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Steal This File Sharing Book—What They Won’t Tell You About File Sharing WALLACE WANG San Francisco Copyright © 2004 by Wallace Wang. All rights reserved. No part of this work may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the copyright owner and the publisher. Printed in the United States of America on recycled paper 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 — 07 06 05 04 No Starch Press and the No Starch Press logo are registered trademarks of No Starch Press, Inc. Other product and company names mentioned herein may be the trademarks of their respective owners. Rather than use a trademark symbol with every occurrence of a trademarked name, we are using the names only in an editorial fashion and to the benefit of the trademark owner, with no intention of infringement of the trademark. Publisher: William Pollock Managing Editor: Karol Jurado Part 1: Learning About File Sharing Chapter List Chapter 1: Finding the Files Overview There is one thing stronger than all the armies in the world, and that is an idea whose time has come. —Victor Hugo A computer file can be anything from a single song to a photograph, a full-length motion picture, the complete text from a book, or a computer program that sells for thousands of dollars. Because a computer file is made up of electronic data, all it does is fill up the space on your hard drive. And large hard drives are really cheap today, which means you can fill them up with many, many files at relatively little cost. Storing this stuff is just not an issue. Computer files can also be copied with perfect accuracy and transferred flawlessly to nearly any computer in the world. In most industries, such qualities might be admirable, but in the computer industry, those same qualities spell trouble for copyright holders. If someone can make multiple copies of a song, a book, or a computer program at no cost, what will stop people from bl Chapter 1: Finding the Files THE INTERNET: A GRAB BAG OF FILES If something can be copied, it probably already has been, and it’s just a matter of knowing where to look for it on the Internet. Although most people think of the Internet as nothing more than pretty websites and email, it’s really a network that connects computers. The Internet has revolutionized the way people share files. In the old days, sharing files meant physically handing a copy of a floppy disk to another person, but with the Internet, sharing files can be as simple as pressing a button. With people able to share files so easily, sharing files no longer requires technical knowledge as much as it requires motivation. Some people share files because they like the idea of “getting back” at big corporations by not paying for the copyrighted files that they duplicate and distribute to others. Others share because they just want a copy of a particular song or program, and they don’t want or can’t afford to pay for it. Still a few people share files TRADING FILES MANUALLY Although most people trade files over the Internet because it’s fast and convenient, you can still find people trading files the old-fashioned way by passing around copies of files manually. Although trading pirated files this way can be slow, it has huge side benefits: it’s anonymous and more profitable. At the simplest level, many people freely copy CDs or DVDs for their friends. While this is technically illegal, it’s highly unlikely that the police will bust you for owning a single illegal DVD copy of The Lord of the Rings. People often “share” programs by passing a program’s installation CD around an office so everyone can install the program on their computer. CORPORATE PIRACY On a somewhat larger scale, many businesses buy a single legal copy of a program and then install that program on multiple computers to save money. Such frugalness often backfires when a disgruntled employee notifies the authorities, and the company winds up getting fined for pirating THE THIEVES’ MINDSET With such rampant file copying occurring on and off the Internet, you might wonder why people do it, if they know it’s against the law. Of course, people break the speed limit, cheat on their taxes, and accept bribes for the same reason they might copy files illegally—because it’s a low-risk, high-reward activity. One reason some people copy files illegally is because they don’t see their activities as harmful. When they copy a CD or give a duplicate to a friend, they don’t see anyone getting hurt in the process. What they don’t see are the copyright owners losing money every time someone copies a CD or DVD instead of buying a legitimate copy (assuming, of course, that they would have bought the pirated CD/DVD in the first place, which is not necessarily the case). Beyond those who see copying as harmless and innocent, there are many more people who copy CDs and DVDs