Playing on the Go

Bittorrent, the infamous sharing protocol is the world’s largest way of sharing music, video, games, applications and everything else has always come under harsh criticism for its, “questionable,” practices. Some embrace it and others scorn it but why is that so? Lets consider the facts…Shall we???

People who hate bittorrent and want to squash it

Government
The Pirate Bay was temporarily shutdown last week because the Swedish government finally decided to sensor Gottfrid Svartholm’s (owner of the pirate bay) ports. This action was in violation of EU law therefore winning Gottfrid’s “Largest Bittorrent Tracker,” back online. The Government wants to do something, but are poorly managed.

RIAA and MPAA
The two most militant groups in the battle against online piracy are the RIAA(Recording Industry Association of America) and the MPAA(Motion Picture Association of America). These two and constantly hammering trackers trying every way possible to shut them down. Even now, in some cubical in some office building, there is a task force of people dreaming up of a new way to kill the infamy. The RIAA and MPAA have righteous intentions of protecting the profits of Albums and Movies, however i believe that the internet is one frontier they can never fully conquer.

ISP
Your Internet Service Provider is probably the most powerful organization of counter-pirates. Some ISPs, like comcast, have a history of blocking seeder’s upload speeds, slowing bringing downloads to a halt. My ISP, cox, sends users letters to inform them that they’re downloading copy-written material and then threaten to temporarily shut down the user’s internet if they do not comply. These instances are rare but extremely effective, how the heck am i gonna check my email with interweb?

Why they’ll never succeed

Volume
There are MILLIONS of transfers in bittorrent every MONTH. Out of those prodigious numbers only a small handful are arrested a year. If the Government really wanted to get then we’d have in increase our penitentiary capacity.

Inability for laws to allow a Tracker to be shutdown
Gottfrid operated thepiratebay.org in the same building as Scandinavian IRAA. They couldn’t do anything about it because it was difficult to find a law that he was breaking. There is no cookie-cutter law that says that bittorrent trackers are in violation of anything.

Failure of DRM
DRM (Digital Rights Management) was originally intended to solve all the RIAA’s problems by equipping encryption onto song files making them only playable on certain machines. The supposed product was that only the buyer could hear the song he bought and no one else. Well, thats and fine and dandy but the RIAA never realized that people can still download MP3s (which have no encryption) and still listen to shared music with minimal loss of bit-rate.

Nature of the Internet
The movie, “Steal this movie,” alluded to this fact. The Internet was created for the spread of information and data without restrictions. It was built so that no one computer could be superior to any other. The Government’s idea of stopping this flow of information is simply not compatible with the protocol of the entire internet. It can never be controlled or stopped unless the masses of people do it willingly.

But how does this all apply to mobile gaming? The with all the piracy occurring on the internet some of it is bound to spill out onto mobile platforms. Mobile game makes might pursue a course of DRM to protect their games from freeloaders