The Pirate Bay has reached yet another milestone. Today, they track more than 20 million unique peers for the first time since the site was launched. It is estimated that the Pirate Bay tracks more than half of all BitTorrent users at any given point in time. By November 2007, The Pirate Bay was tracking around 6 million peers, up from ‘just’ 3 million the year before. The growth has been amazing, and it doesn’t seem that it is going to slow down anytime soon. One of the reasons it was possible for the site to handle this record number of peers are the constant improvements on the software and hardware side. New servers are added regularly, budget permitting, and UDP trackers were added to all the torrents on the site, which are less resource consuming than TCP trackers.
This is what’s called reality. It is generally not a good practice to ignore reality, deny reality, or otherwise pretend that what’s real doesn’t exist. Publishers (and the music industry) like to do this, however. It may be one of the major forms of mass delusion ripe today.
By blindly insisting that DRM is the solution to all pirating problems, publishers are not only doing themselves a disservice, but are also hurting their authors and insulting the non-pirating public. I am amazed by the continuing delusion in the publishing world that DRM can have any effect whatsoever.
Here’s another example of delusional thinking. Sony recently put into place a DRM protection method called BD+. Sony said it should prevent hacking for 10 years or more. Audioholics reports: “BD+ lets Blu-ray Discs install and run a piece of encryption software on the player, allowing each title to have it’s unique encryption scheme. Hacking into a protected disc only affects that single copy, it won’t cause security breaches across the board for the same title. BD+ can detect tampering to a player, refusing to play once the intrusion is discovered. Sony and the studios that support Bluray believe this technology produces a secure, yet user friendly product that only punishes hackers for copy right violations.”
Now comes the good part, where reality overtakes delusion once again: AfterDawn reports “According to a new thread in the official SlySoft forums as well as threads in the Doom9 forums, the new AnyDVD HD will break new BD+ copy protection, the same protection that Sony said would be uncrackable for at least 10 years. There is also a tool coming from Doom9 members that should remove the BD+ from new movies.”
What publishers should be doing is not ignoring reality but developing business models that can deal with it. Having spent the last 40 years in business I know that there are always opportunities that can be found even in the bleakest scenarios. As the TorrentFreak article goes on to say
At the current growth rate, The Pirate Bay may be tracking over 25 million peers by the end of the year. Peter himself is aiming for 24 million peers by Christmas eve. The Pirate Bay is not the only BitTorrent site that has been growing, other torrent sites isoHunt and Mininova are breaking visitor records every week.
Thanks to Garson O’Toole for the heads up.
Last night I use Torrent to download a set of books. I gladly would have paid for e-book versions of them, but they’re simply not available in an e version anywhere, period. And the entire set is OOP, so even in physical form the only way to purchase wouldn’t have benefited the publisher or author.
I always find it weird given how much of our lives these days are digital that there are so many books that you simply can’t buy, period, unless you can track them down through some used book dealer.
When I saw the headline, I was already nodding my head. Yep, if you want to be a publisher, you’ve got to pretty much ignore reality. Reality is that fewer people are reading. Reality is that it’s easy to pirate books (or music) and many readers seem to feel like they’re justified in doing exactly that. To be a publisher in this day and age, you’ve go to ignore reality at least a little–and work to change reality into something that is book-friendly.
I agree that DRM is a problem not a solution. This doesn’t mean that the problem DRM was intended to solve isn’t a problem.
Rob Preece
Publisher, http://www.BooksForABuck.com
Every once in a while I try to find some particular book or books in any non-DRMed electronic format. But no matter how much I search I won’t find anything else but “pirated” versions. As this continues I get better and better at finding “pirated” stuff, and if the publishers continue with their deluded nonsense I’m sooner or later going to stop even looking for those (non-existing) legal alternatives and instead put the efforts into making the currently-not-so-legal non-commercial copying legal.
This is another ‘change the business model’ opinion with no suggestions of how to change the business model.
They are a dime a dozen. It seems to be easy to lionize content distributors, but quite hard to give them actual suggestions for staying profitable in these changing times. Maybe that means they have a point?
If some business model doesn’t work when the times change, then it’s NOT the government’s job to make laws to help that old business model. Nobody has the right to earn money doing whatever he/she wants to do. It’s nice when it’s possible (e.g., I love programming and it certainly puts food on my table), but it’s most certainly not a right.