A Plan for Stopping Online Music & Book Piracy

Online piracy is assuming alarming proportions and will continue to do so with the popularization of internet and better bandwidth availability to customers. Online piracy affects every material that can be moved online - music, video, books and software. A viable plan for stopping online piracy will take into account the numerous p2p distribution and tracker sites along with sites hosted in foreign countries which offers direct download.

Legal Pursuit
The currently predominant method of stopping online piracy is by legal means. It had some success with high profile sites like Napster but also gained lots of infamy in suing grandmother’s and children too. There are numerous problems with the legal approach.

Pursuing legal method requires lots of resources on an ongoing basis. While bigger sites can be easily tracked and sued cost-effectively, the same cannot be said of teenagers downloading from their basement. Not only that, suing common people gives lots of bad press.
It is often hard, if not impossible, to sue sites based in a different country like Russia. Legal means alone cannot serve as an effective deterrent, otherwise there would be no crime in society. Legal methods should be grounded on technological realities for it to be effective.
For every p2p / music sharing site that is banned 10 others come up on a regular basis.

Educating about Piracy
Educating people is a long term but effective strategy. However again the cost is high and the reach is realistically bound to be limited.

Deal Fire with Fire
Often the best method to solve a problem is to adopt similar strategies as the problem itself - to deal fire with fire as they say.

One of the early approaches that got mention in Slashdot is to disguise trojans as much-wanted downloads like the Unreal Tournament game which people unknowingly download. The software then calls home and their IP addresses are publicly displayed (in a now defunct site). This is potentially illegal. The fact that the software calls home stands on shaky legal grounds.

The challenges of internet
Internet is here to stay. With the benefits of internet we also get the unlimited ability by the common people to share binary data and anything that can be encoded as such like information, books, music, video and so forth. Any scheme to address online piracy must take this into account. There are p2p protocols which makes tracking the users extremely difficult, if not impossible.

A simple solution…
Take an album as an example that you want to release but you don’t want to lose from piracy. Use combination of tons of music distortion algorithms to create thousands of barely listenable copies of the music. Add sudden loud noises and other jarring sound effects to spice it up. Then publish them on all the p2p sites as soon as pirated copies start appearing. All of them should be variations of the real name. Spice it up with names like REAL COPY - …, Original… etc. prefixes to add to the confusion. Add funny but not insulting messages in some to urge them to buy the real copy.

Create a funny viral campaign on the internet (publish on YouTube for example) to show the effects of listening to the real music versus listening the pirated music on a viewer, spread around the message on a blog, and in any ways you can.

Make it clear on your website that you have spread thousands of fake copies purposefully.

What will happen?
Your music will be very popular very soon because of the huge publicity and buzz it will generate on the internet and news media.

People downloading the copies will get hopelessly confused with all these copies floating around. So effectively you will render the p2p trackers worthless in helping people to download the pirated version. So they will still have the pirated version but it’s availability will be insignificant due to the noise you have generated.

Eventually the p2p trackers will try to isolate and remove the pirated version. They will be affected because these copies will not only pollute the accessibility of this album but also that of others by appearing in searches and top lists etc.

However the effort will be very hard because most of the content are actually heavily distorted copies of the same music. An algorithmic approach is out of question. People will further muddle the waters with titles claiming that their’s is the real real copy and so on.

They may at best remove all the copies, which is exactly what you want. However they may then replace it with a genuine pirated copy. Continued seeding will address that issue too.

Once this approach is widespread, p2p sites will be forced to restrict submissions from general public and be forced to restrict submissions from few they trust. It will thus be much easier to target these repeated offenders and throw them the book. Also restricting submissions means that the damage they can cause is limited.

Legality?
The benefit of this approach is that it is perfectly legal to create derivations of your work and to distribute them. Also you are not doing anything illegal when people decide to download them.

Imagine what would have happened is there were thousands of “original” copies of Harry Potter floating around in the net, nobody would have the patience to go through all of them to decide which is real. In fact having just one fake copy dissuaded many from trying to get it for free.

Plan for books
Essentially I am saying is if you cannot beat them then ape them. Before the release of a popular book, have writers write fake copies or better yet use simple algorithms to generate them and discuss them in newsgroups, distribute them and claim to their authenticity, anonymously; as any real pirate would do. In the end p2p will cease to be a means of sharing illegal information for general public. It will still continue to be used in closed groups, but that is something which you cannot avoid in any case.

It is long accepted that books will be shared and distributed among friends as well as CD’s. You are fine so long any Tom, Dick and Sally and her kid brother cannot download it after 1 minute search from the internet.

Any software maker taking the approach have to be more careful. I would suggest using a demo version of the real software or a binary file which simply displays a friendly message and does nothing else. It shouldn’t access or store information about the computer or its software or should never send anything over the internet for it to be safe legally. In other words, don’t do any harm. Don’t install backdoor software or affect the users system in any way. Vigilantism, while it sounds good in paper, doesn’t hold much ground legally. It is no wonder that you don’t seen too many caped crusader’s floating around; they don’t have enough to pay their legal bills.