Jockin’ aXXo

Slate has posted a new article on BitTorrent uploading legend “aXXo.” It is really a piece about the ripping culture of BitTorrent, which I find to be more than a little intresting in a voyeuristic way. I wish I was in on all of the different “teams” of pirates. If you have ever downloaded pirated digitial music software (guilty as charged), you know the major “teams” involved–h20, oxygen and a bunch of others. You can tell who they are because they usually have it on the torrent file or somewhere else on the software itself–a form of “watermarking” or “tagging.”

A great point that Josh Levin, the author, makes is that aXXo has been able to exert a level of dominance in the Torrent world that is unparalleled. As you may imagine, sheer ability and great product has a lot to do with this. Any movie Torrent done by aXXO (there are fakes out there so be careful) is consistent:

In the fly-by-night BitTorrent universe, aXXo quickly became a trusted brand name. For one thing, aXXo movies are always crisp DVD rips—files harvested from a digital copy of the movie rather than a shaky camcorder—and are often posted online weeks before the movies are released on video. They’re never bundled with malware or protected with passwords; all you have to do is press play as soon as the download is complete. Finally, the files are a predictable size: right around 700 megabytes, the amount of data that fits on a single CD-R. That makes it easy to burn an aXXo movie to CD for archiving purposes or for watching on a compatible DVD player.

The branding of aXXo parallels another popular illegal trade–drugs:

BitTorrent users flock to aXXo for the same reason people go to, say, Pixar movies—a reputation, earned over time, for quality and reliability. There are other popular uploaders (“release groups” in BitTorrent parlance): FXG, eztv, and R5 are all well-known purveyors of pirated TV shows and movies. Garland notes the parallels here to the illegal drug trade. Just as labeling the product in a dime bag “Pineapple Express” might confer a certain renown, so can slapping a label on a computer file. “If you just go looking for a particular film or a particular TV show, you never know what you’re going to get,” Garland [a blogger] explains. “The logo or the mark or the brand … is important because there’s a reasonable expectation that you’re going to be getting a high-quality product.”

What’s striking to me is how much the story of the rise of aXXo resembles the idealized narrative of capitalist self-reliance and innovation, not really a bad-ass rebellious anti-capitalism. Does it not remind you of some kind of story of a small business started by an Eastern European immigrant in Lower Manhattan at the dawn of the 20th century that today has gone on to become AIG or Goldman Sachs? The triumphalism, however, is not exactly the “Joe the Plumberized” story of small business because, well, aXXo is taking a lot of money from Big Hollywood.

And surely one of the major reasons why this is so is the nature of BitTorrent itself. As Levin writes,

BitTorrent, as Paul Boutin explained in a 2004 Slate piece, is the smartest file-sharing mechanism yet conceived by man. Downloading something from a single source can be slow and unreliable. BitTorrent speeds things up by grabbing pieces of the file—aka torrent—from lots of different sources. The cleverest thing about the BitTorrent protocol, though, is its sharing scheme. As you’re downloading, your computer simultaneously uploads the chunks of the file you’ve already received to others who still need them. The more popular the file, the more people share it, and the sooner your download will finish.

But also, it is the MPAA’s rather unusual response to this bleeding of funds by attacking Torrent hosts, not uploaders themselves. This could be seen as a good idea for them. Attack the platform not the people. But like Wolverine, the Internet is regenerative and usually not in an always recognizable form. Torrent sites are always finding a layer in the fold of the Web to creep back in. Levin agrees:

Shutting down a site like TorrentSpy has little effect on download rates because uploaders like aXXo don’t sequester their files on a particular site—they’re available all over the Web. Unless the MPAA changes its enforcement strategy, then, aXXo should continue his reign as long as he cares to remain on top.

Maybe I shouldn’t have blogged this…

Haha, let’s get real though. No one from MPAA reads my blog…right?

X-posted at Human Potential.