knowing full well that they’re breaking the law. In some cases, they feel that the law is too restr Chapter 2: The Peer-to-Peer File Sharing Networks Overview Behind every great fortune there is a crime. —Honoré de Balzac Between 1999 and 2001, Napster defined the entire world of peer-to-peer file sharing networks until lawsuits shut them down. Despite limiting trading only to audio files and forcing every user to access a central server to find the files they wanted (which allowed the authorities to shut down Napster just by shutting down this central server), Napster proved both the technical feasibility and popular acceptance of peer-to-peer file sharing networks for the masses. While Napster (http://www.napster.com) has reincarnated itself as a legal, subscription-based file sharing service (see Chapter 16 for more information), the free-wheeling, rebellious spirit of file sharing lives on in a host of copycat networks struggling to define themselves in the void left by the original, free version of Napster (which was put out of business by lawsuits launched by the recording indu Chapter 2: The Peer-to-Peer File Sharing Networks HOW FILE SHARING WORKS The whole idea behind file sharing is to connect everyone in a network so that every computer can copy files from any other computer over the Internet. The types of files you share can be anything from programs and pictures to music and movies. If you can store it in a file, you can share it over a file sharing network. To connect to one of the many file sharing networks available, you need a file sharing program. In technical terms, a file sharing program turns your computer into both a client and a server. As a client, your computer can search a file sharing network to find and copy files from any other computer on the network. As a server, your computer can provide files to anyone else on the network. Once you’ve installed a file sharing program on your computer, you’re ready to start searching for files. Note Note Visit See What You Share on P2P (http://www.seewhatyoushare.com) for a look at what people share online: everything from ordinary pictures to poli THE DIFFERENT FILE SHARING NETWORKS When it comes to file sharing, there are the networks themselves, and there are the programs that actually run on your computer (the client programs). A file sharing network is like a television network, while a client program is like a television that tunes in only to a particular network. Each file sharing network has its own dedicated client program; if you want to use the FastTrack file sharing network, you need to use the Kazaa client. The client is what you use to search for and download files from the file sharing network. Because the file sharing networks don’t share files among themselves, your chances of finding a particular file are much better if you tap into one of the larger networks or use multiple clients to tap into multiple networks. (Just don’t run two client programs that use the same network, or you’ll just be searching the same network twice.) Here are some of the more popular file sharing networks: Gnutella and Gnutella2 (G2) F ADDITIONAL FILE SHARING FEATURES With so many different client programs available to tap into the same file sharing networks, each client program may offer different features to entice people to use their program instead. Some client programs claim faster searching and downloading. Others include a built-in media player, so you can play your downloaded files immediately without having to load a separate media player, such as iTunes or Windows Media Player. Other client programs offer parental controls to limit your kids from searching for specific words (and finding certain types of files to download, such as pornography), file shredders to destroy all traces of a downloaded file after you delete it (to prevent the authorities from examining your hard disk to see what copyrighted files you might have copied in the past), and proxy server access, so you can connect to a file sharing network through another computer (called a proxy) to help mask your IP address. Some other popular featur SPECIALIZED FILE SHARING NETWORKS In the computer world, nothing stays the same for long, and peer-to-peer technology is no different. Although FastTrack and Gnutella may be two popular file sharing networks right now, there’s no guarantee that another file sharing network won’t suddenly surge in popularity and push more established file sharing networks into the background. So if you’re the adventurous type who wants to explore some of the smaller and newer file sharing networks, take some time to experiment with the file sharing networks listed in this section. UP-AND-COMING FILE SHARING NETWORKS For an alternative file sharing network, take a peek at Soulseek (http://www.slsknet.org), which specializes in sharing complete music albums. Soulseek is