TIGblogs - Derek Martin

New York Times -- Technology Section
January 17, 2002

PIRATES USE NEW TOOLS TO TURN THE NET INTO AN ILLICIT VIDEO CLUB

DEREK MARTIN's selection of cable channels does not include MTV, but that has posed no obstacle to his enjoying the network's comedy show "Jackass." After a friend recommended it recently, Mr. Martin, 24, of Toronto, used a free software program called Morpheus to download an episode from another Morpheus user who had made it available to be copied over the Internet. It was so funny, Mr. Martin said, that he proceeded to copy all 24 episodes from the last three years, downloading nonstop with his cable modem while he was sleeping or at work.

"It only took me three or four days and no money, so that was pretty sweet," said Mr. Martin, who connects his computer to his television to watch his bounty on the bigger screen. "The other bonus about getting it off the Net is people have been nice enough to remove all the commercials."

The high-tech vanguard of entertainment consumers who initiated a global music-swapping spree with the help of Napster a little over two years ago is branching out into television shows and movies. Napster's service was limited to music, and it was shut down last year after a federal judge found it liable for contributing to copyright infringement. But Morpheus enables users to trade files of any kind, and an increasing number of them are filled with copyrighted video entertainment.

Simply by typing, say, "Star Trek" or "Shrek" into a search box, Morpheus users gain instant access to the media files that hundreds of thousands of other users have acquired - legally or not - and chosen to share. So a growing group of people like Mr. Martin are treating the Internet as a vast personal video library, albeit one with no dues or return policy.

The Internet's video catalog is already impressive, and it is expanding rapidly. The selection at any time depends on who happens to be connected to the Internet and running the software, for example, Morpheus, BearShare or LimeWire, that connects them to one another. More than a million users are usually online with Morpheus, and on a typical evening the download options include nearly every "Simpsons" episode ever broadcast; film classics like "Breakfast at Tiffany's"; episodes of "The Sopranos"; "The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring," now in theaters; and a wide selection of pornography.

"You see people trading movies today the way they were doing MP3's three or four years ago," said Kelly Truelove, a consultant in Redwood City, Calif., who has studied Internet file-trading and has found that the average size of files is increasing, an indication that more of them are video. "Movies and TV are following the same curve that music followed."

The exchange of movies and television shows over the Internet is not new, but until recently it had been largely limited to a core computer underground primarily interested in boasting. Passwords to download early copies of movies like "The Matrix" and "Star Wars: The Phantom Menace" were typically distributed only for limited times in certain chat rooms, and often only to those who had files of their own to trade.

Secretive pirate groups still compete to be the first to "release" a film or television show on the Internet, with the optimal balance of file size and video quality, and any commercials skillfully edited out. But members of the old-school underground are aware of a wave of newcomers they disparagingly call "casual pirates" who are much more interested in free movies than the art of illicit copying and distribution.

The growing appetite of mainstream consumers for getting and sharing video files over the Internet is driven partly by the plummeting price of storage space: three years ago most PC's came with two-gigabyte hard drives barely big enough to hold one movie in addition to the programs and data files a typical user might need. Now 40- gigabyte hard drives that can store about 50 movies are standard in computers that can cost less than $1,000.

Many PC's now also come with CD burners, which can be used to archive video files. While movie files have traditionally been too large to fit on a CD, many of those making the rounds on the Internet have been compressed with new tools that shrink them to fit a CD's 650-megabyte capacity without a significant loss in quality.

For some users, such storage options change the calculation for whether it is worth the bother to download movies that can be rented at the video store and keep them available for others to copy in turn.

Several relatively new sources of unlicensed material are contributing to the rapid expansion of the Internet's illicit video-on-demand service. Inexpensive television tuner cards that can be installed on PC's enable users to record anything shown on television directly onto a hard drive and are now being used in conjunction with new software programs that provide computers with VCR-like features, making it easier to schedule and edit captures.

Digital video cameras equipped with Firewire, a technology that allows material to be transferred directly from the camera to a computer at high speeds, have made it easier to share the results of smuggling a camera into a theater. And computer programs that decrypt DVD's so that a movie ca! n be copied from the disk onto a PC are available on the Internet, though they are illegal in the United States.

The film and television industry, well aware of how the Internet has undermined the record labels' control over the distribution of copyrighted music, is on the case. The major movie studios have filed a lawsuit accusing Nashville-based Streamcast Networks, the distributor of Morpheus, of contributing to copyright infringement. The studios and the major television networks have made the same charge against SonicBlue, the maker of Replay, a digital video recorder whose latest model lets users remove commercials and send copies of recordings over the Internet.

