by Stephen Witt
MPEG, too, was making progress. Video quality was improving, even as the files were shrinking. The upheaval in the music market soon spread to the movie market, as Scene crews that specialized in DVD ripping, in-theater camcorder bootlegs, and high-definition television emerged. Soon, movie files from the Scene were leaving the topsite networks and making their way into the wild.
The defenders of intellectual property were a step behind. The failed lawsuit against Diamond had shown that the technology itself could not be litigated against. Instead, media industries had to target the bad actors one at a time. Numerous lawsuits were filed against peer-to-peer operators, targeting companies like Grokster, LimeWire, and Kazaa. The upshot of these shifts was that the file-sharers no longer needed help compressing the files. They needed help distributing them.
Napster, though, was ruined, and the heirs to its shattered empire could match neither its quality nor its scope. Kazaa, eDonkey, LimeWire, BearShare, Gnutella, Grokster—the new peer-to-peer networks were frustrating morasses of crap. Requesting a song or movie on these networks meant joining a download queue behind hundreds of other users. Your wait time could run to hours, even days, and the entire time you waited in this line you were forced to advertise your computer’s IP address to the subpoena-crazed lawyers of Project Hubcap. Worse, when you did finally receive the file you’d requested, it often turned out to be a glitchy, low-fidelity encode, or a mistagged version of some other song entirely, or even a deliberate, earsplitting fake.
There was little incentive for the peer-to-peer entrepreneurs to invest in quality control. After the A&M Records vs. Napster decision they were plainly on the wrong side of the law, with no hope of buy-in from the media conglomerates. With their venture capital drying up, many operators in the peer-to-peer space began secretly bundling their supposedly “free” applications with gray-market adware, flooding the desktops of the unsuspecting with pitches for low-credit loan consolidations and penis-enlarging pharmaceuticals. Investors predictably rebelled, as did users, and for a time the file-sharing economy faced a return to the days of the pre-Napster IRC underground. But the underlying potential of peer-to-peer technology was still tremendous, and, even as mainstream capitalists abandoned it, the more idiosyncratic programming talent stuck around. And that was how an offbeat 25-year-old code warrior at a short-lived peer-to-peer start-up called MojoNation ended up using his spare time at a doomed job to rewrite the rules of Internet architecture.
His name was Bram Cohen, and he called his invention BitTorrent. Born in Manhattan, Cohen was a gifted programmer who competed in recreational mathematics tournaments in his spare time. He wore his hair long and his eyebrows thick, his voice came fast and nasal, and he had the hard-geek habit of nervously chuckling at things that weren’t really funny, like the inefficiencies of standard Internet packet switching, or the believability of reported file transfer download speeds. His laugh was startling and staccato, and always felt forced, and when he talked he bounced in his seat and didn’t meet your eyes. These were classic symptoms of Asperger’s syndrome, an autism spectrum disorder that Cohen claimed to have—although, he admitted, this wasn’t a professional diagnosis, merely one he’d assigned to himself.
Cohen’s position at MojoNation had given him an intimate look at the mechanics of file-sharing, and what he saw there was appalling. Let’s say you wanted to download an mp3 of the “Thong Song” off a classic peer-to-peer site. There might be millions of copies of the song out there, but, using a site like Napster or Kazaa, you could access only one at a time. That struck Cohen as nonsensical. Rather than matching users piecemeal, he reasoned, an intelligent peer-to-peer protocol would match hundreds of users simultaneously. Instead of downloading the entire “Thong Song” from one user, you could download one one-hundredth of it from a hundred users at the same time. A file transfer like that would happen quickly, perhaps even instantaneously. And even before you finished downloading, you could yourself simultaneously upload pieces of the half-finished file to other users around the globe.
That logic was at the core of the BitTorrent technology, but eliminating download queues was just the beginning. The greatest benefit of the torrent approach was the way it solved one of the Internet’s long-outstanding problems: the traffic bottleneck. Historically, popular files tended to crash servers, as millions of users crowded around a narrow doorway and tried to push their way in. But the matching schematic of torrents opened hundreds of doors at once, taking pressure off the server and transferring it to individuals. This inversion of the traditional paradigm of file distribution had a startling result: with torrents, the more people who attempted to simultaneously download a file, the faster the download went.
