Ironically I was thinking about this last night and saw this post in a different thread.
Sorry kh1 but just uploading them is not enough, you need seeds to flood the torrents to get help contain piracy. 1 file uploaded and hoping for the best is simply not enough.
Moving on ... I was looking around my favorite pirate site the other day for an album and I noticed that this band basically flooded the torrent world with fake torrents to prevent sharing, like hundreds of them with hundreds of seeds/leeches each. I personally think this was genius and was so impressed by the band that I went out and bought their cd.
After that, my stoned ass started thinking about expanding this service out to the music industry as a whole. What do you guys think about setting up a few hundred computers to seed fake torrents so that the one that is real can't be found?
True there is some overhead here in CPUs and internet service, but would this not sell like hot cakes to the music & movie industry in Hollywood?
discuss ....
About a year ago I was approached by a friend of mine who is a C-level executive at a major record label and she wanted me to come out to Cali to discuss ways on how to stop pirates from distributing music over the internets. I mulled over the concept of it for about a week and declined afterwards because it was just too big of a waste of time to even take a stab at it. Plus I haven't purchased a CD in nearly 10 years now. Although I did buy a few vinyl records, but that was for my decks.
Anyway, when discussing some shit with them, she sent me over a bunch of data and different ideas and proposals that were sent their way by lots of entrepeneurs, and a few hacker/security community guys who wanted to blow the whistle in exchange for compensation and protection just in case their sites would be targeted. From the data though, I saw something VERY interesting, that I haven't seen any reputable news agency report on yet. It was a type of scenario I guess you can call it, in which the live concert industry, promoters mostly, stated that music piracy was actually a benefit not something to fight. They wanted the music industry itself to embrace it, and not fight it.
They said so because the internet allowed mass distribution of music, and people were exposed to more songs, quicker. That people also got a chance to decide for themselves which songs they liked better and considered a hit, long before the radio stations or MTV/YouTube would tell them which songs are better. The end result for this was that concert ticket sales skyrocketed. Most bands/artists that were new or old and used to playing smaller shows were now given so much mass crowd appeal that they were getting requests to play more than one show in cities where they would usually play a smaller venue. Now they were able to play larger venues, charge more money (to make up for the CD sales losses) and play more than one night, or come back to that city and play to sold out crowds.
One of the most interesting aspects was that the promoters specifically pointed out that the labels wouldn't have to spend as much money on the artists as they usually would have, in terms of promotional marketing, PR, or plugs. That allowing things to be distributed and taking a loss on CD sales actually helped the artists in the long run!
What I love about these two major issues that the music and film industries constantly bitch about is that they always like to show and whine about how much they are losing, but never say how much they are making! The losses are always in the low billions of dollars, but the profits are at least triple if not quadruple it. I also blame the industry themselves on being so greedy for so long and thinking that they can go about ripping the consumers off forever.
Both industries need to start embracing technology over the internet instead of fighting against the consumers they need and depend on for revenue. By scaring HS and college kids with fines and lawsuits, they are only making it worse for themselves in the long run. For every ONE kid that is prosecuted or threatened, there are a good ONE HUNDRED or more that will see this as an act of war and keep doing what they are doing, if not on a larger scale.
The idea you proposed is a good one. But consider that the development, security and distribution community online are smarter than you and anyone who comes up with a way on how to put them out of business or threaten their operation. They will find a way around it. Quickly too. People thought that P2P apps like Napster and Kazaa would mean the end of IRC sharing and Newsgroups, and they were so so so wrong. Torrents are a great thing, and I would never want to kill that off. But hey, who am I to place judgement, if you see that the battle is worth the time, effort, and compensation reward, go for it man! I only use torrents for liveset downloads every now and then. But I can tell you, that you will have a SHITLOAD of attacks from very angry Torrent folks that would attack your operation for the hell of it, and controlling rogue attackers who's motivation has nothing to do with making money is an uphill battle you will not win. Ever.
:2twocents:
