The Suits from Hollywood and Vine are all gaga to get Pirate Bay shutdown. They are going after the site which is still up not the individuals involved. –

Although the owners of the notorious BitTorrent tracker face prison time and hefty fines, the sentence handed out in April did not include an injunction forcing the site to close down.

Now a coalition of studios including Columbia Pictures, Disney, NBC, Sony Pictures, Universal Studios, and Viacom is demanding that the website be shuttered to protect the illegal distribution of roughly 100 films and television programs. A writ to sue for closure was presented Monday to the Stockholm District Court.

“They’ve been sentenced to prison for criminal activities but haven’t stopped carrying out those activities,” Monique Wadsted, the lawyer for the studios, told Sweden’s The Local.

Sadly this is like Napster round 2. Rather than embracing the opportunity they would prefer to just destroy it and move on. The opportunity of course is to monetize the sharing rather than destroy it. The destruction route just ends up being a game of whack-a-mole. If they could leverage the P2P framework MLM style they could profit beyond belief. But then that’s not their style, so no worries there.

Linky.

There has been a drumbeat over the last couple of years than much content, years old has value if if not many sales. That the ‘longtail’ in the sales cycle have more to offer as a business model than what is sold in the first two years. Last year some economists tested that theory and found it did not hold and that most sales occurred at the ‘head’. -

This really isn’t the upbeat fairy tale message Anderson has spent four years selling on the conference circuit. However, as he took his “message” to Davos and beyond, the Long Tail has gradually developed into a ‘Policy Based Evidence Making’. Having convinced himself of the truth of his hypothesis by looking at one US music service, Anderson widened his search for facts that might fit his theory. But he didn’t examine the numbers closely or critically enough, say the economists.

“You need to consider much more than just some flimsy volume-based Rhapsody data if you’re going to say the world’s changed,” says Page. “For instance, understanding value both in terms of retail spend and then marginal profitability to the artist and songwriter would have been a logical extension”

In another surprise, 80 per cent of the revenue came from 52,000 songs. What’s eye-catching about the number? Well, the typical inventory of a conventional high street record store was around 4,000 CDs. Or … around 52,000 songs.

But that has import to the music business —

“If sellers sell it, it might never be bought. But if the swappers offer it, at least one person will likely take it,” the authors point out.

Polls suggest many music fans would gladly pay for such a service. The University of Hertfordshire last year found over 80 per cent interested in voluntarily paying for services which offered exchanges of sound recordings, and a survey of music fans in Sweden - home of The Pirate Bay - found that over 86 per cent would cough up: over half the sample would pay up to £12 a month.

The world’s first voluntary P2P service was due this spring from UK cable giant Virgin, but the ISP suspended the initiative late in the day due to record company nervousness.

So what’s the uptake? More on Is the Longtail Vapors?

Well it is if you start reading some forums and web sites. Some are saying that VoIP traffic will be affected. Generally false. Others are saying that the efficiency of the internet will drop as a consequence. False. First the announcement off the Torrent website for the new UDP based client –

New alpha! The main change is that uTP (UDP torrenting) is added and enabled by default. It also has real-time transfer rate control and latency minimization.
This build will probably download slower than 1.8.1, particularly if the entire swarm is 1.8.1.

This whole thing has been a boil for about 2 years now between Torrent users and network ISP’s in their use of network capacity. We have had FCC endorsed round tables on the situation. Its finally come to head with Bell Canada impacting P2P traffic altogether. The result is that the Torrent developers have built a UDP based client to get around it. What the ISP’s don’t understand is that they are on the short end of the stick here from a technology perspective. The developers have the upper hand in any tech war. Example? Well how would ISP handle a Torrent client that did the following –

• Stored the existing client protocols table.
• Randomly remapped that table for its own purposes.
• Started a faux spread spectrum-like bounce across the breadth of the protocols table between the seeders and the receivers
• Upon competition restores the saved protocols table back to the system

Its not fool proof. But it is sufficiently involved that it fiscally escalates the costs on the ISP’s side that they just cry uncle. It is not a road we as a global society should go down. Its like restricting free speech.

The other trend I am seeing is the lack of understanding by many in the press on this issue. As a data transmission layer, UDP is MORE efficient than TCP. UDP institutes a full data stream with no framing checks. It just streams till EOF. But there is no checking for data integrity of the file. TCP on the other hand checks blocks of packets for receipt till the whole file sent. In some cases it adds up to 20% overhead to the transmission. So if you were doing a torrent you would WANT them using UDP.

The other falsehood is that VoIP traffic would be impacted. Hate to say it, probably not true. Two protocols dominate the VoIP world — SIP and SSCP. Well SIP uses TCP for build up and tear down of the connection and either TCP or UDP for the transport. The split being about 50/50. If its a problem, providers can switch to a pure TCP transport. SSCP uses TCP for build up and tear down of the connection and only UDP for the transport. But SSCP is generally associated with Cisco CallManager installs. So most of the UDP traffic is intrabuilding, like in call centers. The outbound traffic being wrapped in TCP or TCP-VPNd traffic, building to building.

The solution? How about some profit? The P2P client providers should cooperate with the ISP’s and provide a means to a) strip the traffic easily and b) forward store the traffic on end nodes like Akamai. The ISP’s cooperate by providing a premium data channel that P2P traffic can ride on. The users pay for the privilege. Profits are split by all concerned.

I prefer this solution over data caps.

Linky.