July 24, 2020 • 34 mins
Who invented BitTorrent? How do BitTorrent transfers work? What exactly is a torrent file?
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:04):
Welcome to Text Stuff, a production from my Heart Radio.
Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host,
Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer with I Heart Radio
and I love all things tech. And now we are
going to listen to a classic episode. This episode originally
aired on August twelve, two thousand. It is called how
(00:28):
bit torrent Works. So we actually get down to the
bottom of how torrents work and what's the big deal
about it? And why is it so controversial? And is
it at its heart illegal? All those sort of questions
are the things we ask and try to answer in
this episode. Hope you guys enjoy it. To start off,
we kind of need to talk about just how you
(00:49):
would typically get a file right, how how files are
transferred period at all? Under so the normal process by
either by by any of the protocols that you to
use over the internet, be the FTP or htt P
that's file Transfer protocol or Hypertext Transfer Protocol excellent acronyms.
(01:09):
So traditionally, your your computer, which in this scenario we
call the client, is going to contact a a host
computer a server in order to say, hey, I want
that thing exactly ye whether that thing is a web page.
So if your web browser can be a client. Yeah,
that thing could be a web page. That thing could
be a music file, it could be a movie file,
(01:30):
it could be uh an email. It all depends on content, right,
that that you want to get. Um. The server would
then send the file to your computer according to whichever
protocol you are using, right, And it's using the basic
set of rules that we all know from the Internet,
the idea of everything's in packets. Those packets travel through
different routes and then they get reassembled on your computer.
(01:52):
But yeah, it's essentially a one to one relationship, right,
I'm asking the server to send me something, the server
send something to the client. Done, done, and and you know,
and the speed with which this can happen depends on
the amount of traffic on the server, the size of
the file. Yeah. So let's let's boil this down to
an analogy. Alright, So, Lauren, you are a server, I
(02:12):
am yea. So now you have entered into the uh
the service industry. You are a server in a coffee shop. Okay,
you served terrible at that job, alright, but let's let's
imagine Lauren, that this is a reality where you're not
terrible at your job. You're actually pretty good. You can
serve up to three people simultaneously, so amazing, but only
(02:35):
three people and uh, and the amount of time it
takes you to produce the order for the customer depends
upon what they ordered, like what size of it and
how complicated is the drink. Obviously these things will factor
into how long it takes you to prepare it. But
you can still handle up to three. But then there's
a rush, right like, uh, I don't know, there's some
hipster band is in town and everyone needs their coffee,
(02:58):
so they all rushed the coffee shop at the same time.
And now you've got twenty people asking you to make
very complicated drinks, but you can only serve three at
a time, and these drinks are getting progressively more complicated
and larger. Things start to slow down, so that person
who's you know, seventeen people back feels like they're waiting
forever to get a coffee, and they're thinking, what's the
(03:19):
big deal. It should only take It's just a coffee,
You should just take two minutes. I should be in
and out in two minutes, and instead I've been sitting
here for fifteen minutes and the lines barely moved. That's
the same thing we experience with this traditional approach. If
you're talking about a single server hosting a lot of files,
a lot of clients contacting the server for the files,
and those files are big, it just means that things
(03:41):
can get bottlenecked and slow down. So there were some
different approaches to trying to figure out how to make
this uh more streamlined, and but one way is to
just increase broadband speed. Right, So essentially, if you're talking
about the Internet being a series of tubes, that's it. Bigger, bigger,
longer tubes, more tubes, bigger tubes, and more tubes. Yeah,
(04:03):
those are your two choices, right. You make them bigger
so that you can shove more stuff through the tubes,
or you make a lot more of them so that
there are a new ways for it to pass through.
But you're still kind of ball necked by the the
server itself and how quickly it can respond to requests. Sure,
so if this approach is really slow, then one alternative
(04:25):
is to distribute a file across a network so that
you have lots of different options when you need to
get that file. Right, So in this instance, instead of
saying that Lauren is the only person who can serve
coffee within a twenty mile radius. And that's why we're
all kind of uh, you know, up the creek when
we walk into the coffee shop and we see there's
(04:46):
fifteen people ahead of Instead, we have a coffee shop
on every corner and across the street from each other,
and next door to one another. Their coffee shops everywhere.
So really I just have to walk into any coffee
shop and I can stand in the middle of the
street and shout coffee and someone will bring one. Right.
So that's that's kind of the idea of the peer
to peer network. In this sense, you have some form
(05:09):
of software that allows you to connect to a distributed
network where when you participate in this network, you're essentially
giving permission to access part of your hard drive. Yeah,
you just set aside a little folder on your hard
drive that is okay for this program to access, and
then everyone else who is running the same program also
has folders set up. Hopefully they have stuff in them, right, Yeah,
(05:33):
Because one thing you could do is you can set
up this folder and then immediately move stuff out of
the folder, and then you're leaching. That's the term, right, right,
it's it's considered a faux pas and in sharing circles
just because you're you're not putting anything back out into
the community. Right. So with peer to peer, let's say
you've got this folder that's designated as a shared folder,
and when you're connected to the software, anyone who's also
(05:56):
connected the software, when they're searching for a specific file,
if your file, if you happen to have that file
within your folder, you come up as an option to
connect to download from your computer. Now, the problem with
peer to peer, even it solves one issue, right, The
one issue is that if you go with the clients
server uh model, then you are limited by the server.
(06:20):
Like if the server is the only machine out there
that has an existing version of this file, then that's
the one destination you can go to, and you are
stuck with whatever problems that might have. In peer to peer,
you're adding more tubes, but you're not making them any bigger, right,
So in other words, like I could you know, if
we're going back to our coffee shop, example, and we
have these coffee shops everywhere, I can walk to the
(06:41):
coffee shop. That's closest to me, But there's no guarantee
that coffee shop won't have the world's slowest server, or
you know, like that someone who's just they they are
very meticulous about the way they make their coffee, or
there might be two or three people in front of
me at that coffee shop and I have to wait
for them. Anyway, it gives me more options, it does
not necessarily mean it will be faster, and the really
(07:02):
good software will identify the person with the best connection
who has that file exactly. Yeah, So that way it
gives you the best chance of having a smooth transfer.
And it's also good to note that this creates more
stability when you're trying to get a file. So the
other big issue with the old clients server approach is
(07:23):
that if that server suffers a problem, if it goes
down for some reason, power outage or whatever, then you're stuck.
You know, you don't you do not get that file.
And if you were trying to download a big file
and it was maybe seventy of the way done and
the power goes out, there's a chance that file could
get corrupted in the process, and then you have to
start all over again, right, which was a real bummer.
(07:44):
When peer to pier was was really big back in
the early two thousands, like late nineties, um, because you know,
it was about that modems that could that could handle
broader band than fourteen four it's became available for consumer purchase.
