The Men Who Stole the World (translation of the article)
Ten years ago, four young people changed the world. They did this not with the help of laws, weapons, or money, but with the help of programs: they had radical, destructive ideas that they turned into a program code freely published on the Internet. These four, none of whom graduated from college, created the principles of the digital media environment in which we are now. Then they essentially disappeared.
In 1999, at the Northeastern University, freshman Shawn Fanning wrote Napster, thus initiating P2P file sharing and a new paradigm of “all-consuming information” without the mediation of a major studio or publisher. TIME and FORTUNE placed his portrait on their covers.
In the same year, Norwegian teenager Jon Lech Johansen, together with two unknown programmers, wrote a program that cracked a DVD protection, he became known as “DVD Jon.” He was 15.
In 1997, Justin Frankel, an 18-year-old hacker from Sedona, Ariz., Wrote a free MP3 player called WinAmp, which became a compulsory program for Windows computers and helped revolutionize digital music. For 18 months after the release, 15 million people downloaded its program. 3 years later, Frankel wrote Gnutella, a p2p file transfer protocol, decentralized, unlike Napster, therefore it could not be disabled forcibly. Millions still use it.
In 2001, Bram Cohen, 26, wrote p2p file transfer protocol called BitTorrent, representing a new elegant architecture optimized for transferring large files. BitTorrent has become the standard for transferring large amounts of information over the Internet.
')
In the first half of the 2000s, TIME interviewed every programmer. At that time, it seemed that they were ready to destroy the entire entertainment media complex and begin a digital apocalypse, which would make it impossible to get money from the sale of films, music and TV programs. Artists and musicians will no longer be able to earn. And huge entertainment corporations, Time Warner among them, will be leveled. Pirates will come for corporate America.
“Nevertheless,” we wrote in 2003, “you cannot earn money on information where it is free.” And if the apocalypse had come, Fanning, Johansen, Frankel and Cohen would be his horsemen.
Apocalypse Not
So the apocalypse did not happen. The entertainment industry has changed, more complex and consistent than we expected. If you want to understand what is happening in the digital world now, the story of what happened and what the kings of pirates have done since then is very instructive. Fanning, Johansen, Frankel and Cohen head small, legal firms in Silicon Valley. They all left the pirate business - if ever they were in it.
Fanning - the only one of the four who decided not to give an interview, left the media-apocalypse business early. In 2001, Napster was closed under the onslaught of lawsuits accusing the service of copyright infringement. And in 2002, Fanning founded the new Snocap service - his attempt to make file sharing legal. Together with record companies, Snocap enabled consumers to pay the musician, whose work he downloaded.
But by that time, free file sharing clients were spreading erratically, customers were busy aimlessly stuffing hard drives with music. They exchanged more than 3 million files only in August 2001. Earn on this exchange is not possible. It's hard to compete with free. Fanning created a monster that he could not defeat.
So he stopped trying. Fanning’s next project is a social network for computer players called Rupture, which he sold to Electronic Arts in 2008 for $ 15 million — the first major salary. His current startup, Path, launched in November, is a photo sharing service for the iPhone.
And Napster? He still exists. The brand was sold at auction after bankruptcy and resold again, but was never restored to something significant. He is now under the wing of Best Buy trying to catch up with iTunes with the slogan "More than a music store."
The Pirate Who Wasn't
As the author of Gnutella, Justin Frankel was Fanning's legitimate successor. In contrast, Justin made a profit very early. In 1999, after WinAmp fired, AOL bought the player and Frankel, Nullsoft, for approximately $ 100 million. Frankel became an AOL employee, and he was also very rich in his 20 years.
This was not a wonderful merger. Together with Nullsoft Frankel had to write the best software he could, and give it to the void. In AOL, software trade had a detrimental effect on product quality. Frankel recalls: “What I was working on was like: We want to succeed in making a profit from this product. We make a deal with these companies, so the product must earn. " "But no one bothered the user's opinion."
Meanwhile, Frankel was writing Gnutella in his spare time. It was a great idea: unlike Napster, the system was completely decentralized, without a main server and no “OFF” button, which could be pressed by lawyers. He posted it on the Internet in March 2000 with the note “See? AOL can do good things! ”But re-inventing Napster didn't make Frankel like AOL, the huge Internet company that was trying to reunite with Time Warner, just during the Napster lawsuit. He retired in 2004.
