Blog, Web/Tech - Sunday July 13, 2008 - 11 Comments
Clouds and Pirates: Darknets Rising
Kung Fu Panda is doing a great job for Paramount this summer. As of today, the movie has grossed $196,680,294. It is still playing on 3,347 screens nationwide and after five weeks in release it is still number five behind Get Smart, Wanted, Wall-E and Hancock. So imagine how surprised I was to receive an email from a casual acquaintance yesterday offering me a link to an HD copy of the film.
Kung Fu Panda won’t be released on home video for months, so not only was this guaranteed to be an illegal copy, it was guaranteed to be either a bad video bootleg made with someone’s HD camcorder in the theater, or a very good copy of a stolen file - the file was pristine.
Now, this is not an unusual type of email to receive and it is not a new phenomenon. There are literally hundreds of P2P (peer-to-peer) networks out there with copies of every movie ever made for the taking. What gave me pause was that this particular file was not on a P2P network, it was on sitting on a private, subscription-based storage cloud.
Other than the legal issues, there is really no risk to downloading this file. Nobody knows what I’m downloading. A few years ago, you would call this type of private network a “darknet.” But that’s not exactly what this is. This is more like the type of service-layer, Internet-based, storage cloud you’d use to back up your hard drive, send large business files or move large disk images around on. And, because it is private and from a trusted source, the file won’t be a spoof or infect my computer with a virus. All the stuff that keeps me out of the P2P networks doesn’t apply here. Yikes!
This may seem like a subtle change from a legal point of view. It probably is. But, from my perspective, the ramifications are paradigm shifting. Think about this - you have a bunch of pretty big movie and TV show files on your hard drive that you bought from iTunes or ripped from DVD. You really need the local hard disk space back so subscribe to a service like RapidShare or MegaUpload. You back up the files to the cloud. So far, so good.
A week or so later, you’re online chatting with friends and someone says something about some episode of a show or movie you have stored. Being the very friendly type of person you are, you send them a link to the file. After all, it’s not that different from lending them a physical CD or DVD, right?
At the end of the day, P2P networks and strange or alien files are not going to cause any more economic hardship for the content industry than they are causing right now. However, good natured, good citizens using private storage clouds are going to be hugely hurtful. And, if good citizens can cause irreparable harm by paving the road to hell, imagine what bad natured, bad citizens will be able to accomplish with the same technology. Trust me, the computer network does not know the nature of its users.
Just for fun, I sojourned to a few storage cloud sites and got an up-close, personal view of the issue. Here’s some hands-on knowledge:
YouSendIt is a seemingly harmless service that now offers an Outlook plug-in that will automatically use a storage cloud to send oversized files. The free service is file-size limited, you can pay for big uploads if you need to. YouSendIt says that businesses will like their service because of the value-add of trackability. They might. People will like it because the business is paying for it and they can send monster files everywhere through Outlook.
Sure private “light-nets” enable businesses to move large files easily, but the darknet side is a safe haven for pirates and file sharers of all sorts.
A simple Google search for “Coldplay sendspace” will round up numerous results for full album .zips of their latest and back catalog.
With sites like RapidShare and Mediafire, file sharers don’t need P2P networks or bittorrent networks or bandwidth. All that is needed to upload and share a file is a standard compression tool (stuffit, winzip) and Internet access. Once uploaded, the file is searchable from all over the Internet and can be shared with anyone. Or, you can simply make it available to your private darknet.
Some sites have delay periods for non-members, but waiting 90 seconds won’t deter anyone who is trying to get access to a specific file. Also, sites like SendSpace and RapidShare only allow a certain number of downloads per file (100 for YouSendIt), while others, like ZShare and Mediafire, keep a file active as long as it has been downloaded in the past six months. Many sites offer premium membership packages, but they aren’t really necessary, unless you’re sharing a lot of GB’s. For Free, any one can download applications, albums, and movies — it’s as simple as highlighting a file on your screen.
If you’re interested in seeing all of this for yourself, here’s a short list of sites to visit. Oh, and don’t forget to visit Yahoo Groups and Google Groups. Pretty much anywhere that tech companies offer free storage, you’ll find a bunch of people sharing files.
Drop.io (drop.io)
MailBigFile (mailbigfile.com)
MediaFire (mediafire.com)
MegaUpload (megaupload.com)
Pando (pando.com)
RapidShare (rapidshare.com)
SendSpace (sendspace.com)
YouSendIt (yousendit.com)
ZShare (zshare.com)
There are many, many more. Some of these companies were funded by selling their investors on the idea that this type of file transfer could be ad-supported. It is not a sustainable model. According to Yaron Samid, the founder of Pando, the bandwidth and storage costs add up too quickly and the sites must restrict file sizes or charge for their services.
Everyone I know is starting to use cloud storage for backups as well as the normal doing of business. In a very short period of time, this technology is going to become so easy-to-use and commonplace that the law of unintended consequences may innocently take the movie business to the place where the music business has gone to die.
I’ve looked at clouds from both sides now. Want your mind blown, check out Apple’s mobile me http://www.apple.com/mobileme/ which launches today. Then you’ll realize, you really don’t know clouds at all.