And after that, you know, when when people started getting
(08:05):
connected to the ethernet was really when peer to peer happened. Yeah,
and then you you were able to you know, one
of the downsides is that traditionally, with most Internet service providers,
your upload speed is a fraction of what your download
speed is. Right. The reason for that is that ages ago,
when companies began to offer internet service, they looked at
(08:26):
the broadband that they had available, like the bandwidth they
had available to the size of the tubes. Essentially, they're saying,
all right, here's here's what we are capable of delivering
to our customers. How are we going to determine how
much is down link versus uplink? And then they said, well,
you know, probably people aren't sending stuff up to the
Internet that frequently. They're mostly trying to consume stuff pull
(08:47):
stuff down. This was before we were uploading millions of
years worth of YouTube videos every second. Yeah, this was
This was back when that was not even a consideration.
So the idea was that, well, you know, we can
just make it a fraction upload speeds will be a
fraction of download because you there's nothing as frustrating really
as sitting down. Well this is probably that's that's exaggerating,
(09:08):
but it's very frustrating to sit down and try and
get at some sort of content online and then just
see either a buffering thing or a loading screen and
it just goes on forever. If you're talking about the
old old days of the Internet, there's nothing like trying
to look at a picture of something and watch it
slowly load pixel line by pixel line, and you're just thinking,
I have no idea what I'm looking at. I won't
(09:30):
know for another forty five minutes. I would I would
like the record to state that I just used I
just gestured at Jonathan to help you guys understand what
he was talking about and exactly how ineffective that was.
That was a great visual representation on an audio podcast. Yeah,
so you know that this approach meant that we suddenly
had all these other options, this peer to peer approach,
(09:52):
and this is the way a lot of those file
sharing services back in the day worked because lime Wire, Napster,
that kind of thing. Yeah, it's all about let's find
people who have the stuff you want and connect this
create a connection directly to them. Yeah, so it almost
becomes like a direct phone line in a way, where
(10:12):
the connection is between the host computer and your computer,
so you can get the file and then of course
once you have the file, your computer can become a
potential host computer. So now an improvement on that was
bit torrents approach, right, and I think it will be
really interesting to get into the intricacies of how bit
torrent works. But before we do that, let's take a
(10:34):
quick break. Let's get back to the show. Alright, we're back,
and Lauren, you alluded to bit torrent. Now, this was
a totally different approach in the sense that it was
someone coming up with the idea of how can we
(10:55):
make these download speeds faster, not just more reliable so
that I have more options, but how can I get
the stuff I want faster, particularly if it's a really
large file, you know, and if you're if you're like
Jonathan said earlier, if your internet connection is maybe not
the best and something cuts out somewhere that you won't
lose all of the progress on downloading a file you
had already made. So this was the idea of a
(11:16):
programmer named Bram Cohen. Now, Bram Cohen had worked for
several dot com startups that never really took off, and
it just kind of failed over and over, and he
really wanted to work on something that worked. That was
a big ambition of his understandable And in two thousand
one he was also getting really irritated by these problems
we're talking about the slow download speed of large files.
(11:41):
He liked the idea of the peer to peer network,
but he didn't care for the execution. So in two
thousand one he begins work on a new protocol. Now
we've used the word protocol several times in this podcast,
just to remind you. A protocol really is just a
set of rules. It's kind of a kind of seven
instructions for a computer to follow. So he designed a
protocol that he called BitTorrent. Now, this was an attempt
(12:05):
to solve that connection problem um and the speed problem
at the same time. So you know, peer to peer
adjusted the connection. He wanted to do speed as well,
So how do you do that? Well. His approach was
to create this protocol that would allow files to be
distributed in pieces, and as you receive a piece, you
are also able to upload that piece even before your
(12:26):
file finishes downloading. So I might have a file that's
at twenty seven percent as it's slowly downloading, that twenty
seven is completely available for other people on the network
who are also trying to get that file. You could
also get pieces of these files from multiple sources, so
as long as everyone had the same file, then you
could get, you know, a piece here and a piece there.
(12:47):
So imagine that everyone has at least some part of
a five piece puzzle, and one person down the street
is giving you pieces uh one through twenty seven, and
someone on another side of the street is giving you
pieces forty three through and you're just getting You're getting
the whole puzzle, but you're getting them from different locations
(13:09):
all at the same time. It's like it's like if
everyone in that in that coffee house street has a
cup of coffee and you just kind of run down
and they all pour a little bit into your cup. Right. Yeah,
it's similar to that, except except with less like gross
spittle contamination, and also there's a pretty design at the top.
I don't know how they managed that while you're running
down the street like a crazy person, but you know
(13:30):
they're talented, that's all. So he was thinking like this
would be the way of solving this problem of slow
download speeds. Now, he did not necessarily go about testing
this in a very scientific, scientific PC way. Did you
see how he tested Okay, folks, here's how he tested it.
(13:52):
He collected a batch of freely available pornographic material and
then invited beta testers to see about getting hold of
this stuff using the bit torrent protocol. Stay classy, cohen U.
But he figured that this was kind of a sure
fire away and because it was freely available stuff, it
(14:12):
wasn't like it wasn't copyrighted. He didn't have to worry
about running into problems with torrent systems have having fact
run into lots of copyright issues. We'll talk about that
towards the end of the show. You know, that's that's
a that's a totally different discussion. But he he he
wanted to try and test it out, and apparently that
wasn't considered a terribly auspicious beginning. But he eventually did
(14:32):
launch a working version of bit torrent for the general
public in October two thousand two. Now two years later
in two thousand four, he had a five person company
working on a search engine that would work alongside his protocol.
So he designed the protocol, but one of the issues
people were running into was how do you find the
(14:53):
torrent files which are pointer files. I'll talk about them
a little bit more in a second. How do you
find these files that the facilitate the downloading process when
you're you're actually using the bit torrent software, and this
is via a tracker server. Right, So he created he
worked with this five person company, actually five person company
worked for him to create the search engine that would
(15:14):
look for these torrents to help make this process work
more smoothly. Uh. He was also then looked at by
a little company called Valve. Yeah, so Valive. Valve is thinking,
you know, we want to do a downloadable distributed network
approach for our games. We want to have this ability
to deliver games to our users that is fast and
(15:36):
reliable and doesn't put a lot of pressure training on
our own servers. Right, we don't that way, we don't
have to build out a whole data center just to
support this this model, this distribution model. So they contacted
Cohen and they hired him to work on a platform
that we now call Steam. Cohen was one of the
people who helped build that program out, and it was
(15:59):
all because he saw what he was doing with bit torrent,
and they said, that's the approach we want to take.
And in fact, Valve and Blizzard are two companies that
use bit torrent for a perfectly legitimate means of distributing
their files. It's a good time to just mention there's
nothing illegal about torrent files. No, no, it's it's just
(16:21):
a matter of distribution. It's kind of like if you
were to say, yeah, but you can get illegal material
that way. You can get illegal material through the mail,
But you wouldn't say that means we should shut down
the postal service. You might say we should shed down
the postal service for other reasons, but not for that one.
And same sort of argument you could use for bit torrent,
like to say, let's get rid of bit torrent because
some people are sharing illegal files, even lots of people
(16:45):
sharing illegal files, doesn't mean that the tool itself is wrong, right.