Then, instead of bathing in the glory of his creations, he simply left. He was no longer engaged in Gnutell and did not try to benefit from this project, even after 10 years, LimeWire - the most popular client of the Gnutella network, still has 50 million users. “I wrote Gnutella to prove that this is possible. Let's not make a profit out of it. ” So it does not make sense to do anything with this, it is a concept. ”
Frankel, having recently moved from San Francisco to New York, is now working for his company Cockos (do not ask), which is developing the Reaper audio package. He constantly improves it, and works very closely with his customers, which number in the tens of thousands, and not millions. “This is not the task of constant growth and struggle for the company's image. I just enjoy the process and do what I like. ” He most likely will never say about himself as the most dangerous boom in the world, as Rolling Stone did in 2004. “I think that piracy is not so dangerous. In the end, people who build their business models on the strict control of everything and everyone receive a defective model. And I say, this is like a software developer, where there is always a certain level of piracy. ”Gnutella is a long-standing story for him. “Digital piracy: Has it destroyed the music industry? Not. Should the music industry adapt? Of course, many will say that this will only be better. You have to get people to focus on quality, small groups and things like that. ”
"It didn’t hurt." He shrugs and laughs. "I hope so."
Four-eyed monsters
Of the four horsemen of the apocalypse, Bram Cohen is the only one who works on the same project as 10 years ago. He is a co-founder and head of research at BitTorrent, a respectable San Francisco commercial application company with an incredibly efficient content distribution technology.
This is an amazing company: a legal business built on technology that is used to violate copyright on a large scale. Despite a user base of about 80 million users, BitTorrent still functions as a startup. A relatively small proportion of the total content passing through BitTorrent is legal - about 11%. An even smaller proportion of legal income brings the company.
Like Fanning with his Snocap, Cohen tries to move his brainchild from the world of piracy to the legal world and make some money. In 2007, in times of explosive growth, BitTorrent entered into an agreement with 20th Century Fox, Paramount, Warner Bros. and MGM to form the Torrent Entertainment Network (entertainment torrent network), offering to buy and rent movies, TV shows and video games.
Like Fanning, Cohen realized that getting out of a pirate business is more difficult than it seems at first glance. “It was awful,” says Cohen. The Torrent Entertainment Network was closed at the end of 2008. In retrospect, you can see why it did not work. BitTorrent technology is not user friendly enough and requires a certain level of knowledge. It is able to move large amounts of information very quickly. When you want to make a profit, you have to slow down the transfer rate, monitor and control data using clumsy DRM technology, which limits the actions of the end user.
“I got a good lesson from that failure,” says Cohen with sadness. Now he is focused on working with people who want what he offers: fast digital distribution. “Instead of going to the big content holders and paying them for the privilege of profitable use of our channel, we simply take the thickest channel that we have and go to the interested people”
Now his company is working with the creators of the indie film Four Eyed Monsters and the authors of the independent TV show Pioneer One. This is disappointing: Cohen stands at the origins of an incredible technology that every programmer dreams of, and the big players do not take him seriously.
So why is he trying? As a legend among programmers, Cohen could easily get a job in a large corporation. But this is not his style. "I need some freedom." He is now working on something completely new: a p2p system based on streaming data in real time, instead of in parts. This project has enormous potential for disseminating “live” information, such as news or sports via the Internet. He still heads BitTorrent, but no longer spends much time. “I did almost everything when I released the first release.”
The easy way out
So what happened last year with the pirate apocalypse? In the US, piracy has not become so disastrous for publishers as everyone thought. The US Government Accountability Office's post, issued in April, did not confirm the strict connection between piracy and lost profits, but the findings were not convincing.
What is striking is that the “pirate kings” would be less successful in an honest world. An anarchic look and excellent code do not work the way you want in the prudent world of legitimate commerce. Good code allows the user to make a choice, but a free user is not very good at business. What you really need is total control, which allows the user to do only what you allow.
Another reason the media apocalypse never happens: Steve Jobs. April 28, 2003, on the same day that TIME published a big tour about the explosive growth of file sharing (?), Apple launches the iTunes Music Store. At that time, it was hard to imagine that iTunes would succeed where Snoap and the rest were defeated. Because how can you compete with free?
A simple, attractive interface, a tough Jobs negotiation policy with music studios, an elegant service with which you can download music without any hassle brought success to iTunes, despite the non-repayment and DRM limitations.
