It's raining torrents!

Kick Start
This year seems to have kicked off with a bang on all things copyright related. First we had amazon.co.uk launching their DRM-free MP3 download service and hot on their heels came Apple's long-overdue decision to remove the copy protection from their catalogue too (all sing with me "I see a little silhouette of a price war...").

The British Government published their Digital Britain report which included recommendations for ISPs to take a more active part in halting illegal file sharing.

Then came the news that New Zealand seems to be ignoring civil-rights and going for an approach on copyright infringement that can best be summed up as "I think he's guilty so he must be" which flies in the face of western judicial practice.

Now there's the latest update in another long-running saga; Sweden vs The Pirate Bay, one of the largest indexes of torrents currently available.

The Technology
In case you aren't familiar with torrents they are the latest incarnation of Peer-to-peer filesharing (P2P) which works by having users all over the world sharing content with each other via programs like Napster, Kazaa and Limewire. BitTorrent emerged in 2001 and takes the technology to a new level where a torrent file is created which contains information about the location of multiple (could be thousands) of seeds or users which are sharing that file. Once a user downloads a file they can then become a new seed which allows the numbers of available downloads to grow exponentially. Torrent data is estimated by some to make up to 35% of all internet traffic.

The Pirate Bay
So that's BitTorrent explained but to explain why there's all the fuss about it you need to look at what's being shared and while it can be used to download the latest Linux distribution it's more commonly used to share copyright music, video and software... which the entertainment and computing industrial giants would rather didn't happen.

The Pirate Bay, created in 2003 and hosted in Sweden, is probably the world's largest tracker of these torrent files and you can tell from it's name which side of the fence they sit on when it comes to copyright. Over the last few years it's been raided by police, been on the defending and prosecuting sides of a number of lawsuits and even attempted to buy Sealand, the micronation located about 6 miles off the Sussex coast, to use to host their servers.

Half time scores - The Pirate Bay 1, Sweden 0
Now the site's founders and admins Carl Lundström, Peter Sunde, Frederik Neij and Gottfrid Svartholm Warg are in court in Sweden accused of copyright infringement however it has quickly become apparent that the prosecuting lawyers don't actually understand the technology they are trying to shut down, presumably only driven by their share in the multimillion pound potential damages being claimed.

The key to their defence is that the site is a tracker or index of the torrents themselves and that even the torrents are only lists of users sharing a particular file. They don't make copies themselves or host it so while you've probably got views on their moral standpoint it's a lot harder to actually go after them legally.
If you take the prosecution to it's natural extension then you need to sue search engines like Google for listing sites that host or link to copyright material (actually that's an even better case to prosecute since Google actually maintains a copy of every site it indexes). Hey, let's sue the ISPs for giving us access to the whole damn shooting match in the first place.

These suggestions have been flying around on tech sites like The Register but it's crossed into mainstream reporting with Charles Arthur writing in the Guardian with a discussion on who would actually benefit from the demise of The Pirate Bay.

So an entire day and a half into the big copyright test case the prosecutors have been left with egg on their faces as charges are amended to remove "complicity in the production of copyrighted material" and replace it with "complicity to make (copyrighted material) available" which isn't quite the same thing.

What next?
General opinion on the blogosphere is that The Pirate Bay are going to go on to win the rest of the case but even if they don't the final charge will be much less dramatic than the claimants hoped for. Regardless of what happens to this particular site the torrents are still out there and there's plenty of other trackers around so will it even make a difference? In a similar arena, Kazaa and Limewire still allow easy P2P sharing years after the high-profile cases against Napster.

There are suggestions that users who download illegal copies are actually more likely to go on to spend on the legal versions, Charles Arthur's belief is that they will revert to more casual networks of friends sharing these materials but my view is that the internet is a big bad place and shutting down a single index might slow things down for a while but it's not going to stop it

For the moment we wait to see what's coming next in the Swedish case.

Amazon MP3

After my post on the removal of DRM copy restrictions from Apple's iTunes store I realised that I'd not really mentioned the launch of Amazon's MP3 service except in passing but now that I've had a chance to use the new site I can write in a little more detail.