The technology itself can be used for lots of really
cool things like yeah, like like letting people like Valve
put games up online without having to buy giant servers,
or independent artists put their music online, right right, Yeah,
And there there are a lot of reasons there their
entire you know, whether it's software or video files, music files.
(17:08):
You know, there are a lot of reasons why you
would want to take this approach. And uh, one of
the big ones is that it, like you said, it
takes the strain off the provider. Right. So, if I'm
a small business or an artist, an independent artist, I
might not have the resources available to me to create
a dedicated server where people can come and download stuff,
(17:28):
especially if I'm having to pay lots of fees to
maintain that. And you know, I mean, you know, for example,
if you post some music to your personal website and uh,
Neil Gaiman or Will Wheaton link it on Twitter, and
all of a sudden, you're completely overwhelmed. This, by the way,
is a complete invitation for both Will Wheaton and Neil
Gaiman to tweet about our podcast. We would love that.
(17:49):
That would be gorgeous. Um. Yeah, so I wouldn't even
know what to do with myself I would probably totally
flip out. No, I would totally flip out. I wouldn't
probably there, there's no probably there. Yeah, Hey guys, it's
Jonathan again. We're gonna take another quick break and we
will be right back to talk more about bit torrent
(18:14):
in two thousand five. Already by this time, okay, the
bit torrents only three years old from when it officially launched.
Even by then, Hollywood had taken notice and was not
terribly happy. Yeah, the Motion Picture Association of America and
also the Recording Industry Association of America. That's um, the
m p A A and the R I double A. Yeah,
(18:37):
r I double A is is like, that's music. Essentially,
an m p A is film. So m P A
A UH in particular was concerned because the bit torrent
protocol did make moving large files much easier, which meant
that suddenly people were able to upload and download large
files like rips of films. They take a DVD and
(19:00):
ripped the film from the DVD and then share it
and you would get illegal copies. Or if you were
working on a digital film and you were part of
a digital film production and you had access to the file,
there were movies that leaked out. UM some famous instances
of movies that leaked out before they had even hit
the theaters, where people were getting hold of pirated copies,
(19:21):
and Hollywood was really taking him a bit torrent even
though again, as we said, bit torrents a tool, it's
not like it was specifically facilitating the illegal activity. However,
on November twenty two, two thousand five, Bram Cohen had
a joint news conference with the chairman of the m
p A A. Dan Glickman, and announced that he had
(19:42):
agreed to prevent his own bit torrent website from linking
to torrents pointing to illegally available movies. Now, before that point,
their policy was that if they were alerted to a
torrent that linked to those pointing to they would take
it down. So that was there, that was their policy
all all long. But they said, well, now we're just
going to make sure that that's much more streamlined, which
(20:04):
if you've followed these kind of these kind of cases
not just with bit torrent, but with other providers, other
platforms like YouTube for example, there are examples of takedown
notices that were improperly UM dealt with Yeah, and probably
dealt with or improperly submitted people who didn't actually have
the rights to something demanding they get taken down, and
(20:26):
then it gets taken down um, and then there then
there's some embarrassing ones. I think Microsoft just recently issued
a takedown request to itself. Yeah, so sometimes these sort
of things can end up being kind of embarrassing. But
he was saying that we want to you know, we
don't want to up so um. Today you can find
(20:51):
bit torrent on lots of different platforms. In fact, bit
torrent today allows you to do things like produce content
and then distribute it. So it's design more now to help,
like I said, those small businesses, the independent artists to
create content, and then even to to enable it so
it'll perform properly on things like smartphones, tablets, consoles, creating
(21:15):
a huge distribution network that people wouldn't have had access to,
you know, ten years ago. So there are many reasons
why it's a very useful tool. So let's talk a
little bit about how it actually does what it does now.
First of all, it's open source, which kind of tells
you that Cohen wasn't necessarily looking to create like a
(21:37):
a h multibillion dollar. This wasn't a commercial venture. No,
he wanted he really believed in this. And open source
means you can see the source code. You can go
and get the source code for the bit torrent, play
around with it. Yeah, you can change it. You can
make your own product based upon it. It's open source um.
(21:57):
And then there are sites that how torrent files. Torrent
files are not They don't have any material in them
other than pointer information that will point a your software
to the right destinations that will have the actual file
you're looking for. It's it's a little bit like that
that like a protocol that we were talking about, but
just in a in a file formata. It's and it's
(22:20):
kindlling meta data. It's it's information about the file you want,
the information mainly being where you can get it. Like
it's it's allowing the software that you have on your
computer and when when you when you run a program
to uh to to go go out and find the
little pieces of this file across the Internet, across the
swarm of computers that contain it. That's good. Yeah. So yeah,
(22:40):
your basic computer that has you know, the file, the
full file on it, you would call it a seed.
It's a seed computer. UM, and then the swarm is
all the different computers that connect to the network that
have some portion of that file and are actively downloading
and or uploading that file, that are also running this
this torrent sideway. Right, everything has to be working running
(23:03):
the software at the same time. If you stop running
the software on your computer, you disconnect from this network.
You're still on the Internet, but you're not part of
the bit torrent network anymore. So, Yeah, the torrent file
just kind of points the software in the right direction
so you can get these pieces. It gives them the
software the information it needs to identify and pull those
(23:24):
those pieces of file into your computer. Classically, this is
all organized by a central server called a tracker like
I mentioned earlier. Um, these these days that's it's it's
a little bit um has a little more complicated than that.
But yeah, your classic bit torrent has a tracker server
that kind of acts like a traffic driver, like it's
(23:45):
it's the one that's making sure everyone is going to
the right place. Um. And you're so you've got your seed,
you get your swarm. You are constantly downloading as long
as you're connected to this or downloading end upling as
long as you're connected to this, uh, this network. The
cool thing is with bit torrent that your download speeds
depend upon your participation within the network. Right. You get
(24:08):
a rank based on how many files you are allowing
the system to upload from you, and and your and
your actual upload speed as well, So those two things
factor in. So if you are being you know, if
you're altruistic and you're sharing a lot, then you can
also download faster, right because your rank goes up, and
that means that your download speed's improve and so you
(24:29):
don't have to wait eight hours to get you know,
that music file you wanted to get. It will download
in a matter of minutes maybe or or faster, depending
upon your broadband speed and the speed of course of
the various computers that are hosting pieces of that file.
But it does mean that you go much faster than
you would with your traditional peer to peer or client
server relationship kind of a protocol. You end up getting
(24:53):
the pieces of the file you need, and then once
you've got all the pieces you you're good to go.
So you don't have to depend upon on computer and
its connection to the network. You're depending upon the entire
network and anyone who has pieces of that particular file. Now,
like we said, there's nothing illegal about this. This is
just a distribution network. So if your file that you're
(25:15):
distributing doesn't have any sort of copyright to it, or
if it's licensed under something like creative comments, that gives
the person who has the file the the ability to
distribute it however they like, then there's no issue there.
