They call themselves the biggest BitTorrent tracker on the internet, and maybe they are. Established six years ago, at any one time there are millions of people downloading torrents tracked by The Pirate Bay. Based in Stockholm, Sweden, the website has come under attack over the years from increasingly hysterical record labels and film studios for its increasingly mainstream method of file distribution. You can even read the angry emails they’ve received on the website, www.thepiratebay.org.
Most people with a decent internet connection at least know what BitTorrent is, even if they don’t partake themselves. If you don’t, look it up. The Pirate Bay has in the past gotten away with being a hotspot for global intellectual property piracy by denying that they store copyrighted material on their servers. Technically, this is accurate. The servers only facilitate the sharing of files between computers via the larger and independent BitTorrent network – they don’t store the files themselves. You could think of The Pirate Bay (TPB) as a motorway system. The motorway might be used by criminals to carry illegal contraband, but it might be used by all kinds of drivers to carry legal stuff too. It’s just a motorway. It’s amoral. Admittedly, the internet is more like a Mad Max style post-apocalyptic road warrior highway than the autobahn, but that’s splitting hairs.
Unfortunately, the ‘blank stare of innocence’ defence only goes so far, even with the Swedish police. In 2006, TPB’s servers were raided, seized and impounded by the police. Three days after the raid, the website was live again on backup hardware, and although the servers remain confiscated, a date still hasn’t been set for that particular court case.
Even so, the administrators of the website haven’t proven invulnerable to the law. On April 17, four of the co-founders and operators of TBP were each sentenced to a year in prison, and fined $US 2.3 million in total for ‘assistance to copyright infringement’. The website itself remains unaffected, and of course, the appeals will be ongoing. The really fascination bit comes next.
There exists on the internet a sort of digital disobedience called a denial of service attack (also known as a Distributed Denial of Service attack – a DDos attack). It’s a type of attack carried out by hackers, and basically works by flooding websites with so much information they cease to function properly. For example, say a hacker infected 1,000 computers with a Trojan virus and created what’s technically known as a ‘botnet’, or as I prefer to call it, a ‘zombie computer army’. At a certain time on a certain day, the army is unleashed, and these thousand computers suddenly demand that a specific website on the internet gives them information. Then they demand it again. And again. And again. And then 100 times per second, automatically. All of a sudden, a website that might get 1,000,000 hits per month gets the equivalent of that in a single second. It can take weeks for website owners to track down the IP addresses of the biggest zombie computer networks, banning them one at a time from delivering information requests.
The first major attack of this kind happened in 2001, when the register.com website was suddenly bombarded with millions of information requests. Since then, various sorts of DDos attacks have taken place, on companies from Microsoft to nations like Georgia during the South Ossetia War of last year (speculation ran rife the Russian government orchestrated the attacks on Georgian government servers; although we’ll probably never know for sure, this remains one of the first recorded successful acts of cyber-warfare). DDos attacks can also happen by accident, when a popular website, visited by millions of people, links to a much smaller website hosted on a sever with a tiny, but usually sufficient, capacity for web traffic. If the New York Times linked to a story on the non-existent but still potentially awesome Craccum website, the hundreds of thousands of extra visitors the site received might destroy AUSA’s paltry hosting capabilities.
So, The Pirate Bay. Understandably pissed after being charged, the four men ordered to cough up the 2.3 mil have sworn not to pay a cent. Instead, one of the co-founders of TPB, Gottfrid Svartholm, came up with a remarkably charitable plan: everyone who supports The Pirate Bay should pay the law firm that prosecuted them a certain amount of money. A certain very small amount. 1 Swedish Krona (SEK), to be exact – about 20 New Zealand cents. The law firm, Danowsky & Partners Advokatbyrå, is rather small by international standards, and is entitled to 1,000 free internet fund transfers. After that, their bank charges them a 2 SEK surcharge. After a thousand donations, Danowsky et al ends up losing 1 SEK every time someone sends them 1 SEK. Svartholm called his plan internet-avgift for obscure Swedish reasons, but it’s being lauded on the internet as a Distributed Denial of Dollars – DDo$.
The true beauty of this plan is that under Swedish law, if you decide your internet payment was erroneous, you can claim the money back. In effect, since they have to give your money back, you cost Danowsky 3 SEK while losing nothing yourself. Since Danowski is so small, it has to handle all of these transactions itself, costing yet more money and man-hours in attempting to deal with the tide of faux-generosity.
It’s an ambitious plan on a global scale – Svartholm hopes to get the entire internet to jump aboard the pirate bandwagon – but then, his confidence is born out of seeing his creation, The Pirate Bay, grow almost exponentially in six years. Even if he does somehow manage to coerce Danowsky & Partners Advokatbyrå into silence on this case, there are many other firms willing to lead the charge against intellectual property infringement in order to earn the big corporate dollars that go with it. Whether or not they’ll win the war on digital piracy, however, is still undecided.
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