Nevertheless, the economic damage they caused was real, and Vu was determined to put an end to it. His agents began meeting regularly with the antipiracy division at the RIAA to exchange information and intelligence, and to discuss the progress of the case—what little there was. RNS’ chat channels were closed off, and its recruiting strategy was to pull connected players who were already long-standing members of other groups, making infiltration difficult. RNS’ leader, whoever he was, had an excellent understanding of operational security, cultivating high-placed moles in other organizations while preventing his own from being compromised. Vu worked the case for years, and for a long time he got nowhere.
CHAPTER 13
By 2001 Brandenburg and Grill had parted ways. The compression ratios of the latest generation of psychoacoustic products were approaching theoretical limits, and the outstanding problems in the field were considered solved. The two sought other challenges. Grill, in Erlangen, went into satellite radio; Brandenburg, from his new lab in Ilmenau, into surround sound.
MPEG, too, was making progress. Video quality was improving, even as the files were shrinking. The upheaval in the music market soon spread to the movie market, as Scene crews that specialized in DVD ripping, in-theater camcorder bootlegs, and high-definition television emerged. Soon, movie files from the Scene were leaving the topsite networks and making their way into the wild.
The defenders of intellectual property were a step behind. The failed lawsuit against Diamond had shown that the technology itself could not be litigated against. Instead, media industries had to target the bad actors one at a time. Numerous lawsuits were filed against peer-to-peer operators, targeting companies like Grokster, LimeWire, and Kazaa. The upshot of these shifts was that the file-sharers no longer needed help compressing the files. They needed help distributing them.
Napster, though, was ruined, and the heirs to its shattered empire could match neither its quality nor its scope. Kazaa, eDonkey, LimeWire, BearShare, Gnutella, Grokster—the new peer-to-peer networks were frustrating morasses of crap. Requesting a song or movie on these networks meant joining a download queue behind hundreds of other users. Your wait time could run to hours, even days, and the entire time you waited in this line you were forced to advertise your computer’s IP address to the subpoena-crazed lawyers of Project Hubcap. Worse, when you did finally receive the file you’d requested, it often turned out to be a glitchy, low-fidelity encode, or a mistagged version of some other song entirely, or even a deliberate, earsplitting fake.
There was little incentive for the peer-to-peer entrepreneurs to invest in quality control. After the A&M Records vs. Napster decision they were plainly on the wrong side of the law, with no hope of buy-in from the media conglomerates. With their venture capital drying up, many operators in the peer-to-peer space began secretly bundling their supposedly “free” applications with gray-market adware, flooding the desktops of the unsuspecting with pitches for low-credit loan consolidations and penis-enlarging pharmaceuticals. Investors predictably rebelled, as did users, and for a time the file-sharing economy faced a return to the days of the pre-Napster IRC underground. But the underlying potential of peer-to-peer technology was still tremendous, and, even as mainstream capitalists abandoned it, the more idiosyncratic programming talent stuck around. And that was how an offbeat 25-year-old code warrior at a short-lived peer-to-peer start-up called MojoNation ended up using his spare time at a doomed job to rewrite the rules of Internet architecture.
His name was Bram Cohen, and he called his invention BitTorrent. Born in Manhattan, Cohen was a gifted programmer who competed in recreational mathematics tournaments in his spare time. He wore his hair long and his eyebrows thick, his voice came fast and nasal, and he had the hard-geek habit of nervously chuckling at things that weren’t really funny, like the inefficiencies of standard Internet packet switching, or the believability of reported file transfer download speeds. His laugh was startling and staccato, and always felt forced, and when he talked he bounced in his seat and didn’t meet your eyes. These were classic symptoms of Asperger’s syndrome, an autism spectrum disorder that Cohen claimed to have—although, he admitted, this wasn’t a professional diagnosis, merely one he’d assigned to himself.
Cohen’s position at MojoNation had given him an intimate look at the mechanics of file-sharing, and what he saw there was appalling. Let’s say you wanted to download an mp3 of the “Thong Song” off a classic peer-to-peer site. There might be millions of copies of the song out there, but, using a site like Napster or Kazaa, you could access only one at a time. That struck Cohen as nonsensical. Rather than matching users piecemeal, he reasoned, an intelligent peer-to-peer protocol would match hundreds of users simultaneously. Instead of downloading the entire “Thong Song” from one user, you could download one one-hundredth of it from a hundred users at the same time. A file transfer like that would happen quickly, perhaps even instantaneously. And even before you finished downloading, you could yourself simultaneously upload pieces of the half-finished file to other users around the globe.
That logic was at the core of the BitTorrent technology, but eliminating download queues was just the beginning. The greatest benefit of the torrent approach was the way it solved one of the Internet’s long-outstanding problems: the traffic bottleneck. Historically, popular files tended to crash servers, as millions of users crowded around a narrow doorway and tried to push their way in. But the matching schematic of torrents opened hundreds of doors at once, taking pressure off the server and transferring it to individuals. This inversion of the traditional paradigm of file distribution had a startling result: with torrents, the more people who attempted to simultaneously download a file, the faster the download went.
The technology was brilliant, but there was a catch. The torrent needed to be governed by an oversight server called a “tracker.” A torrent tracker would do far less work than a traditional peer-to-peer network and would require far less capital to operate. But still, someone had to manage it, and the precedent set by A&M vs. Napster was that the operator of a tracker was responsible for policing the contents of the files the torrents pointed to. If (god forbid) a tracker were to govern the transfer of pirated files, then the operator of that tracker would face the possibility of civil and maybe even criminal liability.
Mimicking the routine from the Fraunhofer playbook, Cohen claimed that he did not intend his invention to be used for piracy. Like Brandenburg and Grill, he saw himself only as an inventor. Like Brandenburg and Grill, he dutifully paid for the media he consumed. Like Brandenburg and Grill, he wanted his invention to make him rich. But unlike Brandenburg and Grill, he did not attempt to secure royalty revenues for his invention. Instead, believing he could succeed as an open-source entrepreneur, Cohen registered the BitTorrent technology under an open license that guaranteed his authorship status, but which otherwise permitted the idea to be implemented anywhere, by anyone, for free.
Cohen unveiled the first version of BitTorrent in July 2001, at the annual Defcon hacker conference in Las Vegas. Adoption was slow. Cohen’s first-generation software was cumbersome and confusing, and the underlying BitTorrent architecture was such a radical departure from existing Internet protocol that even the technorati had a hard time understanding it. As with the mp3, the pirates were the first to grasp its potential. In the months following the conference, a number of pirate tracker websites began to appear, but none succeeded in building a critical mass of users. What the earliest torrenters began to see was that the hardest part of running a peer-to-peer file-sharing network wasn’t sourcing the files. It was sourcing the peers. Not until September 2003, more than two years after the shutdown of Napster’s servers, did the first really successful public torrent site go live: the Pirate Bay.