That's completely legal, and in fact, that might even be
the intent of that content. You know, the person who
(25:36):
made it. Maybe I want this to be shared with
as many people as possible. That's why I uploaded it
to the bit torrent network. Uh. However, it does also
mean that it can create an environment that allows for
illegal sharing in a way that is a lot more
difficult to fight than the client server approach, right right,
(25:57):
Because it's not located in a single place. You can't
go knock on one particular person's door and say you're
holding this file. Because it's spread out over so many
people that exactly, Okay, it's a lot harder to trace back.
I can't go into Lauren's coffee shop and tell her
that she has to stop serving this one type of
coffee if everyone around her is serving that same type
of coffee. It doesn't do any good, right, right, same
(26:19):
sort of thing. Yeah, so this is although I mean,
I don't know you could. You can make some arguments
that even even the illegal portions of torrenting are beneficial
in a way because you know, first of all, it's
it's made the industry um create its own legal ways
of distributing files the faster, you know. I I think
(26:40):
that the direct streaming on like Netflix and Amazon Instant
all that kind of stuff is of direct response. I
agree to torrenting. I agree. And it also means that,
you know, encouraging the studios to find new ways to
get content to two people who who want excellent to
buy it. Let me give you my money. They're eager
to participate in this. If you make it easy enough
(27:01):
and you don't price gouge, then you're not really inspiring piracy.
There's also been several surveys of varying reliability that have
suggested that people who pirate stuff also tend to be
some of the it's right right, which, you know, people
who are torrenting are probably more likely to buy things
(27:22):
online than your average consumer anyway, because they're more computer
and internet savage to begin with. But but you know,
but the number that gets tossed around a lot is
from a study by the American Assembly, which is connected
to Columbia University. So it's more or less on the
up and up. Yeah, this is that that's a that's
a fairly reputable institution. They at least call themselves nonpartisan.
They do, they do have a little bit of a
(27:43):
liberal slant, I would say, but um, but they found
that peer to peer file shared users purchase more music
online than non peer peer us. And then of course
there's also the argument that a lot of these organizations
make the mp A A in r I double A
is that UH stolen property UH directly translates to lost revenue.
(28:07):
And we've seen multiple studies, including studies that were specifically
UH funded by the government, you know, the government agencies
that looked into this to see how much, how how
much in damage is really is caused by piracy and
the conclusion is that you cannot come up with a
number because you cannot say for certain that someone who
(28:28):
pirates something would have purchased that something had they not
had access to the piracy software. And furthermore, that they're
not going to go out and purchase it afterwards that
they weren't trying before they bought it. Right, So in
both cases, you don't know if they went out and
bought it anyway, and you don't know if they would
have bought it. So without knowing those two factors, you
can't say that this actually cost anybody anything. And and
(28:51):
you know, it's not like a physical copy of something,
where if I walk into a store and a shoplift,
that store is out a physical piece of inventory. When
you download a digital file, you're making a copy of something.
The original version of that file is still on a
person's computer somewhere else, so it's not like they have
lost that. So with all of these factors, it really
(29:12):
means it's so complicated that we cannot put an actual
dollar amount. Not that that has stopped anyone from doing
so when creating massive lawsuits against either a company that
creates the software or the users of that software. Absolutely,
And we we will talk a little bit about that
in a future episode that you'll hear probably in just
(29:34):
a couple of days, because I think we're recording get
immediately after we finished this one. Yes, we're talking about
a specific right, um, My favorite unofficial study. By the way,
is an anecdote on the effects of purchasing and and
free downloads. Was when uh Neil Gayman in his publisher,
which I believe in this case is HarperCollins, um put
(29:56):
up a copy of American Gods for free wo and
just just free ebook download. Go do it, people, And
I don't think it's up anymore. I might you might
not be able to find it. I could have just
lied to you tremendously. But they had. They had a
free copy at for a certain period of time, and
sales increased, definitely increased, like appreciably increased in the immediate
(30:19):
future after it was up. I will say that, um there,
you know, And I've told this story several times in
the past, so you know I'm comfortable telling it again.
Uh the you know, I I definitely was one of
the people who downloaded something outside the realm of the law.
Because I downloaded a television show that was made in
England that was not available in the United States. There
(30:41):
was no way for me to purchase it legally. Not
that that justifies illegal behavior. It doesn't. So I'm still
in the wrong, you know, I'm still in the wrong
for doing it, but I downloaded Space the show that
eggar right and Simon peg and and several other people did,
and uh, and I loved it, but you know, there
was no way for me to lead to get it
in the United States at that time as soon as
(31:03):
it became available as the day that it came out
on DVD and purchase it because I loved it, I
wanted to support it, and I wanted to have a
really good copy of it. Um. That's another reason that
things that like the studio backed stuff is getting more
popular because the quality tends to be better and you
don't have to worry about like malware is usually unless
(31:26):
the d r M is also malware. Sony, I'm looking
at you. Um it's been much better recently, by the way,
but you know that that CD thing still sticks in
my craw. I think even classically though that I mean,
you know, this conversation is reminding me of you know,
how used to go to NERD conventions and they would
have all of these illegal Hong Kong VHS tapes of
(31:49):
various UM did Battle Royal that way, But I bought
that as soon as it came available to and and
I think that similarly that really that kind of underground
black market VHS sort of thing. Aside from inciting nostalgia,
people of a certain age really pushed movie companies to say, oh, hey,
there's there's a reason, like there's a reason for us
(32:11):
to publish this in America or in other countries outside
of their original origin. People love this, there is a
market for it. We can you know, if we provide
it and we price it properly, we will make money.
Like that's that's the lesson that a lot of these
companies have learned. Uh. And people can argue that, you know,
these are things that various industries have had to learn
uh in a staggered amount, So like the music industry
(32:34):
learned it first, and now the book industry also because
with the books that definitely raised it. But as broadband
speeds have improved for the common users. So so it's interesting.
I mean, and again, you know, BitTorrent is just a
means of distribution. You don't necessarily have to have it
be something where you're pirrating movies and tv um um.
(32:56):
There there is a little bit of a fight back.
As of April of teen, McAfee head patented a system
that identifies pirated content and can prevent users from downloading
it by UM either blocking it entirely depending on how
you set up the software UM it's it's through side advisor,
So depending on how you set up side advisor, it
would either block the software entirely UM or block the
(33:18):
download entirely I'm sorry, or just give you a little
pop up window that says, Hey, it looks like you're
trying to use a torrent file that is torrenting illegally
copied material. Do you really want to do that? Maybe
here's some legal alternatives that you could use to download
that that on the up and up. And that wraps
up this classic episode of text Stuff how bit torrent works.
(33:41):
Hope you guys enjoyed it. If you have any suggestions
for future topics I should cover on the show, reach
out to me on Twitter or Facebook. The handle for
both of those is text Stuff hs W and I'll
talk to you again really soon. Text Stuff is an
I Heart Radio production. For more podcasts from I Heart Radio,
(34:05):
visit the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever
you listen to your favorite shows.
