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BitTorrent was created in 2001 by Bram Cohen, an American computer programmer who was frustrated by the long download times that he experienced using applications such as FTP. Files shared with BitTorrent are divided into smaller pieces for distribution among the protocol’s users, called “peers.”. A peer who wishes to download a file is ...
Mar 27, 2024 · The Pirate Bay, file-sharing Web site founded in 2003 by the Swedish anti- copyright group Piratbyrån (“Bureau of Piracy”). The Pirate Bay is the most popular site in the world to use the BitTorrent protocol that allows the distribution of very large files such as those containing movies and electronic games.
- What is the Pirate Bay?The Pirate Bay is a file-sharing Web site founded in 2003 by the Swedish anti-copyright group Piratbyrån (“Bureau of Piracy”). It is the most popul...
- Why is the Pirate Bay controversial?The Pirate Bay has been presented with legal notices of copyright infringement, accompanied by demands to remove materials, and the site’s operator...
- Has the Pirate Bay been shut down?The Pirate Bay has been shut down several times, and the site’s founding operators—Fredrik Neij, Gottfrid Svartholm Warg, and Peter Sunde—and busin...
- What kinds of files can one find on the Pirate Bay?The Pirate Bay does not host any files itself, but it is home to indices with links to many different types of shared files, such as books, movies,...
- Overview
- From hackers to pirates
- MP3 and P2P networks
- Film and DRM
piracy, act of illegally reproducing or disseminating copyrighted material, such as computer programs, books, music, and films. Although any form of copyright infringement can and has been referred to as piracy, this article focuses on using computers to make digital copies of works for distribution over the Internet.
Before personal computers (PCs) and the digital age, most individuals did not have the capability to copy works in order to print books, press vinyl records, or burn film—nor did they have the ability to distribute copies beyond their immediate circle of family and friends. As a practical matter, copyright law and its enforcement was historically concerned with preventing those with publishing equipment, such as a printing press, from unlicensed reproduction and distribution of copyrighted material for profit.
A certain acceptance or disregard of software piracy, or “code sharing,” had been fostered among “hackers,” or early computer programmers, in the academic computer science laboratories of the 1950s and ’60s. Apple Computers (now Apple Inc.) famously even flew a Jolly Roger flag (a flag with the traditional pirate emblem of a skull and crossbones) on its corporate campus for more than a year starting in 1983. Similarly, Bill Gates, cofounder of the Microsoft Corporation, in 1998 during a candid moment in front of an audience at the University of Washington acknowledged the problem with enforcing software copyrights in the developing world:
The situation began to change with the creation of the Internet and its opening to the public in the mid-1990s. In particular, the change from piracy-as-a-business to piracy-as-a-hobby started with the invention and widespread dissemination of software for creating music in the MP3, or MPEG-1 Audio Layer 3, format. MP3 was designed in the early 1990s by engineers in the international Moving Picture Experts Group (MPEG) to create a data compression format that would result in digital versions of analog music that would require much less storage space without substantially degrading the sound quality. For example, a typical three-minute song might occupy about 50 megabytes (MB) of computer space in analog form (as used on a regular record or CD) but in its MP3 form a mere 4 MB or so, depending on the sampling rate (higher sampling rates produce better quality but require more storage space). Individuals quickly discovered that songs in MP3 format could be exchanged in only a few minutes over the Internet, even with the slower modems available in the 1990s.
This, in turn, led to the development of file-sharing networks, such as Napster, that relied on peer-to-peer (P2P) software for distributing songs. Although the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) succeeded in shutting down Napster, which had facilitated billions of song transfers over the Internet from 1999 to 2001, newer P2P programs became available that no longer required a central server for indexing song locations. Nevertheless, various computers were soon set up to facilitate searches, the most infamous being The Pirate Bay, a Swedish service that began tracking BitTorrent files (a common P2P format) across BitTorrent servers in 2003.
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The principal operators of The Pirate Bay were found guilty of copyright infringement in 2009, though the service continued to operate while the case was appealed. (In an unusual show of support and in protest over copyright and patent laws, Swedes then gave 7.1 percent of their votes for seats in the European Union Parliament to a new political organization calling itself the Pirate Party, which thus received one of Sweden’s 18 parliamentary seats.) The Pirate Bay stopped using torrent trackers in November 2009 and instead used a system called magnet links, in which files are assigned values for which a user can then search. Thus, The Pirate Bay has no record of where the files are located. Unable to completely squelch the ongoing piracy in songs, music publishers had already begun to offer digital versions from their song catalogs through commercial venues such as Amazon.com and Apple’s iTunes Store.
Some music recording artists have taken the view that piracy helps sell their backlist of works long after their publishers have stopped promoting them. For example, Janis Ian, an American Grammy Award winner, wrote a famous essay in 2002 about her experiences with increased sales of her songs after MP3 versions began circulating around the Internet.
With the experience of the RIAA as a guide, the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) campaigned for digital rights management (DRM) software to be included in DVDs, DVD players, and the HDMI (High-Definition Multimedia Interface) standard for connecting modern home theatre components. The MPAA’s task of combating piracy was helped by the vastly larger size of motion picture files, which require much more computing power and time for conversion and distribution over the Internet, even with broadband connections. Most digital video recorders (DVRs), as supplied by cable and satellite television providers, also have DRM software to prevent recorded material from being moved to other devices, or data encryption is used to prevent the material from being viewed on other devices or converted to other formats for further distribution. The inclusion of DRM software encouraged the commercial distribution, for sale or rent, of movies and television shows through DVRs and electronic game consoles from Microsoft (Xbox 360) and the Sony Corporation (PlayStation 3).
Of course, no DRM scheme is foolproof, and there exist modern-day hackers around the world with computer programming skills and relentless determination to share videos via P2P networks. The difficulty in stopping people from viewing what they want to view, when they want to view it, no doubt contributed to movie and television studios’ deciding to offer their products to consumers at Web sites where they could include advertisements. In particular, viewers at such advertiser-supported sites are assured that their machines will not become infected with malware (malicious software) embedded within the media, and the producers gain another source of income that they hope will grow enough to eventually compensate for the additional cost of distribution over the Internet.
- William L. Hosch
Apr 10, 2024 · maritime law. hijacking. buccaneer. wakō. Barbary pirate. piracy, any robbery or other violent action, for private ends and without authorization by public authority, committed on the seas or in the air outside the normal jurisdiction of any state. Because piracy has been regarded as an offense against the law of nations, the public vessels of ...
- John Philip Jenkins
website. wiki, website that can be modified or contributed to by users. Wikis can be dated to 1995, when American computer programmer Ward Cunningham created a new collaborative technology for organizing information on websites. Using a Hawaiian term meaning “quick,” he called this new software WikiWikiWeb, attracted by its alliteration and ...
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1 day ago · Germany. One of Europe ’s largest countries, Germany encompasses a wide variety of landscapes: the tall, sheer mountains of the south; the sandy, rolling plains of the north; the forested hills of the urbanized west; and the plains of the agricultural east. At the spiritual heart of the country is the magnificent east-central city of Berlin ...
Apr 19, 2024 · Wikipedia, free Internet-based encyclopaedia, started in 2001, that operates under an open-source management style. It is overseen by the nonprofit Wikimedia Foundation. Wikipedia uses a collaborative software known as wiki that facilitates the creation and development of articles. Although some highly publicized problems have called attention ...