The technology was brilliant, but there was a catch. The torrent needed to be governed by an oversight server called a “tracker.” A torrent tracker would do far less work than a traditional peer-to-peer network and would require far less capital to operate. But still, someone had to manage it, and the precedent set by A&M vs. Napster was that the operator of a tracker was responsible for policing the contents of the files the torrents pointed to. If (god forbid) a tracker were to govern the transfer of pirated files, then the operator of that tracker would face the possibility of civil and maybe even criminal liability.
Mimicking the routine from the Fraunhofer playbook, Cohen claimed that he did not intend his invention to be used for piracy. Like Brandenburg and Grill, he saw himself only as an inventor. Like Brandenburg and Grill, he dutifully paid for the media he consumed. Like Brandenburg and Grill, he wanted his invention to make him rich. But unlike Brandenburg and Grill, he did not attempt to secure royalty revenues for his invention. Instead, believing he could succeed as an open-source entrepreneur, Cohen registered the BitTorrent technology under an open license that guaranteed his authorship status, but which otherwise permitted the idea to be implemented anywhere, by anyone, for free.
Cohen unveiled the first version of BitTorrent in July 2001, at the annual Defcon hacker conference in Las Vegas. Adoption was slow. Cohen’s first-generation software was cumbersome and confusing, and the underlying BitTorrent architecture was such a radical departure from existing Internet protocol that even the technorati had a hard time understanding it. As with the mp3, the pirates were the first to grasp its potential. In the months following the conference, a number of pirate tracker websites began to appear, but none succeeded in building a critical mass of users. What the earliest torrenters began to see was that the hardest part of running a peer-to-peer file-sharing network wasn’t sourcing the files. It was sourcing the peers. Not until September 2003, more than two years after the shutdown of Napster’s servers, did the first really successful public torrent site go live: the Pirate Bay.
Hosted in Sweden, the Pirate Bay quickly became the world’s leading index of pirated material. Movies, music, TV shows, cracked software—it was all available, not in any one place but shared among thousands, with the Pirate Bay servers hosting only the governing torrent files. The site’s early popularity came from its no-apologies approach: its founders believed what they were doing should be legal, but if it wasn’t they were going to do it anyway. If running a torrent tracker violated copyright law, then the Pirate Bay founders were willing to break that law.
This dissident viewpoint drew attention, and attracted users from the same disaffected subculture of Internet trolls that would later populate such luminary organizations as Anonymous and 4chan. The Pirate Bay’s founders loved controversy—one of them, Gottfrid Svartholm Warg, had previously hosted a site called “America’s Dumbest Soldiers,” which provided casualty reports from the Iraq War and let users vote on the presumed stupidity of the death. They trumpeted their actions as civil disobedience, and publicly flipped the bird to those who didn’t like it. In 2004, lawyers for DreamWorks SKG sent the site a cease-and-desist letter, threatening legal action under the U.S. Digital Millennium Copyright Act, concerning a torrent for a pirated copy of Shrek 2. The response
Svartholm Warg drafted was characteristic:
As you may or may not be aware, Sweden is not a state in the United States of America. Sweden is a country in northern Europe. Unless you figured it out by now, U.S. law does not apply here … It is the opinion of us and our lawyers that you are fucking morons, and that you should please go sodomize yourself with retractable batons.
Not every site was so combative. The Pirate Bay was open to the public and hosted a wide variety of file types, and its founders adored attention. Most of the torrent trackers were private, invitation-only affairs, limited to one or two types of media and dedicated to secrecy. As the Pirate Bay went wide, covering all types of files, the private trackers went deep, building completist collections segregated by genre and medium. Over the next few years, several of these private trackers would flourish beyond their founders’ imaginings, snowballing into large-scale indices of pirated material whose archival breadth surpassed not just the Pirate Bay’s but also the Scene’s and, in some cases, even the Smithsonian’s. The best of these, which grew from the humblest of origins, was the legendary music tracker known as Oink’s Pink Palace.