Welcome to Text Stuff, a production from my Heart Radio.
Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host,
Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer with I Heart Radio
and I love all things tech. And now we are
going to listen to a classic episode. This episode originally
aired on August twelve, two thousand. It is called how
(00:28):
bit torrent Works. So we actually get down to the
bottom of how torrents work and what's the big deal
about it? And why is it so controversial? And is
it at its heart illegal? All those sort of questions
are the things we ask and try to answer in
this episode. Hope you guys enjoy it. To start off,
we kind of need to talk about just how you
(00:49):
would typically get a file right, how how files are
transferred period at all? Under so the normal process by
either by by any of the protocols that you to
use over the internet, be the FTP or htt P
that's file Transfer protocol or Hypertext Transfer Protocol excellent acronyms.
(01:09):
So traditionally, your your computer, which in this scenario we
call the client, is going to contact a a host
computer a server in order to say, hey, I want
that thing exactly ye whether that thing is a web page.
So if your web browser can be a client. Yeah,
that thing could be a web page. That thing could
be a music file, it could be a movie file,
(01:30):
it could be uh an email. It all depends on content, right,
that that you want to get. Um. The server would
then send the file to your computer according to whichever
protocol you are using, right, And it's using the basic
set of rules that we all know from the Internet,
the idea of everything's in packets. Those packets travel through
different routes and then they get reassembled on your computer.
(01:52):
But yeah, it's essentially a one to one relationship, right,
I'm asking the server to send me something, the server
send something to the client. Done, done, and and you know,
and the speed with which this can happen depends on
the amount of traffic on the server, the size of
the file. Yeah. So let's let's boil this down to
an analogy. Alright, So, Lauren, you are a server, I
(02:12):
am yea. So now you have entered into the uh
the service industry. You are a server in a coffee shop. Okay,
you served terrible at that job, alright, but let's let's
imagine Lauren, that this is a reality where you're not
terrible at your job. You're actually pretty good. You can
serve up to three people simultaneously, so amazing, but only
(02:35):
three people and uh, and the amount of time it
takes you to produce the order for the customer depends
upon what they ordered, like what size of it and
how complicated is the drink. Obviously these things will factor
into how long it takes you to prepare it. But
you can still handle up to three. But then there's
a rush, right like, uh, I don't know, there's some
hipster band is in town and everyone needs their coffee,
(02:58):
so they all rushed the coffee shop at the same time.
And now you've got twenty people asking you to make
very complicated drinks, but you can only serve three at
a time, and these drinks are getting progressively more complicated
and larger. Things start to slow down, so that person
who's you know, seventeen people back feels like they're waiting
forever to get a coffee, and they're thinking, what's the
(03:19):
big deal. It should only take It's just a coffee,
You should just take two minutes. I should be in
and out in two minutes, and instead I've been sitting
here for fifteen minutes and the lines barely moved. That's
the same thing we experience with this traditional approach. If
you're talking about a single server hosting a lot of files,
a lot of clients contacting the server for the files,
and those files are big, it just means that things
(03:41):
can get bottlenecked and slow down. So there were some
different approaches to trying to figure out how to make
this uh more streamlined, and but one way is to
just increase broadband speed. Right, So essentially, if you're talking
about the Internet being a series of tubes, that's it. Bigger, bigger,
longer tubes, more tubes, bigger tubes, and more tubes. Yeah,
(04:03):
those are your two choices, right. You make them bigger
so that you can shove more stuff through the tubes,
or you make a lot more of them so that
there are a new ways for it to pass through.
But you're still kind of ball necked by the the
server itself and how quickly it can respond to requests. Sure,
so if this approach is really slow, then one alternative
(04:25):
is to distribute a file across a network so that
you have lots of different options when you need to
get that file. Right, So in this instance, instead of
saying that Lauren is the only person who can serve
coffee within a twenty mile radius. And that's why we're
all kind of uh, you know, up the creek when
we walk into the coffee shop and we see there's
(04:46):
fifteen people ahead of Instead, we have a coffee shop
on every corner and across the street from each other,
and next door to one another. Their coffee shops everywhere.
So really I just have to walk into any coffee
shop and I can stand in the middle of the
street and shout coffee and someone will bring one. Right.
So that's that's kind of the idea of the peer
to peer network. In this sense, you have some form
(05:09):
of software that allows you to connect to a distributed
network where when you participate in this network, you're essentially
giving permission to access part of your hard drive. Yeah,
you just set aside a little folder on your hard
drive that is okay for this program to access, and
then everyone else who is running the same program also
has folders set up. Hopefully they have stuff in them, right, Yeah,
(05:33):
Because one thing you could do is you can set
up this folder and then immediately move stuff out of
the folder, and then you're leaching. That's the term, right, right,
it's it's considered a faux pas and in sharing circles
just because you're you're not putting anything back out into
the community. Right. So with peer to peer, let's say
you've got this folder that's designated as a shared folder,
and when you're connected to the software, anyone who's also
(05:56):
connected the software, when they're searching for a specific file,
if your file, if you happen to have that file
within your folder, you come up as an option to
connect to download from your computer. Now, the problem with
peer to peer, even it solves one issue, right, The
one issue is that if you go with the clients
server uh model, then you are limited by the server.
(06:20):
Like if the server is the only machine out there
that has an existing version of this file, then that's
the one destination you can go to, and you are
stuck with whatever problems that might have. In peer to peer,
you're adding more tubes, but you're not making them any bigger, right,
So in other words, like I could you know, if
we're going back to our coffee shop, example, and we
have these coffee shops everywhere, I can walk to the
(06:41):
coffee shop. That's closest to me, But there's no guarantee
that coffee shop won't have the world's slowest server, or
you know, like that someone who's just they they are
very meticulous about the way they make their coffee, or
there might be two or three people in front of
me at that coffee shop and I have to wait
for them. Anyway, it gives me more options, it does
not necessarily mean it will be faster, and the really
(07:02):
good software will identify the person with the best connection
who has that file exactly. Yeah, So that way it
gives you the best chance of having a smooth transfer.
And it's also good to note that this creates more
stability when you're trying to get a file. So the
other big issue with the old clients server approach is
(07:23):
that if that server suffers a problem, if it goes
down for some reason, power outage or whatever, then you're stuck.
You know, you don't you do not get that file.
And if you were trying to download a big file
and it was maybe seventy of the way done and
the power goes out, there's a chance that file could
get corrupted in the process, and then you have to
start all over again, right, which was a real bummer.
(07:44):
When peer to pier was was really big back in
the early two thousands, like late nineties, um, because you know,
it was about that modems that could that could handle
broader band than fourteen four it's became available for consumer purchase.