SonicBlue argues that copyright law gives consumers a "fair use" right to engage in a certain amount of sharing. Streamcast contends that its product is simply a piece of technology that can be used for legitimate or nefarious purposes, just as an e-m! ail program or a Web browser is. The software enables people to trade video files like home movies or films that are in the public domain, for instance.

Napster has so far failed to prevail with either of those claims. But the new cases have new wrinkles: SonicBlue limits the number of people to whom a Replay user can copy files to 15. And unlike Napster, Streamcast says, it does not maintain an index of which users have which files.

"Morpheus is about empowering people with a way of directly communicating with each other," said Steve Griffin, chief executive of Streamcast, which licenses the technology behind Morpheus. "I guess the M.P.A.A. thought it would become a mainstream application or they wouldn't have sued a little company in Tennessee."

Whatever happens in court, however, the expanding use of the Internet to obtain copyrighted video material as well as music has sharpened fears among entertainment industry executives that they are facing a daunting cultural battle.

"There's a huge difference in what people think copyright is and what the corporations think copyright is," said David Rocci, the founder of Isonews, a Web site that tracks the availability of movies and television shows on the Internet. "I'm not so sure it's morally wrong for someone to go to `Lord of the Rings' in the theater two or three times and then download it because they like it."

But for Jack Valenti, president of the Motion Picture Association of America, there is no doubt.

"We're fighting our own terrorist war," said Mr. Valenti, whose lawyers sent 54,000 letters to Internet service providers last year requesting the removal of copyrighted material from customers' Web sites. The association also regularly refers cases to law enforcement officials and assisted the Customs Service in an antipiracy campaign that included raids on college campuses last month. "The great moat that protects us, and it is only temporary, is lack of broadband access," Mr. Valenti said.

It is a moat that is rapidly evaporating. Because video files are so much bigger than audio files, the movie studios have long considered themselves less vulnerable to Internet piracy than the record labels. But with a cable modem or the fast connections many colleges now supply in student dormitories, a half-hour animated show like "Family Guy" can be retrieved in a few minutes, and programs like Morpheus make it easy to find what you want.

As a result, some entertainment consumers find it preferable to stockpile many hours of video that they can watch later, even if it means a slightly fuzzier picture.

"I use the Internet kind of like my personal VCR," said Rod Putnam, 42, an operations manager at a telecommunications company in Nashville, who downloads back episodes of "The Simpsons" and occasionally previews all or part of movies that he is considering going to see in the theater. "This is much more convenient for me."

Downloading high-quality video, even over a cable modem, is still exceedingly time-consuming. It can also end in frustration when a file called "Planet of the Apes," for instance, turns out to be an unidentifiable gangster movie, or the audio is out of sync, or it simply will not play.

But none of that deters Ogre, a 28-year-old who goes by that screen name and declined to give his real one for fear of legal retribution. A recent inventory of the computers that he shares with two housemates in Ann Arbor, Mich., revealed 23 episodes of "That 70's Show," 11 episodes of "Jackass," 15 "Saturday Night Live" clips, 18 installments of "South Park," all 11 of the "Enterprise" episodes broadcast so far, 20 or so episodes of the animated "Star Trek" series and one or two from the original show. Although they have networked several computers to achieve a whopping 300 gigabytes of combined storage space, one of the housemates recently transferred a cache of downloaded war movies onto CD's make more room on the communal hard drive.

The increasing video traffic over the Internet may indicate a consumer appetite for the fee-based video-on-demand services long promised by the entertainment industry. But it is not clear whether people will pay for what they are becoming accustomed to getting free. In a report on file trading last spring, Viant, a consulting group, estimated that about a half-million movie files were being traded daily over the Internet.

The surge in video traffic in recent months has been significant enough to overload the local networks at colleges like the University of Delaware, where network administrators responded by limiting the volume of files that students could download to one gigabyte per day - still a bit more than the size of an average movie.

"A lot of the Napster activity for us went unnoticed unless it was horrendous," said Susan Foster, vice president for information technologies at the university, who said she had warned about 500 students since September that they had exceeded the download limit. "The video was bringing our network to its knees."

The practice is beginning to spread beyond college students and computer geeks, just as MP3 music trading did two years ago. A Morpheus user who declined to give his real name and identified himself in an online forum as a 49-year-old car dealer in Houston said he downloaded movies ! about twice a week.

"A lot of movies are overhyped and they're not worth the trip to the theater," he wrote under the screen name 169mmm. "As for `Lord of the Rings,' I didn't get it until after we saw it at the theater. Once I had to get more Jujubes and Gummi Worms. So I watched the 30 minutes I missed on the ole PC along with the rest of it."

by Amy Harmon,
New York Times Technology Writer
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PHOTO by Taras Kovaliv for The New York Times
VIEW ON DEMAND Derek Martin of Toronto downloaded episodes of MTV's "Jackass" from the Web and put them on CD's like these.