Piracy, in strictest sense of the term, is defined as “copyright violation”. It is strictly the realm of law to define the various provisions and it’s literal meaning. The purpose of this post is not to go in the legalese but to define the reason behind this “growing phenomenon”: Broadband.

I remember the days of pathetic 56 kbps access on the telephone modem. The dial up access was atrociously expensive, the lines faced frequent disconnections and the overall experience was laced with frustrations. I writhed my hands in despair when I heard about Napster allowing unrestricted exchange of music residing on the hard drives. While I don’t condone this (for legal reasons) but it allowed unrestricted exchange of music one never knew ever existed! Napster died a horrible death due to unrelenting legal challenges by MPAA.

MPAA is a quasi union to protect the interests of the content creators. US has been a test bed of the way this contentious issue has evolved over the years. The MPAA has garnered a lot of bad press from the people who fuel the peer to peer networks. There has been a dissent generated from the ISP’s who claim that this kind of traffic chokes their network and cite FUD campaigns to announce the imminent breakdown of Internet; that the bandwidth would soon run out with the kind of content that is being shared.

In the Web 2.0 arena, interestingly, none of the players are making serious money but follow the basic “Christy” method of “harvesting of souls“. Content is created to dumb down the masses in name of entertainment and people hooked on to the “opium of masses” (based on the loose misrepresentation of Marx). Frankly, content creation involves mega budgets and creators look for perpetual “evergreening” of “copyright” in order to milk whatever is worth it.

In this scenario, it is a double pronged attack on the people who share something that is inaccessible or content that has been blocked because of complex copyright issues. For example, a movie having a theatrical release in US quickly goes through it’s DVD sales and then released “worldwide”. Peer to peer networks (Torrents or it’s variants) has changed the game altogether. The moment a DVD is released, it is “ripped” and uploaded for all. The “seeders” abound for the “leechers” and the cycle continues.

The speeds are an issue worldwide. Primarily, the governments have encouraged faster speeds by tax breaks and other incentives to promote digital lifestyles and the positive spinoffs from that. Asian countries like Singapore, South Korea and Japan have lead the way. Recently, Australia announced it”s grand plan to push rural broadband impetus. US has had an acrimonious debate about the role of FCC (their version of TRAI) and the paltry definition of broadband access at 256kbps. Despite the intensive lobbying, nothing really has come out of it.

Piracy has kept pace with the “increasing” speeds so as to say. Legislation has not kept pace with the attempts to thwart this growth. Europe has seen some activity which led to confiscation of Pirate Bay servers and as a result the public rose in revolt against this “misstep” and formed a “Pirate party”. Interestingly, it even managed to win at the hustings and got a seat in the parliament.

I feel that “rooting” out the piracy is impossible. If Governments find means to thwart Internet access or even “slow down speeds”, there are people to bypass these issues in the name of unfettered access.

I don’t endorse piracy in the present form (to be on the right side of law) but there is an inherent need for people to share. This basic impulse cannot be wished away for times to come.

Broadband is going to change the equations in the way we connect. I don’t have any teary eyed dreams of a “global connected village” though but it’s a good feeling that resources can be shared by one and all.

Tags: Broadband, Broadband access, Digital Divide, DTH, DVD, DVD Rips, FCC, FCC sucks, File Sharing, Globalisation, Indian ISP's, Internet, ISP's, Peer to peer, Piracy, Pirate, Telecommunications India, Torrents, TRAI, TRAI sucks

This is the front opened up by this blog and we have set up a forum thread on VT.com. I hope that traffic gets picked up from there and more people join the fight.

Tags: Broadband, Broadband India, India, Indian ISP's, ISP's, Telecommunications India

I came across this BBC write up about the impending Internet collapse. It seems that the net may just collapse under it’s own weight; given the amount of traffic it has to “support”.

Some salient “facts” and claims from the write up.

In one day YouTube sends data equivalent to 75 billion e-mails, so it’s clearly very different,” said Phil Smith, head of technology and corporate marketing at Cisco Systems. “The router sits at the end of that very high speed link and decides where each small piece of data has to go. That’s not a difficult computational task, but it has to make millions of decisions a second.

The manufacturer of most of the world’s routers is Cisco. When I pushed them on the subject of router overload, they were understandably confident.

“Routers have come a long way since they started,” said Mr Smith. “The routers we’re talking about now can handle 92 terabits per second.

“We have enough capacity to do that and drive a billion phone calls from those same people who are playing a video game at the same time they’re having a text chat.”

Wow.

Now for the bad news.

The real issue that people are going to face, and are already noticing at home, is that ISPs are starting to cut back on the bandwidth that is available to people in their homes,” said Mr Thompson. They call it bandwidth shaping.

I have been writing in about the next generation broadband earlier on. However, in my opinion, the write up is terribly flawed because it so US/ Euro centric. Yeah, they have the You Tube streaming in, videos being uploaded, porn/spam clogging their email inboxes, compromised networks with bot/zombie puters a plenty and Internet trying to be next best thing after sex (and invention of wheel).

Much of the world remains in the dark. Even if you account for an estimated 40 million net users in my “beloved” motherland, most of them remain active email users or on chat. The Government doesn’t have to take the role of a net nanny or an over indulgent policeman. Unless of course, some zealots try and create a “controversy” on Orkut by setting up “I hate my ex girlfriends’ boyfriend’s underwear” community.

We simply don’t have the means to access the net or drive it to the “levels” that are spoken off. We are besotted with decades old copper which gets chewed off in rat infested BSNL’s telephone exchanges (and measly workers with greasy palms). How and where would you expect this to be switched on to shining fibre streched to your place? It is impossible to assume the same, atleast for the next 5 to 10 years. India is the only country where Wireless Internet would generate an degree of excitement in the media or bandwidth starved folks who would whip up their shiny blackberrys only to check email.

Business World carried out an article on the development of the new portals to dish out content in local languages. In my opinion, the user set has not matured enough to fruitfully employ the search in local languages. If “sex” can generate huge amount of traffic for Google, much of the traffic can be easily handled by those Cisco’s routers. You wouldn’t need rocket science to generate those searches in Hindi for that matter. Mind you. Broadband has not yet touched millions of the net users still and despite stories about “scorching” growth of the industry, I would give or take 5 years before it can touch us in any meaningful manner.

This means that promised Mbps speeds would be on the horizon (for unlimited use at least) but that horizon is still way to far off. Indian ISP’s are smart enough for that “bandwidth shaping”. And I don’t see the collapse of Internet; atleast from India at the moment.

Tags: API, Broadband, BSNL, DTH, Google, India, Indian ISP's, Internet, ISP's, Media, Opera, spam, Telecommunications India, Wireless