completely free, and it doesn’t secretly install adware on your computer. To make money, the publishers of Soulseek offer a unique incentive: the more money you donate, the closer you get to the front of the line when waiting to download f Chapter 3: Navigating Newsgroups Overview We live in a rainbow of Chaos. —Paul Cézanne Before the Web offered point-and-click access to information, Internet users shared information through Usenet (Unix User Network or Users Network) newsgroups. Newsgroups provided a place to swap scholarly talk about mostly academic and scientific topics, but eventually people created two previously vetoed newsgroups: “Sex” and “Drugs.” To complete the trilogy, a programmer named Brian Reid added a third newsgroup called “Rock and Roll”: From: mejac!decwrl!reid (Brian Reid) Message-Id: <8804040154.AA01236@woodpecker.dec.com> Date: 3 Apr 1988 1754-PST (Sunday) To: backbone@purdue.edu, chiefdan@vax1.acs.udel.edu, hoptoad!gnu Subject: Re: soc.sex final results In-Reply-To: Gene Spafford <spaf@purdue.edu> /Sun, 03 Apr 88 18:22:36 EST. <8804032322.AA15650@arthur.cs.purdue.edu> To end the suspense, I have just created alt.sex That meant that the alt network now carried alt.sex and alt.drugs. It was therefo Chapter 3: Navigating Newsgroups GETTING STARTED WITH NEWSGROUPS Usenet offers more than 50,000 different newsgroups to choose from, but before you can read them, let alone download any files from them, you need the following: A newsgroup server (which most Internet service providers offer free with your Internet service) A newsgroup reader program (such as Thunderbird, free from http://www.mozilla.org) A subscription to one or more newsgroups (these are free) CHOOSING A NEWSGROUP SERVER A newsgroup server is simply a computer that constantly adds, deletes, and updates messages from all over the Internet. When you connect your computer to the newsgroup server computer, you can start downloading files or exchanging messages with other people. Newsgroup servers aren’t hard to find. Most ISPs run their own newsgroup servers, so if you have your own Internet service, you probably already have free access to newsgroups. However, the quality differs widely among different servers. For instance, very few ISPs carry every ava NAVIGATING NEWSGROUPS Although there are thousands of newsgroups to choose from, you can often decipher the type of information each one contains by examining the newsgroup name. For example, the newsgroup named sci.space is a science-related newsgroup focusing on space interests such as space exploration; comp.privacy is a computer-related newsgroup focusing on privacy issues. The following table lists the most common newsgroup names you’ll encounter along with a brief description of the type of information each one contains. WORD TYPE OF INFORMATION COVERED TYPICAL NAME comp Computer-related topics comp.privacy news News about Usenet itself news.announce rec Recreational activities rec.audio.misc sci Science-related topics, except for computers sci.space soc Sociology topics soc.culture.bolivia talk Chat forum for discussing and debating different ideas and topics talk.atheism alt Alternative topics alt.binaries.movies misc Miscellaneous topics that don’t fit anywhere else misc.jobs. SHARING FILES THROUGH A NEWSGROUP Newsgroups were originally designed to contain nothing but plain-text messages. To get around that restriction, programmers created special ways to convert binary files—music or programs, for instance—into text, so that the files can appear in a newsgroup. Dedicated newsreader programs can automatically encode and decode binary files as you upload or download them so you probably won’t even notice all the work going on in the background. When you download an MP3 file from a newsgroup, for instance, your newsreader automatically decodes it and places it on your hard drive as an MP3 file. However, a new encoding scheme appeared in 2001, and a few newsreaders still don’t support it. Known as yEnc (http://www.yenc.org), the scheme packs more information into less space, which is beneficial to the newsreader but which doesn’t save any time uploading or downloading. Many newsreader programs include built-in yEnc encoding and decoding, but ordinary email/news NEWSGROUP ETIQUETTE When file swapping on newsgroups, you’re joining a gang of very efficiently organized thieves and pirates, so it’s best to keep a low profile. Many binary groups have an adjacent “discussion” group. The “d” attached to alt.binaries.sounds.mp3.d, for instance, designates it as a discussion group where people talk about items they’ve posted in alt.binaries.sounds.mp3, such as announcing dates when they’ll post certain files. Don’t make the mistake of posting binaries in a discussion group. While this may seem like an innocent mistake to you, it’s considered a glaring breach of etiquette to serious users. Without