And after that, you know, when when people started getting
(08:05):
connected to the ethernet was really when peer to peer happened. Yeah,
and then you you were able to you know, one
of the downsides is that traditionally, with most Internet service providers,
your upload speed is a fraction of what your download
speed is. Right. The reason for that is that ages ago,
when companies began to offer internet service, they looked at
(08:26):
the broadband that they had available, like the bandwidth they
had available to the size of the tubes. Essentially, they're saying,
all right, here's here's what we are capable of delivering
to our customers. How are we going to determine how
much is down link versus uplink? And then they said, well,
you know, probably people aren't sending stuff up to the
Internet that frequently. They're mostly trying to consume stuff pull
(08:47):
stuff down. This was before we were uploading millions of
years worth of YouTube videos every second. Yeah, this was
This was back when that was not even a consideration.
So the idea was that, well, you know, we can
just make it a fraction upload speeds will be a
fraction of download because you there's nothing as frustrating really
as sitting down. Well this is probably that's that's exaggerating,
(09:08):
but it's very frustrating to sit down and try and
get at some sort of content online and then just
see either a buffering thing or a loading screen and
it just goes on forever. If you're talking about the
old old days of the Internet, there's nothing like trying
to look at a picture of something and watch it
slowly load pixel line by pixel line, and you're just thinking,
I have no idea what I'm looking at. I won't
(09:30):
know for another forty five minutes. I would I would
like the record to state that I just used I
just gestured at Jonathan to help you guys understand what
he was talking about and exactly how ineffective that was.
That was a great visual representation on an audio podcast. Yeah,
so you know that this approach meant that we suddenly
had all these other options, this peer to peer approach,
(09:52):
and this is the way a lot of those file
sharing services back in the day worked because lime Wire, Napster,
that kind of thing. Yeah, it's all about let's find
people who have the stuff you want and connect this
create a connection directly to them. Yeah, so it almost
becomes like a direct phone line in a way, where
(10:12):
the connection is between the host computer and your computer,
so you can get the file and then of course
once you have the file, your computer can become a
potential host computer. So now an improvement on that was
bit torrents approach, right, and I think it will be
really interesting to get into the intricacies of how bit
torrent works. But before we do that, let's take a
(10:34):
quick break. Let's get back to the show. Alright, we're back,
and Lauren, you alluded to bit torrent. Now, this was
a totally different approach in the sense that it was
someone coming up with the idea of how can we
(10:55):
make these download speeds faster, not just more reliable so
that I have more options, but how can I get
the stuff I want faster, particularly if it's a really
large file, you know, and if you're if you're like
Jonathan said earlier, if your internet connection is maybe not
the best and something cuts out somewhere that you won't
lose all of the progress on downloading a file you
had already made. So this was the idea of a
(11:16):
programmer named Bram Cohen. Now, Bram Cohen had worked for
several dot com startups that never really took off, and
it just kind of failed over and over, and he
really wanted to work on something that worked. That was
a big ambition of his understandable And in two thousand
one he was also getting really irritated by these problems
we're talking about the slow download speed of large files.
(11:41):
He liked the idea of the peer to peer network,
but he didn't care for the execution. So in two
thousand one he begins work on a new protocol. Now
we've used the word protocol several times in this podcast,
just to remind you. A protocol really is just a
set of rules. It's kind of a kind of seven
instructions for a computer to follow. So he designed a
protocol that he called BitTorrent. Now, this was an attempt
(12:05):
to solve that connection problem um and the speed problem
at the same time. So you know, peer to peer
adjusted the connection. He wanted to do speed as well,
So how do you do that? Well. His approach was
to create this protocol that would allow files to be
distributed in pieces, and as you receive a piece, you
are also able to upload that piece even before your
(12:26):
file finishes downloading. So I might have a file that's
at twenty seven percent as it's slowly downloading, that twenty
seven is completely available for other people on the network
who are also trying to get that file. You could
also get pieces of these files from multiple sources, so
as long as everyone had the same file, then you
could get, you know, a piece here and a piece there.
(12:47):
So imagine that everyone has at least some part of
a five piece puzzle, and one person down the street
is giving you pieces uh one through twenty seven, and
someone on another side of the street is giving you
pieces forty three through and you're just getting You're getting
the whole puzzle, but you're getting them from different locations
(13:09):
all at the same time. It's like it's like if
everyone in that in that coffee house street has a
cup of coffee and you just kind of run down
and they all pour a little bit into your cup. Right. Yeah,
it's similar to that, except except with less like gross
spittle contamination, and also there's a pretty design at the top.
I don't know how they managed that while you're running
down the street like a crazy person, but you know
(13:30):
they're talented, that's all. So he was thinking like this
would be the way of solving this problem of slow
download speeds. Now, he did not necessarily go about testing
this in a very scientific, scientific PC way. Did you
see how he tested Okay, folks, here's how he tested it.
(13:52):
He collected a batch of freely available pornographic material and
then invited beta testers to see about getting hold of
this stuff using the bit torrent protocol. Stay classy, cohen U.
But he figured that this was kind of a sure
fire away and because it was freely available stuff, it
(14:12):
wasn't like it wasn't copyrighted. He didn't have to worry
about running into problems with torrent systems have having fact
run into lots of copyright issues. We'll talk about that
towards the end of the show. You know, that's that's
a that's a totally different discussion. But he he he
wanted to try and test it out, and apparently that
wasn't considered a terribly auspicious beginning. But he eventually did
(14:32):
launch a working version of bit torrent for the general
public in October two thousand two. Now two years later
in two thousand four, he had a five person company
working on a search engine that would work alongside his protocol.
So he designed the protocol, but one of the issues
people were running into was how do you find the
(14:53):
torrent files which are pointer files. I'll talk about them
a little bit more in a second. How do you
find these files that the facilitate the downloading process when
you're you're actually using the bit torrent software, and this
is via a tracker server. Right, So he created he
worked with this five person company, actually five person company
worked for him to create the search engine that would
(15:14):
look for these torrents to help make this process work
more smoothly. Uh. He was also then looked at by
a little company called Valve. Yeah, so Valive. Valve is thinking,
you know, we want to do a downloadable distributed network
approach for our games. We want to have this ability
to deliver games to our users that is fast and
(15:36):
reliable and doesn't put a lot of pressure training on
our own servers. Right, we don't that way, we don't
have to build out a whole data center just to
support this this model, this distribution model. So they contacted
Cohen and they hired him to work on a platform
that we now call Steam. Cohen was one of the
people who helped build that program out, and it was
(15:59):
all because he saw what he was doing with bit torrent,
and they said, that's the approach we want to take.
And in fact, Valve and Blizzard are two companies that
use bit torrent for a perfectly legitimate means of distributing
their files. It's a good time to just mention there's
nothing illegal about torrent files. No, no, it's it's just
(16:21):
a matter of distribution. It's kind of like if you
were to say, yeah, but you can get illegal material
that way. You can get illegal material through the mail,
But you wouldn't say that means we should shut down
the postal service. You might say we should shed down
the postal service for other reasons, but not for that one.
And same sort of argument you could use for bit torrent,
like to say, let's get rid of bit torrent because
some people are sharing illegal files, even lots of people
(16:45):
sharing illegal files, doesn't mean that the tool itself is wrong, right.
