The film industry: Technologically challenged

Wednesday night, May 18, I was sitting in line at a theater in Dallas, Texas, reading a book. Like thousands of people around the country, I was waiting for the latest, and of course the last, Star Wars episode, "Revenge of the Sith." I have to say it's amusing to see diehard sci-fi geeks having light-saber duels in the middle of a theater.

As I and others waited in line for the midnight showing, a group named "ViSA" uploaded a leaked version of Star Wars III to newsgroups earlier that day. The film was soon copied countless times and spread across the net on peer-to-peer networks. It's everywhere. So widespread on the Net this film and others like it have become that you could close your browser now, get on IRC, a BitTorrent client, or a P2P client like KaZaA, and download it almost immediately.

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Needless to say, the Motion Picture Association of America isn't too pleased. As much as you hear about the Recording Industry Association of America suing file-sharers for freeloading copyrighted music, you hear about the MPAA getting servers shut down and legal action taken against facilitators of copyright infringement. Of course, this really isn't new. Both industries declared war on so-called "piracy" long ago, and Internet "piracy" came to the forefront of the national debate nearly six years ago when Napster became widespread.

Yet, like the culture war, the war of the copyright has waged on, and the MPAA is doing all it can to stop release groups like "ViSA" from uploading copies to the Internet. Capitalizing on the hyped release of Star Wars III, MPAA President Dan Glickman stated in a press release:

There is no better example of how theft dims the magic of the movies for everyone than this report today regarding BitTorrent providing users with illegal copies of "Revenge of the Sith." The unfortunate fact is this type of theft happens on a regular basis on peer-to-peer networks all over the world. … Fans have been lined up for days to see "Revenge of the Sith." To preserve the quality of movies for fans like these and so many others, we must stop these Internet thieves from illegally trading valuable copyrighted materials online.

There are a lot of things about this type of rhetoric that bother me and should bother you as well. This sort of talk from special-interest groups causes politicians to pass invasive and messy legislation like the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. Organizations like the MPAA have declared war on some of greatest fans of filmmaking; they stifle creativity; and their campaigns have left a lot of collateral damage. I'm not claiming that copyright infringement is legally or even ethically OK, but the reality is the distribution model of major studios has barely changed since its inception, and it seems to have left consumers wanting.

Specifically, Dan Glickman is wrong in the way he characterizes BitTorrent. According to his own words, BitTorrent is responsible for providing users with illegal copies of films. However, BitTorrent is merely a client that when given instructions through a .torrent file, connects multiple IP addresses to one another so that each computer can share random fragments of a file which are then reassembled on each receiving computer. In other words, a protocol can't be illegal. As I type these words, I'm downloading a relatively large file through BitTorrent that is perfectly legal. However, according to Dan Glickman, BitTorrent should be shutdown completely. It's like shutting down the United States Postal Service for distributing anthrax.

This isn't some sort of isolated nitpicking either. Since the beginning of the copyright war on the Internet, the recording and movie industries have used a destructive shotgun approach to fighting the infringers. We're in an age of mass media and information distribution, but unfortunately the MPAA continues to fight the tide instead of offering a viable alternative that takes advantage of new technology.