Usenet’s strict categories, the system would soon be useless to everybody, so Usenet veterans are often quick to chastise newcomers who unknowingly break these important rules. And they won’t necessarily chastise nicely. Newsgroups can only hold a limited amount of messages, so the more people post messages, the less time each message remains available before Chapter 4: Instant Messaging and Online Chat Rooms Overview If other people are going to talk, conversation becomes impossible. —James McNeill Whistler For many people, email isn’t fast enough. Forget about the fact that you can send a message to anyone in the world and often get a reply back within minutes. Email may be useful, but once you send out your message, you have to wait for someone to read it and write back. That’s why instant messaging is so popular. Unlike email, where you have absolutely no idea if any of your messages are actually getting through to the people you’re sending them to, instant messaging lets you write messages directly to others and have them respond within seconds. Best of all, you can only send messages to people when they’re online at the same time as you are, so you know without a doubt that your messages are being received. Still, given the unpredictable and chaotic nature of instant messaging conversations, you’re less likely to find people trading f Chapter 4: Instant Messaging and Online Chat Rooms INTERNET RELAY CHAT (IRC) Although the idea of chatting with your friends online might seem like a recent invention, it’s actually been around since the early days of the Internet. The early real-time chatting system, called Internet Relay Chat (or IRC), is often overlooked by many people because it isn’t quite as straightforward or as easy to use as newer, more user-friendly instant messaging services, such as AOL Instant Messenger (AIM) or Yahoo! Messenger. Hackers typically choose IRC channels over products like AIM or Yahoo! Messenger because IRC channels are unregulated and generally unmoderated. Think Wild Wild West; and they can be wild. GETTING AN IRC CLIENT To chat over IRC, you first need to run an IRC client program on your computer (such as the one shown in Figure 4-1), which you use to contact an IRC server. Figure 4-1: An IRC chat room shows you the nicknames of all the people in the room, along with the messages they’ve already typed. These are some popular IRC clients f INSTANT MESSAGING SERVICES IRC isn’t the easiest thing to use. Not only do you have the problem of finding an IRC network to connect to, but then you may be forced to use cryptic line commands to get anything done. So rather than attempt to learn the often arcane commands needed to chat over IRC, many people prefer the much simpler instant messaging services instead. These are the four most popular instant messaging services: MSN Messenger http://messenger.msn.com ICQ http://www.icq.com AOL Instant Messenger (AIM) http://www.aim.com Yahoo! Messenger http://messenger.yahoo.com With file sharing becoming so popular, many of these now let you trade files, such as your favorite MP3 music, with your instant messaging friends, as shown in Figure 4-5. Figure 4-5: Many instant messaging services allow you to configure the program to turn on file sharing. To share files, you simply tell your instant messaging program which folders you want to share and whether you want others to freely copy fil HOW INSTANT MESSAGING WORKS Although there are several different instant messaging services available, joining one service won’t necessarily allow you to chat with anyone who uses another instant messaging service. The problem lies in the way instant messaging works. To use an instant messaging service, you run a special instant messaging-client program on your computer. This client program connects directly to another computer, called a server, run by the instant messaging company. To find out if someone is online, your client program sends a message to the server, which in turn checks to see if the person you want to reach is connected. If so, the server connects you directly to them. At this point, your computer communicates directly with the other person’s computer; your client doesn’t send your messages to the server again. Once connected to another computer, you can type messages, send video images back and forth, and (of course) send files to each other. Instant messaging lets y PEER-TO-PEER INSTANT MESSAGING PROGRAMS Many people use instant messaging programs like AIM to meet new people and chat with old friends. But if you tend to chat with the same circle of friends, you could set up your own private chat rooms on services like Yahoo! Messenger or ICQ, or set up your own private instant messaging service altogether. Private instant messaging networks let you turn your computer into a server. This way your friends can connect to your computer using one of the following