Media

Veterans of my writing will remember my post made in July of last year “To obtain media, or not to obtain media, that is the question!” Some of you may even remember that I did not go into very much detail on the topic besides theoretical procedures, leaving the specifics for you to figure out. However, a year later, I’ve decided that the topic is most definitely worth revisiting, and this time in much greater detail.

Media, how it was acquired, and the iTunes revolution.

To retain brevity in a topic that spanned numerous paragraphs in past revisions of this article, trust me when I say that Apple revolutionized the music industry with the release of the iTunes Store. Up until the release of the iTunes Store, music had been bought primarily on a record, a cassette, or a CD depending on when you were buying music. During the era of the record, piracy was virtually nonexistent. In fact, until the 1960’s it was physically impossible to make a copy of a record, and even after blank records become available for purchase by consumers it was still a cumbersome process at best.

When cassettes became the new median for music, piracy was somewhat easier although still very uncommon. Due to the methods employed in the process of making a pirated cassette, some quality was lost with each copy, and therefor was undesirable and not very popular.

Then came CDs. Up until 1990 computers did not come with a drive capable of writing to a CD, so the creation of pirated CDs was nonexistent up until that time. However, after 1990 when drives capable of writing files to CDs came standard in personal computers it became possible to create pirated disks and distribute them.

Taking a look back on the evolution of media mediums it is tempting to think that piracy did not begin until the 1990s when drives capable of writing to CDs became common in personal computers. However, that is not the case. Up to that point it was very popular to see online message boards dedicated to the exchange of music for free between users, so even before there was the physical capability to pirate music it was still going on. Before going on though, I would like to share an excerpt from one of my favorite podcasts, Hypercritical, on the iTunes revolution:

Dan Benjamin: Now why do you think it was that [Apple] walked in and really did solve the music problem? and they did it so quickly and so effectively-why was it so much easier there? and we know that the people in the record industry are not pushovers, you know what I’m saying?

John Siracusa: iTunes was Pearl harbor, caught ‘em by surprise-came out of nowhere on Sunday morning, bombed their whole business, right? And then just decimated decimated them. And then the had many things going for them: the fact that there was a big-five record labels that sort of controlled everything instead of eight million different cable companies-

Right.

Right, and the fact that already negotiating from a position of power. It’s like ‘Look, your business is already destroyed, you need us to bring you back.’ Right? The fact that music was more easily within the realm of technology abilities, although I’m kinda disappointed that the iTunes revolution made the quality of music go down, reversing a very long trend of the quality of music going up- I’m talking about bitriate and everything like that… But still, for the mass market technology reached the point where we had no problem whatsoever giving you music that was good enough for all consumers. … So we’re just on the cusp, but music was well within those bounds. And really, they just scored a surprise attack victory and everything went right, and they caught everyone unaware: caught the content providers unaware, caught all of the other companies unaware-Apple just got out the gate and did their thing and said ‘Yay, we are victorious.’

Hypercritial episode 01: 50:59-52:20

While methods for pirating music were available whether through the use of CDs or online message boards, it was still a very cumbersome process. Making copies of and then distributing your favorite songs on CDs was implausible at best, and the use of online message boards, while enabling some piracy, was on such a small scale that it is hardly worth mentioning and was mainly restricted to those who had the time and expertise to access that resource. Additionally, even for those with the capabilities to acquire music through online message boards it was hardly worth the effort, as the selection offered was so minimal and the infrastructure supporting it feeble at best. Taking all this into account, it is clear that something new was needed; something that would allow music to be transferred from one computer to another easily and quickly over the internet with little technical expertise required. That ‘something’ was Limewire.

Limewire, P2P, and torrents.

Limewire, a subsidiary of Lime Group, was first released in 2000. However, this article will focus on its progression after 2004 when version 4.2 was released. With version 4.2 came something called firewall-to-firewall file transfers, something that Limewire was the first to accomplish. Basically, that means that Limewire enabled users to share files from their home computers without needing to upload those files to a server on the internet. This sort of sharing is called P2P file sharing, or Peer 2 Peer file sharing.

