Digital piracy crackdown will never work.
Many of you don't know who I am, but if you ever downloaded an episode of Fox's animated series Futurama from the Internet, then you and I have probably crossed paths.
From the fall of 1999 to spring of 2002, every single episode of Futurama was available on the Internet, free of cost, because of a few friends and me who captured and encoded them all.
On several occasions, my servers occupied up to 40 percent of the ASU network's bandwidth. But, eventually, I stopped.
It was not because Fox or Matt Groening's attorney tried to stop me. As a matter of fact, Fox and Groening have never even contacted me. I chose to stop because I did not have any time available to keep up my little hobby.
On April 17, William Lewis of ASU's Information Technology Department sent out a precautionary e-mail to the entire ASU population regarding the consequences of downloading copyrighted material.
Monday's State Press included an article explaining that students from other universities were sued by the Recording Industry Association of America and fined up to $150,000 per song.
I am here, not to encourage people to disregard the examples set by the lawsuits, nor to cheer for the RIAA for cutting their losses short by getting a few dimes back, but to see how feasible it is to stop digital piracy completely.
I hope I am wrong, but I think it will never work.
Mp3s are transmitted from one computer to another via a series of network servers and software. To stop copyrighted songs from going through from one computer to another, RIAA may ask the network administrators or Internet Service Providers to intercept any mp3 files with certain artists' names or song titles in them.
But if the users are clever enough, they will simply change the file name or file extensions, so the RIAA can be easily defeated.
Whenever there is digital transmission going across the network, a certain amount of bandwidth is being used. If you are downloading a large number of mp3s, the bandwidth used by you will trigger a "red flag" on the network administrator's monitor and information such as the Internet Protocol address and Media Access Control (MAC or Physical) address is recorded.
Tools like Winrar or Slicer are widely available on CNET's Web site, to split and slice one large mp3 file into many small bits. All these little bits of mp3s can cruise down the information highway with ease.
File-sharing software like Limewire, Morpheous and Audiogalaxy use certain ports on the computer to communicate. To stop software from functioning "properly," network administrators or ISPs can block these ports to prevent any data from going through.
To defeat this block, the users have the ability to choose which port on their computer to use for file sharing.
The bottom line is that with upcoming new technologies like wireless network, infrared data transmission, and personal digital mp3 players that can hold tens and hundreds of gigabytes of information, it would be a waste of human resources and financial effort trying to stop digital piracy.
It did not work for VHS tapes, it did not work for MUSAK, and it will certainly not work in today's high tech world.
If digital piracy does eventually slow down or stop, it will not be due to RIAA's threat of lawsuits, nor from network administrators sniffing through users' computers, but because of consumer boredom.
You don't see many people carry boom boxes around break-dancing anymore, do you?
Can (or should) digital piracy be stopped? Post your opinion in the forum below.
Tian Tang is a Mechanical Engineering Senior. Reach him at tian@asu.edu.