Oink himself was Alan Ellis, a 21-year-old computer science student from the United Kingdom. Born in Leeds and raised in Manchester, Ellis had enrolled in 2002 in a computer science program at the University of Teesside, located in the decaying industrial city of Middlesbrough in the UK’s blighted northeast. Ellis was shy, intensely private, and—in sharp contrast to the Pirate Bay’s founders—unfailingly polite. He stood only 5′5″, but he was an avid squash player and kept his body in peak physical condition. His hair and eyes were dark, and his square, handsome face was bisected by a pronounced dimple in his chin.
Ellis found his university education lacking. The school’s curriculum seemed geared to an early era of computing. Courses were, in the best British academic tradition, conducted in languages like Fortran and Lisp that had been dead for centuries—the programming equivalents of ancient Greek and Latin. There was no focus on commerce or contemporary computer trends, and there was a baffling lack of interest in the Internet. In conversations with potential employers, Ellis kept hearing of demand for newer programming languages like PHP, for Web scripting, or SQL, for database administration, but the school offered courses in neither.
So he decided to teach himself. In his spare time between classes and squash, Ellis downloaded a few open-source software packages and familiarized himself with the basics of both languages. Although he wasn’t expecting to make any money, his idea was to learn employable skills by running a website that functioned almost like a business, serving dynamic requests to a variety of users. A torrent tracker was perfect in this regard: it used an SQL database to sort the torrents, and PHP to present them to users.
On May 30, 2004, Oink’s Pink Palace went live. The site was served from Ellis’ home PC, in an off-campus house he shared with five other people. Ellis announced the launch of the tracker by posting to the forums on other torrent sites and inviting in a few trusted confidants. There wasn’t much interest. In the wake of the Pirate Bay’s popularity, hundreds of other private trackers were opening. Most would stick around for a few months, maybe a year, then sputter out of existence. Ellis expected the same future for Oink, although this didn’t trouble him—he viewed the site as a hobby. Nor was he expecting any legal trouble. When he registered for the domain name “Oink .me.uk,” Ellis paid with his own credit card and used his real name.
In its first few weeks Oink’s Pink Palace attracted just a few hundred users. The site was so quiet that Ellis occasionally shut down the Web server software on his PC to play computer games. But then a niche opened in the tracker ecosystem. Avoiding the headache of the public download networks like LimeWire, for some time Ellis had been sourcing music from another private site, Raiden.se, which was, like the Pirate Bay, hosted in Sweden. But in the summer of 2004 Raiden had mysteriously folded after technical difficulties, and its entire database of torrents had been lost. Without the site, the music files themselves, hosted on laptops and personal computers around the globe, were disorganized and inaccessible. In twentieth-century terms, it was like walking into a library and burning down the card catalog.
Ellis saw an opportunity. Returning to the torrent forums, he announced that Oink was rebranding and would no longer host movie or software files. Instead, it would be an exclusive music tracker, long on quality and short on quantity. Unlike the Pirate Bay, which acted mostly as a link repository, with limited oversight or quality control, Oink would be something else entirely: a carefully curated digital archive with a fanatical emphasis on high-fidelity encodings.
He began an aggressive branding campaign. He ran a contest to determine the site’s mascot. The winner was a plump piglet wearing a pair of headphones, christened Oink. The branding campaign put a friendly face on the tracker’s increasingly demanding technical requirements. Ellis was becoming a quality snob. He permitted only mp3s ripped from the original compact discs, and emphasized archival completion. The site’s rules for uploads rivaled the Scene’s in their complexity. And there were further rules—rules governing how music was to be tagged and cataloged, rules regarding how torrents were to be uploaded, rules regarding album art and liner notes, rules regarding behavior in the site’s moderated forums. There were even rules outlining how “cute” members’ avatars had to be, the precedent set by the hard-rocking piglet himself.