Peer 2 Peer file sharing enabled users to connect to each other’s computer through the medium of the P2P program. This eliminated “the middle man” (the server) from the equation. Now, instead of uploading a file to a server and then distributing a link to anyone you wanted to share the file to, it was possible to connect directly to the computer that held the file and download that file. There are numerous advantages to this approach, but I will refrain from mentioning them until later on in the post as many of the advantages are synonymous with those of torrents.

As I’m sure you can imagine, the growing popularity of Limewire became a problem to the label companies due to the increase in piracy, and, after a four year lawsuit, Limewire was finally forced to stop distributing its software in October of 2010. The end of Limewire? No, not quite. Less than a month after Limewire was forced to stop distributing its software a secret developer team resurrected Limewire and began distributing the new, modded version of Limewire on popular torrent sites such as The Pirate Bay. The new version of Limewire released by the group of developers has many improvements over the previous versions created by the actual Limewire company including the unbundling of the Ask Toolbar, all dependencies on servers controlled by the Limewire corporation removed, and all the features that were previously offered in Limewire Pro (the version that you could upgrade to from the free version) are offered for free. The new version, titled Limewire Pirated Edition (referred to as LPE commonly) is available through a simple Google search for said software and a quick torrent download. (Yes, some of you may notice the irony here: The program that was prohibited from being distributed because it enabled the piracy of music was re-released as a “pirated” version and is now circulating throughout the internet through this manner.) Wait, torrent download? What? What’s a torrent download? Let’s look into this topic, but before going in to an explanation of torrents you must have the knowledge of how files are downloaded normally in order to compare the two.

Without going into too much detail on this topic I will give a brief overview on how downloading files works. Every time you click a link your computer makes a connection to a server at a remote location. Your computer downloads parts of the webpage along with any other files that are required for the website to run. The time it takes for the necessary elements to be downloaded to your computer will depend on your internet connection speed. For example, it takes a matter of milliseconds to download the code to display a webpage and have it printed to your browser window because the file consists merely of text. Conversely, when downloading (some) images, music files, or videos, the download takes a lot longer because there is a lot more information in the file. A host of other factors also influence the speed at which your request happens such as the number of other people connecting to the same server, and the number of people requesting the same file-to name just two.

Now what about torrent downloads? Torrents are a type of file that acts as a sort of descriptor that tells the torrent program what to look for to download. The torrent programs searches through something called the “swarm”, which is all the connected computers available to the torrent program. Once the program finds files that are available to download, it begins downloading pieces of the file(s) from as many sources as possible with your current connection speed. That is how torrents work in a nutshell.

So since torrents make downloading a file quicker by connecting multiple times to different places at which the file is stored, there is a clear advantage to this sort of process for downloading files. Any other advantages? Oh yes, many.

• In order to download a torrent, you only need the .torrent “descriptor” file. Once you have the .torrent file, downloading all the files in that specific torrent becomes easy and quick. And since the torrent files are extremely small, uploading a .torrent file and distributing large files in this manner is very easy. For example, a torrent file for a 25GB torrent including around 165 short videos is about 202KB.
• Going back to the example in the last point: If I wanted to distribute 25GB of video files to a hundred people using the normal downloading process, I would need to store that entire 25GB of data somewhere on the internet. Sure, if I wanted to pay an exorbitant amount I could probably manager this, but since I’m cheap I would like to avoid this “solution”.  To solve this problem using torrents, disregarding the fact that I would need to have my computer on 24/7 or have the files stored in a place that could be accessed by the torrent whenever a request was made, an easy solution would be to upload the 200KB .torrent file and distribute it. Solving the problem in this way would allow for me to distribute the file much more easily, as well as reduce the amount of time taken to download the files I wanted to share as more and more people acquired the files and were connected in the “swarm”.
• Restrictions. Many places that allow you to upload files will place some sort of restriction on what kind of files you are allowed to upload, how often you can upload files, and what size. Torrents have no such restrictions.

