Digital Technology for Digital Living.
December 22, 2004
Pesce Points Something Out To The MPAA.
As an extension to Monday’s SuprNova closing report and yesterday’s eXeem review and screenshots, we now bring you a brilliant monologue by Mark Pesce, widely renowned for bringing Virtual Reality to the net, who eloquently sums up the situation. The piece also acts as a great primer for those that aren’t completely across this what the whole BitTorrent craze is really about, but most of all, it’s a great open letter to the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), and any other organisation that decides they need to take on a global community.
Pointing up the single greatest weakness of BitTorrent take down the tracker and the torrent dies – has only served to energize, inspire and mobilize the resources of an entire global ecology of software developers, network engineers and hackers-at-large who want nothing so much, at this moment, as to make the MPAA pay for their insolence. Imagine a parent reaching into a child’s room and ripping a TV set out of the wall while the child is watching it. That child would feel anger and begin plotting his revenge. And that scene has been multiplied at least hundred thousand times today, all around the world. It is quite likely that, as I type these words, somewhere in the world a roomful of college CS students, fueled by coke and pizza and righteous indignation, are banging out some code which will fix the inherent weakness of BitTorrent – removing the need for a single tracker. If they’re smart enough, they’ll work out a system of dynamic trackers, which could quickly pass control back and forth among a cloud of peers, so that no one peer holds the hot potato long enough to be noticed. They’ll take the best of Gnutella and cross-breed it with the best of BitTorrent. And that will be the MPAA’s worst nightmare.
Hey, Hollywood! Can you feel the future slipping through your fingers? Do you understand how badly you’ve screwed up? You took a perfectly serviceable situation – a nice, centralized system for the distribution of media, and, through your own greed and shortsightedness, are giving birth to a system of digital distribution that you’ll never, ever be able to defeat. In your avarice and arrogance you ignored the obvious: you should have cut a deal with SuprNova.org. In partnership you could have found a way to manage the disruptive change that’s already well underway. Instead, you have repeated the mistakes made by the recording industry, chapter and verse. And thus you have spelled your own doom.
It’s said that the best sequels are just like the original, only bigger and louder. Ladies and gentlemen, prepare yourselves for one hell of a crash. This baby is now fully out of control.
Read the whole Mark Pesce on BitTorrent piece at Susan Mernit’s Blog.
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