instant messaging programs without fear of some recording industry spy snooping and tracking down the IP addresses of the people doing the most trading of copyrighted MP3 music files: MeetGate http://www.meetgate.com P2P Instant Messenger http://www.ufasoft.com PalTalk http://www.paltalk.com STILL PARANOID? ENCRYPT YOUR MESSAGES The truly paranoid who feel that even their own private instant messaging networks could be spied upon encrypt their messages so that nobody will know what they’re say Chapter 5: Finding Files on Web and FTP Sites Overview I can’t understand why people are frightened of new ideas. I’m frightened of the old ones. —John Cage In the early days of the Internet, people didn’t have file sharing networks for swapping files with each other. Instead, if you wanted to share files over the Internet, you had to use File Transfer Protocol—FTP for short. FTP is just a standard method for transferring files from one computer to another. Before the file sharing networks took over, many people used to share files (legal and otherwise) through websites and FTP sites. Websites that offer FTP transfer simply display a list of files available, and you click the file you want to copy, as shown in Figure 5-1. Figure 5-1: The graphical nature of a web page lets you point and click on the files you want to copy, such as the movie The Matrix Revolutions or Microsoft Office XP. FTP sites, on the other hand, don’t have the luxury of displaying graphics or point-and-click interf Chapter 5: Finding Files on Web and FTP Sites TYPES OF SITES When exploring FTP sites and websites, you’re likely to run across three different types: Leech sites These provide free, unlimited access to all the files you want. They’re also extremely rare. Ratio sites These force users to upload a certain number or size of files before the FTP or website administrator will allow you to download anything. A typical ratio might be 1:10, which means you need to upload 1MB of files, and in return, you’ll be able to download up to 10MB of files. Banner sites These display banner ads (sometimes many obnoxious ones) that you must click before you can get access to the FTP site or website. Web and FTP site administrators get a certain amount of money for each banner ad their site displays, so these sites tend to force users to view dozens of such ads, usually offering pornography. The worst part is that many of these are themselves scams; even if you click all the banners, there’s no guarantee that you’ll ever get access to the desired sit FINDING A FILE SHARING SITE Normally when you want to find something on the Internet, you can use a search engine such as Google or Yahoo! While search engines can find a list of potential sites to visit, you may have to visit several different sites just to find one that isn’t shut down, especially if you’re looking for illegal music files, software, or full-length movies. If you’re lucky enough to find a website that contains what you want, you may have to wade through several layers of pop-up ads trying to entice you into looking at pictures of naked celebrities having sex (like who cares). Finally, you find a file that you want to download, but the link is dead, so you have to visit another website. Repeat this process several more times, and you can see why the recording industry views web and FTP sites as only a minor threat to their profit margins compared to the danger that file sharing networks pose. Fortunately, there are faster, less frustrating ways to find what you want on COPYING FILES TO YOUR COMPUTER Once you’ve found your favorite MP3 files, your next step is to visit the web or FTP sites that holds the files you want. If you used a search engine, you can just click the appropriate links. COPYING FROM WEBSITES On the website, you may simply see a list of URLs, something like this one: http://my.dreamwiz.com/maluchi/sound/music.mp3 This is the address of a web page that contains the file you want. You know it’s a web page (rather than an FTP site) because it starts with the letters http (which stand for Hypertext Transfer Protocol). Enter this address into the address bar in your web browser, and you’ll jump straight to the web page that contains the link to the MP3 file you want. If you right-click this link (on a Macintosh, hold down the CTRL key and then click the mouse), a pop-up menu appears, as shown in Figure 5-5. Click Save Target As (or something similar, depending on the specific browser you’re using) to display a dialog box in which you can PROS AND CONS OF WEB AND FTP SITES Copying files from a file sharing network can be simple. Copying files through a website is slightly trickier, and copying files from an FTP site can be the clumsiest method yet. Given the obstacles in copying files from a web or FTP site, why would anyone want to do it? The main reason to copy files from a web or FTP site