What is the Future for File Sharing?
From the time that computers began being available for the home hobbyist, there has been file sharing and copyright infringement. What has changed over time is the methods used to share the files. With the rapid growth in the use of the Internet, and the introduction of newer technologies that make the sharing and discovery of files far easier than before, file sharing has come within the reach of the everyday user in a way that could never have been imagined before.
Paralleling this has been high profile court cases against site operators has helped keep some of the most popular methods over the years in check. The most recent high profile file sharing court case, against the operators of The Pirate Bay, already appears to have had some effect on the availability and use of BitTorrent trackers.
Despite ongoing argument about the validity of the court case and the sentences handed down, including some spectacular claims of bias and inappropriate conflicts of interest, the current outcome is reported to have seen a number of public and not-so-public BitTorrent trackers voluntarily close. Many of these closures have been of trackers based in Sweden and are likely a direct result of the Pirate Bay's court case. When the largest tracker site on the Internet is successfully prosecuted (pending appeal), it sends a message to similar sites hosted in the same country that they might be next on the target list. With a successful prosecution precedent set, many smaller operators are looking to cut their risk exposure and close down.
Since BitTorrent is a non-centralised means of distributing content, the only centralised component being a place to record and point users towards content locations, it probably isn't going to take very long for new trackers to appear and take up some of the slack that the Pirate Bay has now created (despite being still available, just not hosted in Sweden). New sites are more likely to be private trackers with enforced ratios than the high profile sites like The Pirate Bay. Smaller private trackers have always been around and are the means by which a lot of the most desirable torrents trickle down to the public sites. Because they tend to carry content that is extremely sensitive and close to the original source, are comprised of users who are very aware of what their ratios are and how they are proceeding, and are what investigators should be focusing on, their existence and accessibility is usually a closely guarded secret.
This might make it harder for the casual file sharer to access content, but there will always be a way for that information to be had, eventually trickling down.
In the long run there may be some new sources coming online to help access files, but overall there isn't really going to be much of a change. Many of the sites that are closing will probably reappear under a different name, hosted in another country, just that little bit further out of reach of investigators. With the borderless nature of the Internet, this isn't really going to affect end users all that much. Avid file sharers might hope for the day when copyright laws are amended to reflect the modern reality of digital content and extremely simple bit-perfect duplication of that content, but that isn't likely to happen until generations that grew up with the internet and on-tap file sharing take political and business power.
Avid file sharers would rather investigators and the various content associations focus on the sources of the leaked information, which more often than not seems to be from within those very organisations (or at least member companies) rather than slamming the end users who consume it.
Attacking the technology used to distribute content, or sites that point to what is available isn't going to help in the long run and will only ensure the survival of file sharing, just maybe in a slightly different format. What technology is going to emerge to replace BitTorrent as the most popular file sharing method of the next decade isn't known, but it is guaranteed that it will trace a similar arc of emergence into popularity and decline into obscurity through prosecution that other file sharing technologies have followed before.
24 April 2009
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