A Chronicle of Online Piracy at the dawn of 2016.

Let us begin by acknowledging the fact that last year, 409 scripted TV shows were produced and aired by Hollywood on cable, broadcast and streaming outlets such as Netflix, Amazon, Hulu, Crackle, HBO GO etc. FX boss John Landgraf coined the term “Peak TV” last August, to address this phenomenon. I think at this point, it is safe to say that we have officially reached a boiling point in TV programming. And this is just TV, we also have YouTube, Facebook video, Vimeo and so many streaming services to keep us glued to a screen.

As an Indian citizen and an ardent fan of American TV shows, I regularly faced this:

This is not new for us. Region restriction is old news and only the truly optimistic will fill out their Email ID in that field, expecting to hear the good news any day.

Back in the mid 00s, i.e. 10 years ago, BitTorrent and file sharing services like Rapidshare and Megaupload were our knights in shining armor.

It was a glorious time. The time of Limewire, BitTorrent, BitComet, eDonkey and DC++. Sites like Megaupload and Rapidshare flourished and prospered. I remember people sharing premium access to these sites on forums.

There were two ways to pirate content:

First way : You just download the application of your choice (Limewire, Bittorrent), do a search and voila! Minutes later (depending on the number of peers), you would be watching your favorite show or movie or listening to that song. The downside was that malware and viruses were rampant in applications like Limewire and there was really no way of knowing whether the file is legit.

Second way: Say, you wanted to watch that new episode of ‘How I Met Your Mother’.

You just went to Google, did a few searches, and voila, Google would present you with links to all the juicy pirated content on the Internet. It would present links to Megaupload and Rapidshare and so many other services. And if you added the word torrent behind any keyword, Google would direct you to The Pirate bay, ISOHunt, Demonid. Pirates would be given recognition for quality files and leechers could enjoy unregulated access to quality entertainment. If the words aXXo, KLAXXON ring a bell, you were definitely at the party.

Yes, that was the golden era of piracy. The world of media was our oyster, no restrictions, no caps. Those days are gone and they are never coming back. And we have only one party pooper to thank for that.

And we weren’t surprised, especially after what happened to Napster, it was only a matter of time before the others would be taken down. And it happened, inevitably:

Since 2011, every pirate and leecher started seeing this message frequently on Google’s search results.

Google had made it’s stand on piracy very clear with this message, and for the first time in years, it was a terrible time to be a pirate.

Gnutella and BitTorrent have remained resilient and from 2011, online piracy took a different turn, all thanks to the efforts in enforcing the DMCA. For the first time, we started seeing a growing trend for privacy in BitTorrent trackers. Piratebay completely stopped giving .Torrent files and instead made the switch to sharing magnet URLs completely. Several other trackers shut down and pirates started taking measures to protect themselves on BitTorrent and Gnutella networks.

It was around this time that a popular service started making its mark on the torrent landscape. That service was called Torrific. Torrific combined the power of cloud with the functionality of BitTorrent. The result was high speed cloud download speeds from the BitTorrent network.

So all you had to do was Sign up for an account, paste the magnet URL or upload a .torrent file, the servers of Torrific would start leeching the files and provide you with a high speed download link. Meanwhile, you could enjoy faster downloads without worrying about the seeder/leecher ratio and also rest easy about the FBI tracking you.

But that party was stopped too as Torrific was shut down eventually. However, the idea stuck around and that led to a thriving business model of file sharing on the internet.

In the last 3 years, traffic and seeding on BitTorrent has come down significantly. Yes, people are still pirating content online, but there are many legal options now. The rising trend of piracy shook up the entertainment industry and the industry has woken up to the way its audience consumes content now.

Today, we have several streaming services that produce as well as curate several shows. These services can be accessed at a cheap subscription prices. And suddenly people who were pirating content, were making a switch to these services. The result: less people seeding on BitTorrent.

But that still brings me back to this problem.

There used to be a time when every TV show would be available at great speeds on BitTorrent, but today if the file is old, no one is seeding. For example, if you tried to download Doogie Howser today, you won’t find more than 3 seeders for any copy. But if you tried to download Seinfeld you would get a tons of seeds. BitTorrent today has shifted from being ‘THE PLACE’ for file sharing to a popularity contest.

So if any show that is evergreen such as Friends or Seinfeld will always have seeders but try Doogie Howser and you might just come up empty handed. Today, piracy is all about what’s new and what’s good.

Today, we access Netflix, Hulu and all other services using VPNs. And that works out well. You connect to a remote proxy address somewhere on the worldwide web and use that address to access the service of your choice.

But does that mean we stopped using torrents? Far from it. We have Popcorn Time for Movies and TV. We have Aurous for music. These are services that use BitTorrent as a back end to provide streaming services. We are not complaining. But it continues to remain illegal.

And what happened to Torrific? They shut it down for good, yes. And today we have at least 5 different services (zBigz, Bitport, offcloud, Filestream, Putdrive) providing the exact services of Torrific for a price, two of which have a free to use plan.

File sharing also, hasn’t stopped. We have several options including: Dropbox, Google Drive, Box and many more.

Conclusion:

Piracy used to be about rebellion. It was an online revolution where the little guy could stick it to the man. Where the individual was powerful and ruled the waves of the internet. And now, after they changed their business models and look where we are. We’re right back where we started, at the heels of giant corporations looking at the bottom line. Piracy is no longer about rebellion. Its about monetization and marketing. Its about publicity and exposure.

Our knights have sold out. Kim Dotcom, the guy who ran Megaupload, now owns Mega out of New Zealand. Sean Parker, that guy who co-created Napster is doing Spotify and AirBnB. I guess that rebellion was just a teenager’s tantrum. Maybe its time for all of us to grow up.

Note: At the time of writing this article, Netflix is set to launch in India.