Being a member of Oink was demanding. The private nature of the site meant users had to give email addresses, have persistent logins, and reveal their IP addresses. They also had to maintain a minimum ratio of material uploaded to downloaded. That is, a user had to give music to get music. The easiest way to do that was to upload a new album, one that was not already on the site. And the easiest way to do that was to get your hands on an original copy on CD and encode it to an mp3.
Much of this material had been encoded before, during the millennial Napster frenzy. But often those encodes had been conducted haphazardly, by bedroom rippers with only a limited understanding of how the technology worked. Glitchy, low-quality files had abounded on Napster—files misnamed or mistagged, files attributed to the wrong artist, files with glaring audio flaws. There was also the music out there from the Scene, which Ellis knew of but did not participate in. To an exacting audiophile like Ellis, even the Scene wasn’t good enough. The Oink way was the only way, and Ellis was recreating the world’s music libraries from scratch. Yes, he was saying, I know a lot of this material is out there already, but we’re going to do it again, and this time we’re going to do it right.
The strict upload ratio requirements enhanced the quality of the archive, of course, but they also implicated Oink’s user base in a potentially serious crime. As a public tracker, the Pirate Bay did not have upload requirements. You could “hit and run” there: download your torrents and disable any re-uploading, limiting your legal liability. On Oink this would get you banned. Users were forced to participate in a scheme that, depending on your viewpoint, was either a laudatory attempt to build the greatest record collection the world had ever seen or the premeditated participation in an astonishing conspiracy to defraud.
Would Oink’s users take the risk? Yes. Ellis had timed the launch of his mission well. The ancient race of vinyl enthusiasts who had once haunted record stores and swap meets was dying out, superseded by a mutant breed of torrent obsessives. The snobbishness and exclusivity of Oink were exactly what this new group was looking for: a place to show off their dismissive, elitist attitudes about both technology and music. The High Fidelity types were still concerned with high fidelity, of course; only now, instead of exchanging angry letters about phonograph needles in the back pages of Playboy, they flamed one another over the relative merits of various mp3 bit rates in hundred-page threads on the Oink forums.
The stricter the site’s rules became, the more people showed up. Invitations became a hot commodity, and of course this only fueled demand. Seeking to fort
ify his archive, Ellis implemented ever stricter upload ratio requirements. He instituted a hierarchical system of user classes. He increased moderation of the forums. And his community of obsessives responded with delight. They were pirates, sure, but what they really wanted was order.
Oink became the premier destination for the tech-obsessed music nerd (and his close cousin, the music-obsessed tech nerd). Public trackers like the Pirate Bay were overrun by plebs, while Oink members were knowledgeable, cool, and occasionally even socially well adjusted. By the end of 2004, several thousand users had signed on, the kind of core base of dedicated file-sharing peers that could support exponential growth. Ellis’ ability to serve the site from his bedroom was quickly outstripped. He enlisted technical support from the site’s users and found like-minded administrators to help him meet demand. He migrated the site from Windows XP to Windows Server 2003, then to Linux. The physical location of the hosting computer moved to other users’ bedrooms, in search of high-bandwidth connections—first to a small town in Canada, then to an apartment in Norway, then finally to a professional server farm in Holland.
Hosting bills began to mount. By December, the tracker cost several hundred dollars a month to maintain. In early 2005, Ellis posted the address of a PayPal account for the site and made a polite request for donations. Cash began to trickle in, denominated in currencies from all over the globe.
More than money, Oink’s army donated labor. They built out the archive, and their enthusiasm for this venture put even the Scene to shame. Oinkers uploaded their own CD collections, and the CD collections of their friends. Some of the site’s elite “torrent masters” uploaded a thousand albums or more. As Scene participants had done before them, Oinkers started to search eBay for rarities and import pressings. As record stores started closing, Oinkers showed up to buy their fire sale inventory in bulk, and these compulsive uploaders were the music retailers’ last, best customers.