It became clear that you can easily compete with free. Napster, Gnutella and BitTorrent will never be as user friendly as Apple products, and the content of these networks is mixed with ads, porn, viruses and junk. When Jobs provided us with an alternative, we accepted it. Freedom is overvalued, especially where digital products are available.
Fanning, Frankel Cohen and Jon Lech Johansen were never fully pirates. Jon did not want to crack the DVD protection in order to crush Hollywood. He did this because he wanted to watch movies on his computer running on Linux. Since in 1999 there was no movie player for his system, he and his partners decided to make one.
When the Motion Picture Association of America found out about it, there was a complaint about Johansen to the Norwegian government. Next was the arrest. Jon postponed two trials, and both times was acquitted. The hacking DVD you bought is no longer legal.
Johansen was genuinely interested in handling digital products acquired by customers in the same way as, for example, with a book - unlimited use and donation to others. In 2005, Johansen moved to California, where he subjected reverse engineering to (reverse engineering) FairPlay, Apple's DRM technology. But then he noticed how attractive the experience of using Apple products was and decided to move it to a more chaotic world of non-Apple products. "We saw that many devices can work much better" "So we started to make a system that allows them to interact with each other"
By “we,” Johansen meant his doubleTwist company, which he co-founded in 2007. The doubleTwist program is free and is something like the Rosetta Stone for digital media files: it can convert, synchronize and organize files between 500 different devices and combine them into one elegant interface. In June, doubleTwist introduced an application for the Android platform, about 500,000 people have already downloaded it. Last year, doubleTwist successfully cut it off by making an advertisement with the slogan: “A cure for iPhone addiction. Your iTunes library on any device. In seconds. Advertising was placed in front of the Apple store.
Johansen rejects any attempt to associate it with piracy. “I support fair use (fair use), if you legally purchased the content, you have the full right to play it on any device and use any software.” For Johansen, like for other “pirate kings,” all this is primarily about writing good code and the possibilities that it gives people. This is the real reason why the pirate apocalypse never happens. Pirates don't need movies and music to be financially free; they want real freedom.
Original
This is my first translation experience of such a large volume. I strongly welcome healthy criticism. If you find errors, translation shortcomings, let me know by habraposhta, so as not to "litter" in the comments
And again: I tried to issue as a translation, but the link was not swallowed, I had to do so.
In 1999, at the Northeastern University, freshman Shawn Fanning wrote Napster, thus initiating P2P file sharing and a new paradigm of “all-consuming information” without the mediation of a major studio or publisher. TIME and FORTUNE placed his portrait on their covers.
In the same year, Norwegian teenager Jon Lech Johansen, together with two unknown programmers, wrote a program that cracked a DVD protection, he became known as “DVD Jon.” He was 15.
In 1997, Justin Frankel, an 18-year-old hacker from Sedona, Ariz., Wrote a free MP3 player called WinAmp, which became a compulsory program for Windows computers and helped revolutionize digital music. For 18 months after the release, 15 million people downloaded its program. 3 years later, Frankel wrote Gnutella, a p2p file transfer protocol, decentralized, unlike Napster, therefore it could not be disabled forcibly. Millions still use it.
In 2001, Bram Cohen, 26, wrote p2p file transfer protocol called BitTorrent, representing a new elegant architecture optimized for transferring large files. BitTorrent has become the standard for transferring large amounts of information over the Internet.
')
In the first half of the 2000s, TIME interviewed every programmer. At that time, it seemed that they were ready to destroy the entire entertainment media complex and begin a digital apocalypse, which would make it impossible to get money from the sale of films, music and TV programs. Artists and musicians will no longer be able to earn. And huge entertainment corporations, Time Warner among them, will be leveled. Pirates will come for corporate America.
“Nevertheless,” we wrote in 2003, “you cannot earn money on information where it is free.” And if the apocalypse had come, Fanning, Johansen, Frankel and Cohen would be his horsemen.
Apocalypse Not
So the apocalypse did not happen. The entertainment industry has changed, more complex and consistent than we expected. If you want to understand what is happening in the digital world now, the story of what happened and what the kings of pirates have done since then is very instructive. Fanning, Johansen, Frankel and Cohen head small, legal firms in Silicon Valley. They all left the pirate business - if ever they were in it.
