing program, but this view is not only misguided, but probably a notion put forth by certain parties who stand to lose a lot of money as a indirect result of this data sharing protocol becoming prevalent.

First off, I'd like to make a disclaimer as to my lack of true expertise in the computer science arena. I am an aspiring legal professional who dabbles in technology--an armchair techy, if you will.

Currently, the internet is based on straight peer-to-peer data sending protocol, meaning that if you want to send or receive information from another computer (another peer), your computer has to connect to the singular source of that information, ask for it, and, generally, download it. This is all based on a point-to-point system. Information goes from point A to point B. A problem arises. Let's say that point A is the only (currently) legal source of this information, as a consequence, a bottleneck will form at A's data output channel (his website, for example). The bottleneck will become an actual bottleneck once A's output bandwidth is maxed out. Bandwidth, while growing generally across the net, is not infinite. The BitTorrent guys came up with a solution.

The new paradigm is that of a new type of 'publication' of data, rather than a streaming of it from point A to Point(s) B. The overall result of using the BitTorrent protocol instead of the peer-to-peer protocol, is that A's upload bottleneck is of no real consequence. All A has to do is release his data to B once, and, in an aggregate sense, his data is everywhere at once. The B's of the world can obtain the data from all the other B's on the net.

But this sounds like any other file sharing program, right? No. The others are all based on peer-to-peer. I want data, I search for someone that has it, and I take it from him, again point A to point B. With BitTorrent, it isn't point A to Point B; its points (A-C-D-E-F-G-etc.) all at the same time to point B. You transfer a small chunks of the data from everyone else on the net that has the data, effectively bringing the bandwidth concerns to negligible levels. Of course this is all based on the assumption that the data becomes distributed effectively over the net. While this is an assumption, I find it to be the case in reality. I can find just about anything on BitTorrent-based file sharing programs (BitComet for example). The things I can't find, I would probably just go and purchase.

So back to The Pirate Bay. These guys have a huge database of torrent files. Open a torrent file in your BitTorrent-based file sharing client (BitComet, et al) and your client will begin downloading your target data from the whole society of people who have this file on the net. Sweet. These guys have all the torrents. I was stoked to find that they had one for the entire second season of Deadwood. I don't think this is available on DVD just yet. Woot!

So, as a liberty-minded individual, I feel somewhat torn between two maxims here. On one hand, I love progress in science, education, etc. On the other hand, I believe in strong property rights for the individual. Perhaps at no other time in history have these two maxims been in such great conflict. Property rights of the individual stand to halt a technical revolution on the internet. The New-net that protocols like BitTorrent threatens to create reminds me of the network described in what was either Snow Crash or Diamond Age (Stephenson), where data flowed in a massive ocean. I can't do it justice since I read it so many years ago, but the imagery is fantastic. The Internet today is just a collection of bottlenecks of varying diameters. Yah, big fuckin' woop. The aggregate effect of BitTorrent will turn it all into one big throbbing pool of tart, juicy data. It makes me hot just thinking about it. Let's all have a party; I'll bring the super-soakers filled with hot KY.

Take a look at this: The Pirate Bay's legal section. While simultaneously very humorous, the exchanges between the Pirate Bay dudes and the industry lawyers, et al illustrate an important new concept. What I like to call "The CopyLeft Movement." I didn't coin this term, but the first time I heard it was in Copyright lecture last year. I like it; it's poetic.

So with the advent of protocols such as BitTorrent, the old paradigm of Copyright threatens to leave a lot of creative work in the dust. A lot of new artists, writers, programmers etc. are opting to use Copyleft to their advantage. Why not? While you sacrifice a little in terms of near-absolute control of the work, you benefit by FREE (!!!!) publication, you get to be part of the in-crowd (us copyleft hippies are really fun to get smashed with), and I'd presume there are other benefits that are only on the horizon.

And from what I understand, the rights you give up in, for example, an open source software licensing scheme, don't really hurt you the programmer as much as they hurt the distributors and publishers of the software. Wow, this is some big time hippy shit. The artist/writer/creative dude wins out over the big companies? Awesome. Not that I'm again corporations, per se, but this in fact opens the door to a lot of creative folks. They no longer need to depend on huge capital investments in order to make their dreams a reality.

Ok, this could go on forever. Hence I will defer to a later date as the issues continue to develop.

Copyleft.