This month’s Wired runs a high-decibel piece by Jeff Howe, on topsites and their denizens:
When Frank … posted the Half-Life 2 code to Anathema, he tapped an international network of people dedicated to propagating stolen files as widely and quickly as possible.
It’s all a big game and, to hear Frank and others talk about “the scene,” fantastic fun. Whoever transfers the most files to the most sites in the least amount of time wins. There are elaborate rules, with prizes in the offing and reputations at stake. Topsites like Anathema are at the apex. Once a file is posted to a topsite, it starts a rapid descent through wider and wider levels of an invisible network, multiplying exponentially along the way. At each step, more and more pirates pitch in to keep the avalanche tumbling downward. Finally, thousands, perhaps millions, of copies – all the progeny of that original file – spill into the public peer-to-peer networks: Kazaa, LimeWire, Morpheus. Without this duplication and distribution structure providing content, the P2P networks would run dry.
The story paints this as a sort of organized-crime scene, akin to a drug cartel, in which a great many people conspire, via some kind of command-and-control network, to achieve the widest distribution of the product. If true, this would be good news for law enforcers – if they chopped off the organization’s head, “the P2P networks would run dry.”
But this is wrong way to interpret the facts, at least as I understand them. The topsites are exclusive clubs whose members compete for status by getting earlier, better content. The main goal is not to seed the common man’s P2P net, but to build status and share files within a small group. Smebody on the fringe of the group can grab a file and redistribute it to less exclusive club, as a way of building status within that lesser club. Then somebody on the fringe of that club can redistribute it again; and so on. And so the file diffuses outward from its source, into larger and less exclusive clubs, until eventually everybody can get it. The file is distributed not because of a coordinated conspiracy, but because of the local actions of individuals seeking status. The whole process is organized; but it’s organized like a market, not like a firm.
[It goes without saying that all of this is illegal. Please don’t mistake my description of this behavior for an endorsement of it. It’s depressing that this kind of disclaimer is still necessary, but I have learned by experience that it is.]
What puts some people at the top of this pyramid, and others at the bottom? It’s not so much that the people at the bottom are incapable of injecting content into the system; it’s just that the people at the top get their hands on content earlier. Content trickles down to the P2P nets at the bottom of the pyramid, often arriving there before the content is available by other means to ordinary members of the public. Once a song or movie is widely available, there’s no real reason for an ordinary user to rip their own copy and inject it.
The upshot is that enforcement against the top of the pyramid would have some effect, but much less than the Wired article implies. The main effect would be to delay the arrival of content in the big P2P networks, at least for a while, by blocking early leaks of content from the studios and production facilities. The files would still show up – there are just too many sources – but the copyright owners would gain a short interval of exclusivity before the content showed up on P2P. Certainly the P2P networks would not “run dry.”
Don’t get me wrong. Law enforcers should go after the people at the top of the pyramid. At least they would be making examples of the right people. But we should recognize that the rivers of P2P will continue to overflow.
UPDATE (7:25 PM): Jeff Howe, author of the Wired article, offers a response in the comments.
Leave a Reply