Fanning - the only one of the four who decided not to give an interview, left the media-apocalypse business early. In 2001, Napster was closed under the onslaught of lawsuits accusing the service of copyright infringement. And in 2002, Fanning founded the new Snocap service - his attempt to make file sharing legal. Together with record companies, Snocap enabled consumers to pay the musician, whose work he downloaded.
But by that time, free file sharing clients were spreading erratically, customers were busy aimlessly stuffing hard drives with music. They exchanged more than 3 million files only in August 2001. Earn on this exchange is not possible. It's hard to compete with free. Fanning created a monster that he could not defeat.
So he stopped trying. Fanning’s next project is a social network for computer players called Rupture, which he sold to Electronic Arts in 2008 for $ 15 million — the first major salary. His current startup, Path, launched in November, is a photo sharing service for the iPhone.
And Napster? He still exists. The brand was sold at auction after bankruptcy and resold again, but was never restored to something significant. He is now under the wing of Best Buy trying to catch up with iTunes with the slogan "More than a music store."
The Pirate Who Wasn't
As the author of Gnutella, Justin Frankel was Fanning's legitimate successor. In contrast, Justin made a profit very early. In 1999, after WinAmp fired, AOL bought the player and Frankel, Nullsoft, for approximately $ 100 million. Frankel became an AOL employee, and he was also very rich in his 20 years.
This was not a wonderful merger. Together with Nullsoft Frankel had to write the best software he could, and give it to the void. In AOL, software trade had a detrimental effect on product quality. Frankel recalls: “What I was working on was like: We want to succeed in making a profit from this product. We make a deal with these companies, so the product must earn. " "But no one bothered the user's opinion."
Meanwhile, Frankel was writing Gnutella in his spare time. It was a great idea: unlike Napster, the system was completely decentralized, without a main server and no “OFF” button, which could be pressed by lawyers. He posted it on the Internet in March 2000 with the note “See? AOL can do good things! ”But re-inventing Napster didn't make Frankel like AOL, the huge Internet company that was trying to reunite with Time Warner, just during the Napster lawsuit. He retired in 2004.
Then, instead of bathing in the glory of his creations, he simply left. He was no longer engaged in Gnutell and did not try to benefit from this project, even after 10 years, LimeWire - the most popular client of the Gnutella network, still has 50 million users. “I wrote Gnutella to prove that this is possible. Let's not make a profit out of it. ” So it does not make sense to do anything with this, it is a concept. ”
Frankel, having recently moved from San Francisco to New York, is now working for his company Cockos (do not ask), which is developing the Reaper audio package. He constantly improves it, and works very closely with his customers, which number in the tens of thousands, and not millions. “This is not the task of constant growth and struggle for the company's image. I just enjoy the process and do what I like. ” He most likely will never say about himself as the most dangerous boom in the world, as Rolling Stone did in 2004. “I think that piracy is not so dangerous. In the end, people who build their business models on the strict control of everything and everyone receive a defective model. And I say, this is like a software developer, where there is always a certain level of piracy. ”Gnutella is a long-standing story for him. “Digital piracy: Has it destroyed the music industry? Not. Should the music industry adapt? Of course, many will say that this will only be better. You have to get people to focus on quality, small groups and things like that. ”
"It didn’t hurt." He shrugs and laughs. "I hope so."
Four-eyed monsters
Of the four horsemen of the apocalypse, Bram Cohen is the only one who works on the same project as 10 years ago. He is a co-founder and head of research at BitTorrent, a respectable San Francisco commercial application company with an incredibly efficient content distribution technology.
This is an amazing company: a legal business built on technology that is used to violate copyright on a large scale. Despite a user base of about 80 million users, BitTorrent still functions as a startup. A relatively small proportion of the total content passing through BitTorrent is legal - about 11%. An even smaller proportion of legal income brings the company.
Like Fanning with his Snocap, Cohen tries to move his brainchild from the world of piracy to the legal world and make some money. In 2007, in times of explosive growth, BitTorrent entered into an agreement with 20th Century Fox, Paramount, Warner Bros. and MGM to form the Torrent Entertainment Network (entertainment torrent network), offering to buy and rent movies, TV shows and video games.
Like Fanning, Cohen realized that getting out of a pirate business is more difficult than it seems at first glance. “It was awful,” says Cohen. The Torrent Entertainment Network was closed at the end of 2008. In retrospect, you can see why it did not work. BitTorrent technology is not user friendly enough and requires a certain level of knowledge. It is able to move large amounts of information very quickly. When you want to make a profit, you have to slow down the transfer rate, monitor and control data using clumsy DRM technology, which limits the actions of the end user.