Comments
11 Responses to “Clouds and Pirates: Darknets Rising”Gary Schultz July 14th, 2008 10:49 am
Shelly, Enjoyed your article on Darknets. I’m wondering if you’ve
checked with the DRM companies who also offer forensics software
(watermarking, fingerprinting, etc) such as Secure Media,
Verimatrix, Widevine, NDS and others. It’d be interesting to hear
their take on this issue. At MRG, we’ve long been emphasizing that
the Long-form (high budget) video content owners (eg, studios)
can’t allow their content to be categorized with the Short-form
(relatively low budget) music. Because people only watch movies 1-3
times, movie studios need to find better ways to protect their
content than the music business did. Ergo, there will always be a
cat and mouse game between the studios and the pirates. GS
Dave Villano July 14th, 2008 12:53 pm
Take a look at this and then let’s talk. Cliff
Wardy July 14th, 2008 12:55 pm
It is like any other form of application. It can be used for good
or bad intentions based on the user. I personally use File Chute on
my Mac, that copies files to my mobile me account and provides a
link for me to send video’s (that I created) to family members
without having to over compress them, and still being able to send
via email. P2P or Bit torrent, fall into the same category. If
someone uses them with bad intentions, it looks bad on all of us
legitimate users.
Abhay Kumar July 14th, 2008 1:01 pm
Especially considering the lack of reliability for some of these
systems, why not leverage something that is awesome been around for
ages (usenet) and create your own “darknet” on what is already
considered one. 1. encrypt your data and, optionally, compress it
2. split it up into yenc chunks 3. distribute to a usenet server 4.
let the usenet network distribute your files across to thousands of
servers. I’ve been thinking of getting this working rather than
using amazon s3 for backing up my files.
Abhay Kumar July 14th, 2008 1:08 pm
Then again, the real problem with my idea is that after some
non-infinite period of time, any level of reasonable encryption can
be cracked. Maybe after 1000 years (if the data is still out
there), someone can sue my great-(x30)-grandchildren for content
I’m backing up.
Avi Blau July 14th, 2008 4:02 pm
From a simple bandwidth calculation you can see that P2P file
sharing cannot be compared to these centrally managed storage
clouds. Take RapidShare for example. They claim they have 240
Gbit/Sec bandwidth. Maybe one of the biggest on the Internet. But
even this big amount of bandwidth cannot support much users.
Assuming most users uses DSL, cable modems or even faster
communication lines, RapidShare can support no more than several
tens of thousands of users. In comparison, there are around 10
million P2P users in any given moment (without BitTorrent).
BitTorrent adds some more millions. Operating RapidShare cost
millions of dollars each month. Operating P2P network cost almost
nothing. There are also scalability advantages to P2P networks. As
for now, central storage sites (storage clouds) are negligible
phenomenon in comparison to P2P networks. It will most probably
stay so, because of the above mentioned reasons. A much more
promising idea is a legal P2P file sharing system. Such system can
solve most of the problems you mentioned and enjoy most of the free
P2P systems benefits.
Gerd Leonhard July 15th, 2008 1:27 am
Shelly, thanks for the alert on this story, via Facebook. This is a
indeed a very interesting development that once more proves that
scarcity is toast, and that the content industry can no longer rely
on the ’selling copies’ model. I have written about this topic here
(a blog that offers some previews of my new book, The End of
Control): http://www.endofcontrol.com/2007/10/chapter-1-atten.html
“Attention is the New Currency”. However, as mentioned above, p2p
is the pretty much the only way to ship very large files around the
net, so let’s look for a p2p dropbox / sendit service soon (skype
certainly seems perfect… taking it back to its roots which
was…. Kazaa;)
Phil Lelyveld July 15th, 2008 12:44 pm
Shelly, The idea of closed (invitation only) social networks for
file sharing was discussed years ago as the next logical technique
for file sharing as enforcement of antipiracy within P2P ramped up.
Tools like YouSendIt were approved for internal use at some of the
major studios last year. This is way the future of entertainment as
a business will involve, in part, building value around the linear
content so simply sharing the linear content is only a partial
experience. Shameless plug - read my blog on this -
http://reelword.com/2008/01/17/linear-content-as-platform-reposted/
Simon Hudson July 17th, 2008 9:58 am
Microsoft are also trying to get into this space. which means it’ll
be deeply integrated… http://www.mesh.com/
Brian Hayashi July 23rd, 2008 12:32 pm
I think you’re right about MobileMe’s significance. I think Apple
has launched MobileMe now in order to pave the way for a new
supercheap netbook that will cost less than $500 come September.
This $499 netbook will be the razor, iTunes-delivered apps will be
the razorblades, and MobileMe will be the glue that makes the whole
ecosystem work together. I’ve played with lots of the
darknets…I’ve seen business plans that sold access through gift
cards; included free premiums like feature length movies; and used
cellphone for authentication. Sure, Microsoft is getting into this
space in a big way via Live (or more specifically,
http://m.live.com). But none of them have put together a viable
ecosystem where hardware and apps and media can all make money
together like Apple.
http://connectme.typepad.com/news/2008/07/inside-the-ipad.html
Shamsul Erzwan November 8th, 2008 8:46 am
great sharing. i’ll subscribe to your site. thanks.