The technology itself can be used for lots of really
cool things like yeah, like like letting people like Valve
put games up online without having to buy giant servers,
or independent artists put their music online, right right, Yeah,
And there there are a lot of reasons there their
entire you know, whether it's software or video files, music files.
(17:08):
You know, there are a lot of reasons why you
would want to take this approach. And uh, one of
the big ones is that it, like you said, it
takes the strain off the provider. Right. So, if I'm
a small business or an artist, an independent artist, I
might not have the resources available to me to create
a dedicated server where people can come and download stuff,
(17:28):
especially if I'm having to pay lots of fees to
maintain that. And you know, I mean, you know, for example,
if you post some music to your personal website and uh,
Neil Gaiman or Will Wheaton link it on Twitter, and
all of a sudden, you're completely overwhelmed. This, by the way,
is a complete invitation for both Will Wheaton and Neil
Gaiman to tweet about our podcast. We would love that.
(17:49):
That would be gorgeous. Um. Yeah, so I wouldn't even
know what to do with myself I would probably totally
flip out. No, I would totally flip out. I wouldn't
probably there, there's no probably there. Yeah, Hey guys, it's
Jonathan again. We're gonna take another quick break and we
will be right back to talk more about bit torrent
(18:14):
in two thousand five. Already by this time, okay, the
bit torrents only three years old from when it officially launched.
Even by then, Hollywood had taken notice and was not
terribly happy. Yeah, the Motion Picture Association of America and
also the Recording Industry Association of America. That's um, the
m p A A and the R I double A. Yeah,
(18:37):
r I double A is is like, that's music. Essentially,
an m p A is film. So m P A
A UH in particular was concerned because the bit torrent
protocol did make moving large files much easier, which meant
that suddenly people were able to upload and download large
files like rips of films. They take a DVD and
(19:00):
ripped the film from the DVD and then share it
and you would get illegal copies. Or if you were
working on a digital film and you were part of
a digital film production and you had access to the file,
there were movies that leaked out. UM some famous instances
of movies that leaked out before they had even hit
the theaters, where people were getting hold of pirated copies,
(19:21):
and Hollywood was really taking him a bit torrent even
though again, as we said, bit torrents a tool, it's
not like it was specifically facilitating the illegal activity. However,
on November twenty two, two thousand five, Bram Cohen had
a joint news conference with the chairman of the m
p A A. Dan Glickman, and announced that he had
(19:42):
agreed to prevent his own bit torrent website from linking
to torrents pointing to illegally available movies. Now, before that point,
their policy was that if they were alerted to a
torrent that linked to those pointing to they would take
it down. So that was there, that was their policy
all all long. But they said, well, now we're just
going to make sure that that's much more streamlined, which
(20:04):
if you've followed these kind of these kind of cases
not just with bit torrent, but with other providers, other
platforms like YouTube for example, there are examples of takedown
notices that were improperly UM dealt with Yeah, and probably
dealt with or improperly submitted people who didn't actually have
the rights to something demanding they get taken down, and
(20:26):
then it gets taken down um, and then there then
there's some embarrassing ones. I think Microsoft just recently issued
a takedown request to itself. Yeah, so sometimes these sort
of things can end up being kind of embarrassing. But
he was saying that we want to you know, we
don't want to up so um. Today you can find
(20:51):
bit torrent on lots of different platforms. In fact, bit
torrent today allows you to do things like produce content
and then distribute it. So it's design more now to help,
like I said, those small businesses, the independent artists to
create content, and then even to to enable it so
it'll perform properly on things like smartphones, tablets, consoles, creating
(21:15):
a huge distribution network that people wouldn't have had access to,
you know, ten years ago. So there are many reasons
why it's a very useful tool. So let's talk a
little bit about how it actually does what it does now.
First of all, it's open source, which kind of tells
you that Cohen wasn't necessarily looking to create like a
(21:37):
a h multibillion dollar. This wasn't a commercial venture. No,
he wanted he really believed in this. And open source
means you can see the source code. You can go
and get the source code for the bit torrent, play
around with it. Yeah, you can change it. You can
make your own product based upon it. It's open source um.
(21:57):
And then there are sites that how torrent files. Torrent
files are not They don't have any material in them
other than pointer information that will point a your software
to the right destinations that will have the actual file
you're looking for. It's it's a little bit like that
that like a protocol that we were talking about, but
just in a in a file formata. It's and it's
(22:20):
kindlling meta data. It's it's information about the file you want,
the information mainly being where you can get it. Like
it's it's allowing the software that you have on your
computer and when when you when you run a program
to uh to to go go out and find the
little pieces of this file across the Internet, across the
swarm of computers that contain it. That's good. Yeah. So yeah,
(22:40):
your basic computer that has you know, the file, the
full file on it, you would call it a seed.
It's a seed computer. UM, and then the swarm is
all the different computers that connect to the network that
have some portion of that file and are actively downloading
and or uploading that file, that are also running this
this torrent sideway. Right, everything has to be working running
(23:03):
the software at the same time. If you stop running
the software on your computer, you disconnect from this network.
You're still on the Internet, but you're not part of
the bit torrent network anymore. So, Yeah, the torrent file
just kind of points the software in the right direction
so you can get these pieces. It gives them the
software the information it needs to identify and pull those
(23:24):
those pieces of file into your computer. Classically, this is
all organized by a central server called a tracker like
I mentioned earlier. Um, these these days that's it's it's
a little bit um has a little more complicated than that.
But yeah, your classic bit torrent has a tracker server
that kind of acts like a traffic driver, like it's
(23:45):
it's the one that's making sure everyone is going to
the right place. Um. And you're so you've got your seed,
you get your swarm. You are constantly downloading as long
as you're connected to this or downloading end upling as
long as you're connected to this, uh, this network. The
cool thing is with bit torrent that your download speeds
depend upon your participation within the network. Right. You get
(24:08):
a rank based on how many files you are allowing
the system to upload from you, and and your and
your actual upload speed as well, So those two things
factor in. So if you are being you know, if
you're altruistic and you're sharing a lot, then you can
also download faster, right because your rank goes up, and
that means that your download speed's improve and so you
(24:29):
don't have to wait eight hours to get you know,
that music file you wanted to get. It will download
in a matter of minutes maybe or or faster, depending
upon your broadband speed and the speed of course of
the various computers that are hosting pieces of that file.
But it does mean that you go much faster than
you would with your traditional peer to peer or client
server relationship kind of a protocol. You end up getting
(24:53):
the pieces of the file you need, and then once
you've got all the pieces you you're good to go.
So you don't have to depend upon on computer and
its connection to the network. You're depending upon the entire
network and anyone who has pieces of that particular file. Now,
like we said, there's nothing illegal about this. This is
just a distribution network. So if your file that you're
(25:15):
distributing doesn't have any sort of copyright to it, or
if it's licensed under something like creative comments, that gives
the person who has the file the the ability to
distribute it however they like, then there's no issue there.
