twopointouch

Sue me now: I have used BitTorrent to sample stuff I was not in a position to buy or was not sure whether I wanted to buy. It’s been piracy, legally, but my defences, which I am sure wouldn’t see me win in court, but which might help here are:

(a) I buy more music and games than most people. Check out my iTunes, gamers gate, direct2download and metaboli accounts (you can’t because they are private, but I assure you they are burgeoning).

(b) I feel ripped off by a lot of MSM releases. I buy a music album and I only like two tracks. I buy a game and every level is the same as the first, or normally, worse. That’s not fair, and internet sharing gives me a means to test properly before I buy. I don’t want to give cases in point right here, but it’s certainly true. OK – found Neil Finn through Blip.FM (an internet radio malarkey, like a mix between Twitter and Last.fm). Then I bought two of his CDs. Fair deal? I think so.

(c) I go on to buy or follow a lot of stuff I get this way. I might download your first album or game, but then I’ll go on to buy your second or third. I might come to your gig, tell my friends how great it is, etc., etc.

(d) The content producers very often haven’t created a way for me to sample the product – e.g. downloadable tracks, a streaming radio station or a lengthy games demo. Twenty pounds is (sadly) a lot to me, and I want a way to test the worth of new purchases.

(e) In the case of digital downloads, the producer’s marginal costs are zero, especially if it’s been bit-torrented. They aren’t losing money (because of b, c, and d, above).

Anyway, the main point of this post was supposed to be about the mechanism of these things. It is a file-sharing mechanisms, but it isn’t really about sharing at all. It is about getting.

No-one (hardly) goes to a bit-torrent site with the view of sharing something. They want to get something. “I want Crysis Warhead” or “I want the new Girls Aloud album” (really?)

These mechanisms and sites aren’t publicly-funded charities, so there has to be some way that users pay for that bandwidth/opportunity.

For many sites, like Rapidshare, for example, there’s a ‘freemium’ model – which is not a BitTorrent site. So there’s advertising on public pages and an upgrade to faster bandwidth, etc. There are a lot of variations on that theme.

But I am not very interested by that and its many variants. I am interested in BitTorrent.

BitTorrent is an internet protocol rather than a site (though it does have a site). The idea is decentralised traffic – a site, like PirateBay, most famously (though quite possibly hundreds of sites), posts a “map” – or torrent file – which shows how to link to other users who have the pieces of the treasure you’re seeking. And then you download from all of those sources, sharing them with other users at the same time. Ideally, you’ll go on to share them more with other users, once you’ve got the file you’re looking for, although there’s little compulsion to do that. Some sites that publish torrents (the little files that contain the ‘map’) enforce ratios. To download more that 20MB of a new file, for example, you need to have uploaded 10MB of another file.

BitTorrent has proven tricky for the Internet Police to close down because it is about user-to-user (they call it peer-to-peer). Closing down BitTorrent isn’t about shutting down a single site, like Napster, it’s about stopping millions of users doing what they want to do. There are also lots of perfectly legal uses for BitTorrent, such as sharing music, video, anything you’ve produced copyright-free or under a Creative Commons license.

It may be the case that under the new MOU (Memorandum of Understanding) between the BPI and the six major UK Internet Service Providers (ISPs), that web traffic that looks like a torrent (that’s the word for a file being transferred using BitTorrent) will be cut off by your ISP. The ISPs don’t really want to do that, for fear of losing customers, so they’ll need to be forced into it by legislation or (more likely) fear of legislation.

Back to BitTorrent and why it’s interesting.

BitTorrent is interesting to social media folk because it enforces sharing, to some extent. If you do not allow others to download the parts of a file you have already downloaded, then you’ll not be able to download any more. It’s wholly mathematical about the way it does that: the more you share, the faster you’ll be able to download. Many people have attempted to hack that system to get what they want instead of benefitting the swarm (the users attempting to get the file), but have been unsuccessful, to date.

To put that into more ’social’ terms: the more value you add, the more value you derive.

Isn’t that the ideal state for any social network? It’s already the case, in many ways, for many of these beasts, but think about how it could have a mathematical enforcement, the way BitTorrent has created:

1. No Spam
2. You receive only what you have requested
3. Effort == Rewards
4. Value == Rewards

I don’t see that state in any social networks of which I am currently a member, possibly barring LinkedIn. They all seem to be spammable, because there isn’t any real maths behind the contribution mechanism. I am no mathematian nor programmer, but have considerable respect for what both disciplines bring to the table.

So how to create that? I can see a few things looking sensible:

1. Private messages only, initially.
2. Public messages or message to your groups in return for recognised content.
3. Kudos of some kind being rewarded for sharing.
4. You can only share other people’s stuff.
5. But doing so raises kudos.

What else have I missed, or is this lala-cuckooland? Does social media need more Maths and less talk? I’d like to know.