Amazon seem to be favouring a soft launch approach to their new categories with sections like Health & Beauty just appearing in the navigation bar without any fanfare however the launch of a new MP3 download service that competes with established rivals Napster and iTunes surely deserved a bigger announcement.

Back in January 2008 there were promises from Amazon that a UK version of the US beta trial was coming soon and they just managed to get launched before Christmas accompanied by promotions offering chart topping albums like Kings of Leon for £3 (sadly this price has now gone back up to £6.45)

The lack of user awareness has presumably come from the fact that there is a limited number of tracks available at the moment and once the library is a little larger I'd be surprised if they didn't start shouting about it more.

Given that the big selling point of Amazon MP3 was that they are DRM free and will play on any device it's not surprising that iTunes have chosen now to announce they have change their system to follow suit, scared perhaps of users moving to the new competitor in large numbers.

Amazon have sensibly setup their site so that downloading a song or album is no different to browsing and purchasing any other product which will hopefully appeal to users who don't want to use the iTunes interface or are already familiar with buying from Amazon. While you can just click and download tracks they have also offered a nice little download manager which keeps track of multiple purchases and automatically updates your iTunes and Media Player libraries. The other, more important point is that they seem to have priced themselves slightly below iTunes with a 79p track from Apple costing just 69p on Amazon - now that they've equalised the market on DRM could this be the start of a price war? In the current economic climate this can only be a welcome thing for users of the two sites.

iTunes goes DRM free

It's official, iTunes is going DRM free in a long anticipated move which will bring it in line with the other major music download sites.

Rumours
It's been rumoured for some time that Apple was changing the way it approaches Digital Rights Management (DRM) within it's iTunes store with users noticing that the "iTunes Plus" part of the store, which traditionally gave access to higher quality unprotected music, had vanished and the DRM restrictions on certain artists seeming to come and go, a fact picked up by Wired last month.

History
Digital Rights Management is the copy restriction process that distributors like Apple and the big labels use to ensure that the music you pay for and download doesn't get spread over the internet or shared between friends however the other major online sites like Amazon and Napster have all opted for DRM-free music which allows your downloads to be used on whatever device you choose. Currently an iTunes download can only be used on an iPod/iPhone, tying you to the brand.

Even on iTunes the story isn't clear cut since EMI opted to remove the DRM from it's catalogue some time ago so what we're really talking about here is whether Sony, Universal and Warner will follow suit.

The DRM restrictions in iTunes are one of the biggest problems users have with the service and when I first got an iPod about 5 years ago I steered clear of using iTunes since I didn't want to be forced into using the Apple programme for my music management on the computer, preferring WinAmp at the time, and also had a fear of wanting to use a different MP3 player in the future and losing my entire collection since they were all coded to work on my iPod. The old iPod finally died a couple of weeks ago which was a pretty good lifespan compared to those models which seemed to break the second you put it into your pocket - cue the purchase of a shiny new iPhone.

Despite my concerns, you can understand why DRM was introduced back in the heady days at the start of the century when music labels really woke up to the fact that people wanted to be able to download, transport and listen to their music without the cumbersome physicality of a CD. Even though people have been taping records and burning CDs for decades the idea of effortlessly passing digital music around really scared the labels so they loved Apple's implementation of DRM.

The real problem (at least for Apple) was that people exist who don't use iPods and that there are other music download services other than iTunes so there's a lot of people out there who aren't limited by DRM. All the big labels offer DRM-free music on these other sites, even if they are restricted on iTunes so it's pretty confusing why it's taken this long for Apple to down this route especially when it opens the iTunes service to every MP3 user out there. Steve Jobs went into this subject in some detail back in 2007 and came out supporting the removal of DRM.

The Future
So what's changed?
A couple of weeks ago during the MacWorld keynote speech Apple announced that they were finally removing DRM from their library. So far around eight million tracks have been altered with the expectation that all tracks will be free from protection by Easter. At the same time they have upgraded the quality of the music available on the site to match what was previously available on iTunes Plus. You can see more details from Apple themselves at the iTunes website

The changes will only be applicable when you download the music for the first time so your existing collection won't magically upgrade it's quality or remove it's copy protection - Apple are offering this for a hefty 20p per track for each one you want to release from the chains of DRM.