That's completely legal, and in fact, that might even be
the intent of that content. You know, the person who
(25:36):
made it. Maybe I want this to be shared with
as many people as possible. That's why I uploaded it
to the bit torrent network. Uh. However, it does also
mean that it can create an environment that allows for
illegal sharing in a way that is a lot more
difficult to fight than the client server approach, right right,
(25:57):
Because it's not located in a single place. You can't
go knock on one particular person's door and say you're
holding this file. Because it's spread out over so many
people that exactly, Okay, it's a lot harder to trace back.
I can't go into Lauren's coffee shop and tell her
that she has to stop serving this one type of
coffee if everyone around her is serving that same type
of coffee. It doesn't do any good, right, right, same
(26:19):
sort of thing. Yeah, so this is although I mean,
I don't know you could. You can make some arguments
that even even the illegal portions of torrenting are beneficial
in a way because you know, first of all, it's
it's made the industry um create its own legal ways
of distributing files the faster, you know. I I think
(26:40):
that the direct streaming on like Netflix and Amazon Instant
all that kind of stuff is of direct response. I
agree to torrenting. I agree. And it also means that,
you know, encouraging the studios to find new ways to
get content to two people who who want excellent to
buy it. Let me give you my money. They're eager
to participate in this. If you make it easy enough
(27:01):
and you don't price gouge, then you're not really inspiring piracy.
There's also been several surveys of varying reliability that have
suggested that people who pirate stuff also tend to be
some of the it's right right, which, you know, people
who are torrenting are probably more likely to buy things
(27:22):
online than your average consumer anyway, because they're more computer
and internet savage to begin with. But but you know,
but the number that gets tossed around a lot is
from a study by the American Assembly, which is connected
to Columbia University. So it's more or less on the
up and up. Yeah, this is that that's a that's
a fairly reputable institution. They at least call themselves nonpartisan.
They do, they do have a little bit of a
(27:43):
liberal slant, I would say, but um, but they found
that peer to peer file shared users purchase more music
online than non peer peer us. And then of course
there's also the argument that a lot of these organizations
make the mp A A in r I double A
is that UH stolen property UH directly translates to lost revenue.
(28:07):
And we've seen multiple studies, including studies that were specifically
UH funded by the government, you know, the government agencies
that looked into this to see how much, how how
much in damage is really is caused by piracy and
the conclusion is that you cannot come up with a
number because you cannot say for certain that someone who
(28:28):
pirates something would have purchased that something had they not
had access to the piracy software. And furthermore, that they're
not going to go out and purchase it afterwards that
they weren't trying before they bought it. Right, So in
both cases, you don't know if they went out and
bought it anyway, and you don't know if they would
have bought it. So without knowing those two factors, you
can't say that this actually cost anybody anything. And and
(28:51):
you know, it's not like a physical copy of something,
where if I walk into a store and a shoplift,
that store is out a physical piece of inventory. When
you download a digital file, you're making a copy of something.
The original version of that file is still on a
person's computer somewhere else, so it's not like they have
lost that. So with all of these factors, it really
(29:12):
means it's so complicated that we cannot put an actual
dollar amount. Not that that has stopped anyone from doing
so when creating massive lawsuits against either a company that
creates the software or the users of that software. Absolutely,
And we we will talk a little bit about that
in a future episode that you'll hear probably in just
(29:34):
a couple of days, because I think we're recording get
immediately after we finished this one. Yes, we're talking about
a specific right, um, My favorite unofficial study. By the way,
is an anecdote on the effects of purchasing and and
free downloads. Was when uh Neil Gayman in his publisher,
which I believe in this case is HarperCollins, um put
(29:56):
up a copy of American Gods for free wo and
just just free ebook download. Go do it, people, And
I don't think it's up anymore. I might you might
not be able to find it. I could have just
lied to you tremendously. But they had. They had a
free copy at for a certain period of time, and
sales increased, definitely increased, like appreciably increased in the immediate
(30:19):
future after it was up. I will say that, um there,
you know, And I've told this story several times in
the past, so you know I'm comfortable telling it again.
Uh the you know, I I definitely was one of
the people who downloaded something outside the realm of the law.
Because I downloaded a television show that was made in
England that was not available in the United States. There
(30:41):
was no way for me to purchase it legally. Not
that that justifies illegal behavior. It doesn't. So I'm still
in the wrong, you know, I'm still in the wrong
for doing it, but I downloaded Space the show that
eggar right and Simon peg and and several other people did,
and uh, and I loved it, but you know, there
was no way for me to lead to get it
in the United States at that time as soon as
(31:03):
it became available as the day that it came out
on DVD and purchase it because I loved it, I
wanted to support it, and I wanted to have a
really good copy of it. Um. That's another reason that
things that like the studio backed stuff is getting more
popular because the quality tends to be better and you
don't have to worry about like malware is usually unless
(31:26):
the d r M is also malware. Sony, I'm looking
at you. Um it's been much better recently, by the way,
but you know that that CD thing still sticks in
my craw. I think even classically though that I mean,
you know, this conversation is reminding me of you know,
how used to go to NERD conventions and they would
have all of these illegal Hong Kong VHS tapes of
(31:49):
various UM did Battle Royal that way, But I bought
that as soon as it came available to and and
I think that similarly that really that kind of underground
black market VHS sort of thing. Aside from inciting nostalgia,
people of a certain age really pushed movie companies to say, oh, hey,
there's there's a reason, like there's a reason for us
(32:11):
to publish this in America or in other countries outside
of their original origin. People love this, there is a
market for it. We can you know, if we provide
it and we price it properly, we will make money.
Like that's that's the lesson that a lot of these
companies have learned. Uh. And people can argue that, you know,
these are things that various industries have had to learn
uh in a staggered amount, So like the music industry
(32:34):
learned it first, and now the book industry also because
with the books that definitely raised it. But as broadband
speeds have improved for the common users. So so it's interesting.
I mean, and again, you know, BitTorrent is just a
means of distribution. You don't necessarily have to have it
be something where you're pirrating movies and tv um um.
(32:56):
There there is a little bit of a fight back.
As of April of teen, McAfee head patented a system
that identifies pirated content and can prevent users from downloading
it by UM either blocking it entirely depending on how
you set up the software UM it's it's through side advisor,
So depending on how you set up side advisor, it
would either block the software entirely UM or block the
(33:18):
download entirely I'm sorry, or just give you a little
pop up window that says, Hey, it looks like you're
trying to use a torrent file that is torrenting illegally
copied material. Do you really want to do that? Maybe
here's some legal alternatives that you could use to download
that that on the up and up. And that wraps
up this classic episode of text Stuff how bit torrent works.
(33:41):
Hope you guys enjoyed it. If you have any suggestions
for future topics I should cover on the show, reach
out to me on Twitter or Facebook. The handle for
both of those is text Stuff hs W and I'll
talk to you again really soon. Text Stuff is an
I Heart Radio production. For more podcasts from I Heart Radio,
(34:05):
visit the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever
you listen to your favorite shows.
TechStuff News
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Oz Woloshyn
Karah Preiss
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