60 Minutes and the MPAA: Part I - BitTorrent

Before I start: I'm in favor of copyrights, I believe movie makers, even big mainstream Hollywood studios, have a right to make a buck and I think that sneaking out a lo-fi recording of a movie and the guy in the next row snoring, besides being illegal, is just pretty lame. That said ...

CBS's long-running news show 60 Minutes just ran a piece on video piracy. I'm calling it a "piece" and not a news story because it's essentially the Motion Picture Association of America's position on the issue re-routed through a major news show. The MPAA certainly has a right to make its case, and the case is not without merits, but passing it off as news -- particularly old-school investigative reporting -- has considerably less merit.

In my first draft of this post I tried to hit all of my objections, but the result was unwieldy and it soon became clear I had some homework of my own to do. So before digging into the real meat of the issue, let's just talk about BitTorrent.

BitTorrent is widely used for exchanging large files. Said large files include new Linux distributions, legitimately produced free video and, of course, pirated videos. In other words, like pretty much any other information technology out there, it can be used for good or ill. 60 Minutes seems mildly shocked that such a thing could be "perfectly legal."

BitTorrent, as you may know, works by avoiding the bottleneck of a central server. Instead of thousands of home computers all bombarding the central site with requests and overloading even its capacity to fulfill them, BitTorrent uses a central computer to coordinate the home computers distributing the data to each other. The 60 Minutes piece gets this wrong by suggesting that the data itself is going both to and from a central server:

Tiny "bits" moving toward a blue column in the middle of Malcolm's screen are pieces of the movie we were getting from people all around the world. The bits moving away from the column are pieces we have and are sharing with someone else.

You can sort of see where the key concepts got lost in translation, but ... huh? Pieces I'm sending out are going away from the column? Am I the column then? Each piece goes both to and from the column? What's the point of that? If you want to see what's really going on, Wikipedia has a much less whizzy but more accurate picture.

I should pause to point out here that BitTorrent's architecture is a classic example of the value of carefully considering the problem you're trying to solve. Instead of solving "How can you transmit a file quickly from one computer to another?" which basically has only one answer (high bandwidth on both ends), BitTorrent solves "How can you distribute copies of a file among a large number of computers?" Once you look at it that way, the answer of letting a given host pay back its download over time and to lots of other hosts seems fairly natural, but looking at it that way in the first place is an engineering masterstroke.

To use BitTorrent, you have to let a central tracker know what file you're retrieving. You're also committing to upload data to other BitTorrent users in return for downloading. This architecture makes BitTorrent different from other well-known ways of moving big files around:

• Unlike the central server model, BitTorrent is distributed. There is no single bottleneck for data. There is a single place for handling metadata, but metadata is much, much smaller.
• BitTorrent is much more traceable than older peer-to-peer file sharing systems (but see below).
• It's also faster, because you're effectively downloading your file from many other places instead of being constrained by one person's upload speed.

In short, you trade off anonymity for speed. This is a perfectly good trade if you're conducting legitimate business, not so good if you're not. Even if you neglect to tell The Man you're setting up a BitTorrent tracker to share files, the pattern of lots of peer-to-peer traffic coupled with frequent low-volume traffic between everybody to a central node is pretty distinctive. Once the central server is located, watching it is much easier than watching everybody. It's also much easier to tell who's involved, since they're all talking to the tracker. All in all, this seems like much less of a headache for parties like the MPAA than, say, Napster and its descendants.

However ...

BitTorrent's speed is a definite headache. A typical cable-based home connection, at least in the States, has a download speed massively higher than its upload speed. Last time I measured mine, the ratio was 40:1. This makes it reasonably easy for me to download big files from a central, easily traceable server with huge bandwidth, but a real pain for me to send a copy of that file to my friend or whoever. That's fine, but it's much less of a pain for ten thousand people to distribute copies of a file amongst each other.

More worrisome to folks like the MPAA, though, is that it is possible to run the same distribution scheme without a central tracker. As I said, metadata is small, so distributing it to everyone takes relatively little time. A particular mechanism, distributed hash tables, has been around for a while now. As with file sharing itself, distributed hash tables aren't inherently evil. In fact, they have some very generally useful properties. But a highly efficient file distribution system without a visible center presents a real problem if you see your job as preventing people from distributing files.

In summary: Copyright violation is illegal, harmful and lame. BitTorrent can be used for copyright violation or for legitimate purposes, and it's a very neat hack* in any case. Preventing illegal file sharing by purely technical means looks like a tall order. Bashing BitTorrent or any other particular product is unlikely to help.

* I suppose in this context it's particularly important to point out I mean "hack" in the sense of "cool and unexpected thing done with technology," not in the more widespread sense of "act of computer vandalism".