piracy

piracy, act of illegally reproducing or disseminating copyrighted material, such as computer programs, books, music, and films. Although any form of copyright infringement can and has been referred to as piracy, this article focuses on using computers to make digital copies of works for distribution over the Internet.

From hackers to pirates

Before personal computers (PCs) and the digital age, most individuals did not have the capability to copy works in order to print books, press vinyl records, or burn film—nor did they have the ability to distribute copies beyond their immediate circle of family and friends. As a practical matter, copyright law and its enforcement was historically concerned with preventing those with publishing equipment, such as a printing press, from unlicensed reproduction and distribution of copyrighted material for profit.

A certain acceptance or disregard of software piracy, or “code sharing,” had been fostered among “hackers,” or early computer programmers, in the academic computer science laboratories of the 1950s and ’60s. Apple Computers (now Apple Inc.) famously even flew a Jolly Roger flag (a flag with the traditional pirate emblem of a skull and crossbones) on its corporate campus for more than a year starting in 1983. Similarly, Bill Gates, cofounder of the Microsoft Corporation, in 1998 during a candid moment in front of an audience at the University of Washington acknowledged the problem with enforcing software copyrights in the developing world:

Although about 3 million computers get sold every year in China, people don’t pay for the software. Someday they will, though, and as long as they’re going to steal it, we want them to steal ours. They’ll get sort of addicted, and then we’ll somehow figure out how to collect sometime in the next decade.

MP3 and P2P networks

The situation began to change with the creation of the Internet and its opening to the public in the mid-1990s. In particular, the change from piracy-as-a-business to piracy-as-a-hobby started with the invention and widespread dissemination of software for creating music in the MP3, or MPEG-1 Audio Layer 3, format. MP3 was designed in the early 1990s by engineers in the international Moving Picture Experts Group (MPEG) to create a data compression format that would result in digital versions of analog music that would require much less storage space without substantially degrading the sound quality. For example, a typical three-minute song might occupy about 50 megabytes (MB) of computer space in analog form (as used on a regular record or CD) but in its MP3 form a mere 4 MB or so, depending on the sampling rate (higher sampling rates produce better quality but require more storage space). Individuals quickly discovered that songs in MP3 format could be exchanged in only a few minutes over the Internet, even with the slower modems available in the 1990s.

This, in turn, led to the development of file-sharing networks, such as Napster, that relied on peer-to-peer (P2P) software for distributing songs. Although the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) succeeded in shutting down Napster, which had facilitated billions of song transfers over the Internet from 1999 to 2001, newer P2P programs became available that no longer required a central server for indexing song locations. Nevertheless, various computers were soon set up to facilitate searches, the most infamous being The Pirate Bay, a Swedish service that began tracking BitTorrent files (a common P2P format) across BitTorrent servers in 2003.

The principal operators of The Pirate Bay were found guilty of copyright infringement in 2009, though the service continued to operate while the case was appealed. (In an unusual show of support and in protest over copyright and patent laws, Swedes then gave 7.1 percent of their votes for seats in the European Union Parliament to a new political organization calling itself the Pirate Party, which thus received one of Sweden’s 18 parliamentary seats.) The Pirate Bay stopped using torrent trackers in November 2009 and instead used a system called magnet links, in which files are assigned values for which a user can then search. Thus, The Pirate Bay has no record of where the files are located. Unable to completely squelch the ongoing piracy in songs, music publishers had already begun to offer digital versions from their song catalogs through commercial venues such as Amazon.com and Apple’s iTunes Store.

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Some music recording artists have taken the view that piracy helps sell their backlist of works long after their publishers have stopped promoting them. For example, Janis Ian, an American Grammy Award winner, wrote a famous essay in 2002 about her experiences with increased sales of her songs after MP3 versions began circulating around the Internet.

Film and DRM

With the experience of the RIAA as a guide, the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) campaigned for digital rights management (DRM) software to be included in DVDs, DVD players, and the HDMI (High-Definition Multimedia Interface) standard for connecting modern home theatre components. The MPAA’s task of combating piracy was helped by the vastly larger size of motion picture files, which require much more computing power and time for conversion and distribution over the Internet, even with broadband connections. Most digital video recorders (DVRs), as supplied by cable and satellite television providers, also have DRM software to prevent recorded material from being moved to other devices, or data encryption is used to prevent the material from being viewed on other devices or converted to other formats for further distribution. The inclusion of DRM software encouraged the commercial distribution, for sale or rent, of movies and television shows through DVRs and electronic game consoles from Microsoft (Xbox 360) and the Sony Corporation (PlayStation 3).

Of course, no DRM scheme is foolproof, and there exist modern-day hackers around the world with computer programming skills and relentless determination to share videos via P2P networks. The difficulty in stopping people from viewing what they want to view, when they want to view it, no doubt contributed to movie and television studios’ deciding to offer their products to consumers at Web sites where they could include advertisements. In particular, viewers at such advertiser-supported sites are assured that their machines will not become infected with malware (malicious software) embedded within the media, and the producers gain another source of income that they hope will grow enough to eventually compensate for the additional cost of distribution over the Internet.