Piracy is good?

Fascinating article by Mark Pesce in Mindjack: Piracy is Good? How Battlestar Galactica Killed Broadcast TV.

Although no formal surveys have been conducted, it's reasonable to assert that at least four percent of Australians, two percent of Britons, and one percent of Americans are already using broadband hyperdistribution to get some percentage of their TV programs. Based on my own research, I have found television downloading to be widespread among men 18 to 25 years old, precisely the demographic most coveted by advertisers. In other words, the prime audience is already there, already waiting and already willing to receive. All that remains is to put the components of this new value chain into operation.

Plus, a postscript by Mark written in response to the news that the MPAA has filed lawsuits against six sites for sharing TV programs.

I spent the last week touring around Australia's two biggest cities, with one message on my mind, repeated to anyone within earshot: the audience has taken control. I used many stories, from "This Land's" epidemic spread across the net last fall, to the ascendance of Wikipedia, introducing and reinforcing one idea: the audience is starting to exhibit a truly unique emergent quality - swarming.

Predicted a decade ago by Kevin Kelly in Out of Control, we've finally caught up with the future. We have protocols which allow us to swarm our data (BitTorrent). We have websites which allow us to swarm our knowledge (Wikipedia). We will no doubt soon have some evolution of social networks which will allow us to swarm our understanding.

The battle continues unabated. Today the MPAA shut down the six most obvious TV torrent sites on the Internet. It's true. You go to their web pages, only to find that they've been pwned.

And yet, as I type this, I am getting a torrent from one of these sites, even though the BitTorrent tracker, the one central, fixed and therefore vulnerable element in the system, is down, down, down. This shouldn't be happening. Yet it is. With the latest and greatest update to Azureus, a popular BitTorrent application, the torrent trackers themselves have been given over to the swarm. ...

In part two, Mark lays out The New Laws of Television. He says the new rules are good for everyone — unless you're a broadcaster.

The audience is asserting their control over television programming; this is actually a good thing, because the moments for television viewing are expanding in direct proportion to the exercise of this new power. Until very recently, television was an experience which was confined to the lounge room, shackled to a big, heavy box. But now we can watch full-length television programs on our mobile phones (a new capability of the latest generation of mobiles), or on the Sony PlayStation Portable (PSP), a high-resolution, widescreen, portable game and media machine, two of the new "must have" items for the younger set. Audiences are growing fond of the idea of on-demand TV, available wherever they are, whenever they want to watch it. Television viewing has become a multitasking activity; you might watch a short program - something like the 11-minute "Adult Swim" episodes pioneered on the Cartoon Network, or the 3-minute "mobisodes" being rolled out by various wireless carriers. You can dip in, watch something, then go on to something else. Television viewing is no longer wholly consuming; but it is also becoming more pervasive. Freed from the tyranny of the box, people will be watching more TV, and more different kinds of TV, than ever before.

I explore this phenomenon, which I call Edge TV, at some length in Darknet — and cite Mark Pesce as a leading thinker in the dawning era of a new kind of television.

A talk on this subject, delivered by Mark on May 6, 2005, at the Australian Film Television and Radio School in Sydney is available on BitTorrent as a 200MB download.