is anonymity. If the recording industry is going to sue anyone, it will be the person running the web or FTP site, not the people who copy files from it. Of course, downloading from a website isn’t completely anonymous either, because your browser gives information to websites, such as your monitor’s resolution and operating system, so that web pages are displayed correctly. More importantly, your browser must give away your IP address, which uniquely identifies your computer on the Internet. By giving your IP address away, your browser tells a website where to send text and graphics to display them. If your browser didn’t give away Part 2: Stealing Files Chapter List Chapter 6: Protecting Your Identify Overview Hiding yourself from the world doesn’t exactly hide the world from you. —Unknown With the RIAA hunting down individuals who share pirated music files, the Business Software Alliance (BSA) targeting people who pirate software, and the FBI looking for anyone who breaks copyright laws, the prospect of sharing files over the Internet may seem about as dumb as selling crack from the trunk of your car while parked behind a police station. Of course, file sharing itself isn’t illegal as long as you own the copyright on the files (they’re your photos, music, poetry, and so on), or if the files are in the public domain. But even though the RIAA may threaten and sue, millions of people are still sharing files. They’re just getting a little bit smarter about doing so and playing the odds. Rather than stop sharing files that violate copyright, most file sharers simply adopt different ways of sharing to avoid detection and prosecution. While the authorit Chapter 6: Protecting Your Identify HIDING YOUR IDENTITY Share a copyrighted file or two and you’re breaking the law. Share a few hundred and you’ll likely attract the attention of the authorities. The first step people take when they are worried that the police may raid their house because of their file sharing activities is to mask their identity online so that nobody will know who is doing the illegal file sharing. The first way of masking your identity is to keep your real email address secret; the second is to mask your IP (Internet Protocol) address. HIDING YOUR EMAIL ADDRESS Once the authorities know an email address, they can monitor the account holder’s activity to see what the person does and receives over the Internet, much the same way they can tap a telephone line and eavesdrop on telephone conversations. The simplest way to keep your email address a secret is to never share it with anyone you don’t trust. An email address can identify either the company that you work for (such as billgates@microsoft.com), t SECRETS OF ANONYMOUS FILE SHARING Whether you’re a privacy freak or you’re actually doing something wrong, you have three choices if you want to maintain your anonymity over a file sharing network: Use a special firewall, such as PeerGuardian, to mask your IP address. Use a file sharing program that encrypts your IP address. Use a proxy server to strip away your IP address. KEEPING YOUR IP ADDRESS SECRET WITH PEERGUARDIAN If you can’t keep your IP address a secret from a file sharing network, you can keep it secret from the people most likely to be trying to track you down—if you know their IP addresses. PeerGuardian (http://www.methlabs.org) knows those addresses; it contains a database of IP addresses that belong to various law enforcement agencies and music companies (see Figure 6-2). When someone with one of these known IP addresses tries to examine the files on various computers to determine the number and names of the songs available, PeerGuardian jumps in and blocks your IP addr Chapter 7: Protecting Your Computer In any country there are people who have to die. They are the sacrifices any nation has to make to achieve law and order. —Idi Amin Dada Overview One of the biggest problems with file sharing is keeping your IP address private so organizations like the RIAA can’t find and sue you. The second biggest problem with file sharing is keeping your computer safe. Not only do you have to worry about downloading bogus MP3 files that contain static or verbal insults, urging you to buy music legally, but you also have to worry about the more insidious files you might download by mistake: viruses, worms, Trojan horses, pop-up ads, and spyware. Chapter 7: Protecting Your Computer CATCHING MALICIOUS FILES Every time you copy and share files, you risk infecting your computer, and if you copy files from several sources, you will undoubtedly run into a nasty file at some point. To fully protect your computer, you need all of the following programs: An antivirus program A firewall An anti–Trojan horse program An anti-spyware program STOPPING A VIRUS Viruses act like parasites that attach themselves to otherwise harmless files, so that when you copy the infected