“I got a good lesson from that failure,” says Cohen with sadness. Now he is focused on working with people who want what he offers: fast digital distribution. “Instead of going to the big content holders and paying them for the privilege of profitable use of our channel, we simply take the thickest channel that we have and go to the interested people”
Now his company is working with the creators of the indie film Four Eyed Monsters and the authors of the independent TV show Pioneer One. This is disappointing: Cohen stands at the origins of an incredible technology that every programmer dreams of, and the big players do not take him seriously.
So why is he trying? As a legend among programmers, Cohen could easily get a job in a large corporation. But this is not his style. "I need some freedom." He is now working on something completely new: a p2p system based on streaming data in real time, instead of in parts. This project has enormous potential for disseminating “live” information, such as news or sports via the Internet. He still heads BitTorrent, but no longer spends much time. “I did almost everything when I released the first release.”
The easy way out
So what happened last year with the pirate apocalypse? In the US, piracy has not become so disastrous for publishers as everyone thought. The US Government Accountability Office's post, issued in April, did not confirm the strict connection between piracy and lost profits, but the findings were not convincing.
What is striking is that the “pirate kings” would be less successful in an honest world. An anarchic look and excellent code do not work the way you want in the prudent world of legitimate commerce. Good code allows the user to make a choice, but a free user is not very good at business. What you really need is total control, which allows the user to do only what you allow.
Another reason the media apocalypse never happens: Steve Jobs. April 28, 2003, on the same day that TIME published a big tour about the explosive growth of file sharing (?), Apple launches the iTunes Music Store. At that time, it was hard to imagine that iTunes would succeed where Snoap and the rest were defeated. Because how can you compete with free?
A simple, attractive interface, a tough Jobs negotiation policy with music studios, an elegant service with which you can download music without any hassle brought success to iTunes, despite the non-repayment and DRM limitations.
It became clear that you can easily compete with free. Napster, Gnutella and BitTorrent will never be as user friendly as Apple products, and the content of these networks is mixed with ads, porn, viruses and junk. When Jobs provided us with an alternative, we accepted it. Freedom is overvalued, especially where digital products are available.
Fanning, Frankel Cohen and Jon Lech Johansen were never fully pirates. Jon did not want to crack the DVD protection in order to crush Hollywood. He did this because he wanted to watch movies on his computer running on Linux. Since in 1999 there was no movie player for his system, he and his partners decided to make one.
When the Motion Picture Association of America found out about it, there was a complaint about Johansen to the Norwegian government. Next was the arrest. Jon postponed two trials, and both times was acquitted. The hacking DVD you bought is no longer legal.
Johansen was genuinely interested in handling digital products acquired by customers in the same way as, for example, with a book - unlimited use and donation to others. In 2005, Johansen moved to California, where he subjected reverse engineering to (reverse engineering) FairPlay, Apple's DRM technology. But then he noticed how attractive the experience of using Apple products was and decided to move it to a more chaotic world of non-Apple products. "We saw that many devices can work much better" "So we started to make a system that allows them to interact with each other"
By “we,” Johansen meant his doubleTwist company, which he co-founded in 2007. The doubleTwist program is free and is something like the Rosetta Stone for digital media files: it can convert, synchronize and organize files between 500 different devices and combine them into one elegant interface. In June, doubleTwist introduced an application for the Android platform, about 500,000 people have already downloaded it. Last year, doubleTwist successfully cut it off by making an advertisement with the slogan: “A cure for iPhone addiction. Your iTunes library on any device. In seconds. Advertising was placed in front of the Apple store.
Johansen rejects any attempt to associate it with piracy. “I support fair use (fair use), if you legally purchased the content, you have the full right to play it on any device and use any software.” For Johansen, like for other “pirate kings,” all this is primarily about writing good code and the possibilities that it gives people. This is the real reason why the pirate apocalypse never happens. Pirates don't need movies and music to be financially free; they want real freedom.
Original
This is my first translation experience of such a large volume. I strongly welcome healthy criticism. If you find errors, translation shortcomings, let me know by habraposhta, so as not to "litter" in the comments
And again: I tried to issue as a translation, but the link was not swallowed, I had to do so.
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/109398/
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