HOLLYWOOD, Calif. - Diana Duke, executive director of the Free Speech Coalition, got the party started Tuesday morning at the Sheraton Universal for the FSC's summit on "How to Survive in a Digital Environment." As she put it, "Virtual money does not pay real bills." Everyone in the audience mumbled in agreement. She then went on to introduce the first speakers of the day, including Kelly Truelove, of Truelove Research, the presenter of the first seminar, "Technology Show and Tell: Copyrighted Content's Best Friend or Worst Enemy?"
Truelove described himself as a kind of mechanic who breaks apart a potential copyright infringer's site and puts it back together for the lawyers. He believes that the biggest trend in online piracy is "layering." He then began the seminar by going into a bit of the history of online piracy, from single-operator, centralized models to later ones such as Napster, a site that used a decentralized, middleman type, also termed "peer-to-peer." And then he hit on the newest in piracy: the multi-layered model known as "torrent."
Through a PowerPoint demonstration, Truelove took everyone through the way a potential user would obtain content through torrent technology. To sum up: the user goes through several intermediaries, starting with obtaining a torrent client, then locating a torrent file (which only describes the torrent and contains info about where to find the desired content), and finally downloading the content using the pre-installed torrent, which uses a process called "swarming."
Layering is in fact nothing new, as legitimate business models often have third-party billing for example, so it is no surprise to see it manifesting itself in piracy. With "piracy in a box," almost anyone can now set up a torrent site anywhere, and take it down as quickly as it was put up.
In terms of anti-piracy trends, the big one is acoustic/visual fingerprinting, which is essentially a type of watermarking. The only problem with this trend, as Truelove put it, is that it requires a reference database of all the "fingerprints," which could prove difficult to establish.
Truelove then opened up the floor for questions. One particular question was how Truelove would go about assessing a potential target of piracy. As he put it: "forensic analysis." An interesting, and fitting, choice of words.