file to your hard disk, the virus starts infecting your computer. Once a virus has infected your computer, it may display an annoying message, interfere with the normal use of your computer (such as fouling up the mouse or stopping the keyboard from working), or delete files— it could even wipe out your entire hard disk. While not all viruses will threaten your files, all viruses are unwanted. To protect yourself against viruses, use an antivirus program that can detect and remove viruses before they can caus PROTECTING DATA ON YOUR COMPUTER No matter how carefully you use antivirus programs, firewalls, pop-up ad blockers, and anti-spyware programs, a new virus, worm, Trojan horse, pop-up ad, or spyware/adware program may still slip past your defenses. At the very least, such programs will just be a nuisance, cluttering up your hard disk or possibly slowing down your computer. At the worst, they could crash your computer or delete files from your hard disk despite your precautions. The last thing you want to do is risk messing up any hard disk that contains important information. So if you’re going to engage in the high-risk behavior of sharing files, separate your important data from your file sharing activities. That way if you download a strange file that turns out to be the latest virus, or if a spyware/adware program latches on to your computer and wrecks it, your important data will still be safe. MAKING BACKUPS Computers are inherently unreliable beasts, whether you have to worry abo DESTROYING THE EVIDENCE With the major music companies using their financial muscle to sue anyone caught trading files illegally, the final step in protecting your computer and yourself involves wiping out any evidence that you’ve ever had questionable files stored on your computer at all. Two ways to hide your questionable files from view are encryption and secure deletion. ENCRYPTING YOUR FILES Encryption basically scrambles your files so no one can tell what type of data may have been stored inside them. To make encryption easy to use, programs such as the following ones can automatically encrypt everything in a folder: Encrypted Magic Folders http://www.pc-magic.com CryptoExpert http://www.secureaction.com To use any files stored in an encrypted folder, you enter a password. When you’re ready to leave your computer, just enter your password again, and these programs magically encrypt your folders once more, protecting the folder and file contents from prying eyes. SECURELY DELETING Chapter 8: The File Formats Overview Property is theft. —Pierre-Joseph Proudhon Much to our frustration, computer files can be stored in hundreds of different formats. Practically every program creates its own file format because each software company wants their file format to dominate and control the market, while possibly earning extra licensing fees at the same time. For example, Apple originally snubbed rival Microsoft by designing its popular iPod to use a different audio file format than the “standard” audio file format (Windows Media Audio or WMA) that Microsoft supports. Microsoft, hoping to make money on their own WMA audio format, designed Windows Media Player so it only converts songs to WMA, not to the vastly more popular MP3 format. (People must purchase a separate MP3 encoder before Windows Media Player will create MP3 files.) Besides there being so many file formats created by different software publishers, new file formats often pop up for other reasons. Some formats c Chapter 8: The File Formats MUSIC FILE FORMATS Commercial audio CDs preserve all the fidelity of recorded music, but the size of each song is huge, making them awkward for storing and trading. To solve this problem, most people compress audio files using something called lossy compression (like the MP3 format), which smashes a huge audio file into a smaller file size while preserving as much sound fidelity as possible. As an alternative, you can also compress files using lossless compression (like the WAV format), which compresses audio files very little but maintains excellent sound fidelity. With so many audio file formats available, it’s possible to get an audio file that your music player won’t recognize. To solve this problem, you can convert audio files from one format to another with an audio conversion program such as one of the following: dBpowerAMP http://www.dbpoweramp.com Music Converter Audio MP3 WAV http://www.audio-converter.com WMA OGG Converter Awave Audio http://www.fmjsoft.com Note Note Conver FILE COMPRESSION FORMATS File compression formats typically pack one or more files into a single file that’s smaller than the sum of all the parts. The most popular file compression formats work on several operating systems but some file compression formats are only used on specific operating systems, such Linux or Mac OS X, which limits their file sharing