Faced with this reasoning, it is easy to see that torrents are a great solution to the problem of sharing numerous files, large files, and sharing those files quickly.

So why torrents over P2P file sharing programs such as Limewire? Well, there really isn’t one. P2P programs are really just BitTtorrent programs that, generally, specialize in certain kinds of files. For example, Limewire specializes in music sharing, whereas Vuze, a bittorrent client, specializes in video files. However, both Limewire and Vuze can handle any sort of torrent file. The specialization comes in when searching for certain files. Limewire searches computers for files that are set to be shared with anyone searching for it through the, in this example, Limewire program.

Vuze, however, searches the internet for torrent files that match the description of your query. A definite advantage of this method versus that of the approach taken by Limewire is that this way torrent files can be hosted anywhere and will be indexed by search engines such as Google, thus making the files available more quickly than they might be when indexed by Limewire. This is all theoretical though, so the affect could be quite the opposite, I am just basing this off what I believe to be true and my personal experiences.

Downloading and using torrents

I mentioned a program called Vuze earlier when discussing torrents. I also explained how Limewire could handle torrents. However, at least before the developer team came out with LPE, Limewire was limited to a maximum of 3 active torrents at any given moment, whereas Vuze has no limit. Due to this fact, and the fact that Vuze is especially optimized to handle videos, I will be talking mainly about Vuze from now on.

Before downloading torrents you will need a program to handle downloading the torrent files. The program I am going to recommend is Vuze, which you can download by going to the main Vuze website and navigating to the download page. Once the download is finished, open the executable file and install Vuze. When the installation is finished, open Vuze and come back here.

Alright, you should now have the Vuze program open and running on your computer. Let’s look for some torrents! In the ensuing paragraphs I will focus mainly on downloading movies and videos, but the knowledge can be applied to any sort of file you choose to look for.

• Go to Google.com. In the upper, left-hand corner of the Vuze window there is a text-box in which you can enter your query, but I will suggest going to Google and searching for torrent files rather than use the built-in service in Vuze because Google is faster and allows for more customization to be applied to your search.
• Let’s look for the movie “Speed Racer”. In the Google query box, type in the following query:
  Speed Racer filetype:torrent
  Before searching, let’s take a look at the query. The search criteria is relatively simple, so this will be quick. The first part of the search deals with the name of the file we are searching for-in this case, Speed Racer. The second part, filetype:torrent, deals with the type of file we would like to have Google return in the search results.
  As a side note, had I wanted to look for Speed Racer with, say, Spanish subtitles, I may have appended the following to the query after the name of the movie:
  +spanish
  For those of you who do not know what this does, it means to search for results that match __ (in this case, Speed Racer) AND include “spanish” somewhere.
• As you begin to become more and more experienced in downloading torrents you will gain the ability to sift through the torrent websites available depending on the reliability of the content provided from said site, as well as download speed and various other factors. For now, this is as far as I will go with this example because this post is not intended to encourage the piracy of media, but rather to educate those interested in the topic.

 

So we’ve covered a lot of ground here, here’s a summary of what we’ve gone over:

• The iTunes revolution and how it effected piracy in general
• A brief history of piracy
• Limewire and P2P programs
• Torrents and Bittorrent programs
• Downloading and installing Vuze
• Finding torrents using Google

 

 

Sources:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2010/oct/27/limewire-shut-down
http://www.pcworld.com/article/208895/limewire_shut_down_permanently.html
http://www.pcworld.com/article/210092/limewire_is_quietly_resurrected_its_baaack.html
http://musicbizadvice.com/tag/a-little-history-on-music-piracy/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LimeWire
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LimeWire#Version_history
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ITunes
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ITunes_Store
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compact_Disc
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compact_Disc#History
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_infringement
http://netforbeginners.about.com/od/peersharing/a/torrenthandbook_2.htm
http://computer.howstuffworks.com/bittorrent2.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BitTorrent_(protocol)