- The entertainment industry framed the conflict as a fight against movie and music “piracy.” However, this rhetoric obscures the serious implications of the tactics deployed by these giants. Central to the defeat of this particular peer-to-peer movement was that its infrastructure was vulnerable to weaponised design, in which the network protocol directly empowers attackers through its design. For BitTorrent, this empowerment came as the protocol exposes every user’s participation in the network. This data was exploited to unmask users, ruin lives and provide justification for new legislation. The collapse of centralised power that was prophesied in the 2000s never materialised. Centralised actors outmaneuvered the reformists, shielding themselves and their own ecosystems from scrutiny. The concentrated media companies of the 2020s now dwarf their 1999 equivalents, and the innovations pioneered by decentralised infrastructure were exploited by the winners as they ascended to monopoly.
The most poetic example of peer-to-peer technologies pressed into the service of corporate giants is the story of peer-to-peer software engineer Ludvig Strigeus. Having built the popular μTorrent client and perhaps sensing the changing winds, Strigeus joined former μTorrent CEO Daniel Ek’s new startup. Together, they built a quasi-Napster/BitTorrent hybrid that relied on a vast, unauthorised music catalog drawn from its user base. Today, that architecture is long gone, but the startup – Spotify – boasts 124 million subscribers, taking in USD$7.44 billion in revenue but paying artists just USD$4.37 per 1,000 streams.
As we can see from history, blind faith in technically resilient network protocols is naïve and misplaced. The Copyright War drives home hard lessons around politics, corporate appropriation, transparency, collectivism and the urgency of network safety, all illustrated in the decimated lives of key or adjacent reformists, collateral user damage, and resulting legislation. In 2013, BitTorrent was responsible for 3.35% of all internet traffic. Today the networks remain but this market share has shrunk. Torrents are down worldwide.