I've been thinking a lot about how to address the siege being waged on BitTorrent sites by the MPAA, the RIAA and the law enforcement agencies of various nations. The situation looks basically like this. The BitTorrent protocol is a distributed peer-to-peer system in which clients connect to trackers to find else what other clients are sharing a particular file. The clients then connect to each other and send data back and forth. The trackers themselves are not actually handling any of the data, which is the defense put forth by the operators.

The MPAA and RIAA don't care. They have issued cease and desist letters to some operators, engaged in distributed denial of service attacks against some trackers and actually had police raid some others. A handful of end-users have had lawsuits filed against them, but this is primarily an assault on the servers. Many of these servers (in fact, the vast majority of the high-trafficked ones) are located in Europe and Asia, and subject to American laws; however, local law enforcement agencies appear quite willing to help out. In the last few days, two of the top BitTorrent sites -- Suprnova and TorrentBits -- closed up shop for good. A number of other sites seem to have been lost as well, and those that remain are operating extremely slowly under the burden of new traffic.

(Now comes the part where I try not to incriminate myself too much.)

The problem with this approach is exactly the same as the problem with the way the RIAA approached Napster several years ago. When Napster started to get pinched, Audiogalaxy, WinMX and KaZaa stepped in; meanwhile, people started running private Napster servers using the OpenNap system. In the two days since the closing of TorrentBits became official, I've found about ten new-ish sites that fill the same niche and any of which could become just as big.

BitTorrent alone accounts for about a third of all Internet traffic. It's not very secure when it comes to anonymity, but there are a lot of people working on that problem. It's not going anywhere, and it's an exceptionally well-designed delivery system. The MPAA could look at what happened when the RIAA dragged its feet on legal downloads (about 200,000,000 songs have been purchased for download ever, compared with about 1,500,000,000 that are freely downloaded each month) and decide to use BitTorrent to develop online distribution right now. They could realize that the people using BitTorrent the most don't have much money to sue away but are very enthusiastic about the music, movies and TV that they download. These people are simply not costing anybody any money; the greatest crime they are committing against the entertainment industry is getting the word out early about crap product.