opportunities. Note Note Although file compression formats can squash multiple files into a single file, they don’t always work on certain types of files that are already compressed, such as certain movie, photo, and music file formats. Trying to compress MP3 or JPEG files with a file compression program can actually increase the total size of the file. Here’s a look at the most common compression formats traded on the Internet, the type of information they usually contain, and the programs used to create or open them. ZIP Type of file: Lossless compression Usual contents: Any type of file Copy protection: Optional password protecti ELECTRONIC BOOK FORMATS File swappers post e-books in a wide variety of formats to accommodate different reading styles and mechanical devices. Because book files are relatively small compared to songs and movies, many people offer the same book in several different formats to ensure compatibility. The eBookMall (http://www. ebookmall.com/choose-format) contains a good description of competing e-book formats and the devices they use. Here’s a look at the e-book formats most often traded on the Internet. CHM Type of file: Book Usual contents: Text, graphics, and hyperlinks Copy protection: No Official website: http://msdn.microsoft.com/library Programs used: Microsoft HTML Help CHM (compiled HTML) files are often used for creating help files in Windows applications, but have also grown popular for distributing e-books as well. Unlike ordinary text files, CHM files can be searched, compressed, and organized into topics for easy browsing while displaying graphics embedded within text. TXT ELECTRONIC BOOK FORMATS MOVIE FORMATS Unlike songs, which are usually found as MP3 files, movies are stored in a wide variety of file formats. Because video files can be huge, most people compress videos in the RAR format, which was discussed earlier in this chapter. To add to the confusion, movies draw from a wide variety of codecs— compression mechanisms for packing the video into a certain file format. This means that even if your video player supports a particular video format, it may not support the codec used to compress the video, a problem covered in Chapter 14, in the “Finding Pornography on Newsgroups” section. Here are some common formats and codecs used for trading movies. DIVX Usual contents: Video Copy protection: No Official website: http://www.divx.com Programs used: DivX Player (http://www.divx.com) or any video player with the proper DivX codec installed Created by DivXNetworks, the DivX codec compresses full-length movies into much smaller sizes. A full-length DVD, for instance, is normally PHOTOGRAPH FORMATS Many people trade photos on the Internet, whether they are porn, celebrity photos, art, or any other static visual medium. Unlike other media, photos and clip art usually come stored in one of three widely accepted formats: JPEG, GIF, or PNG. The JPEG format uses lossy compression, which means it physically removes data to reduce the file size. The GIF and PNG formats use lossless compression, which means they don’t remove data to compress a file’s size. JPEG Usual contents: Photos, art Copy protection: None Official website: http://www.jpeg.org Programs used: Nearly every graphics program and web browser Developed in the early 1980s by the Joint Photographic Experts Group (JPEG) as a lossy way for compressing photographs, JPEG is the most common method of storing photographs on the Internet. Although the JPEG format was created as a license-free compression method, a company called Forgent announced in 2002 that it held the patents and would charge licensing fees. T WHERE TO GO FROM HERE While so many different file formats might seem overwhelming, relax. Once you start searching and downloading files on your own, you’ll find that most people stick to just a handful of common file formats, such as MP3 for music, JPEG (or JPG) for photographs, AVI for video, and DOC or PDF for books. Rather than trying to learn all the different file formats you’re likely to find on the Internet, just start out learning the file formats you’re likely to find while trading your favorite types of files, such as music or video files. Once you learn the common formats for storing your favorite types of files, you’ll soon learn the common formats used for storing other types of data, and before you know it, you’ll be able to identify the contents of most files just by peeking at the file extension. If you're stumped by a file format that you're not familiar with, visit one of the following two sites: FILExt http://www.filext.com Every File Format in the World http://wha Chapter 9: Sharing Music Overview There is nothing stable in the world; uproar’s your only music. —John Keats Music files are very widely traded over the Internet, and it’s easy to see why. Everybody loves music, digital music files are usually small and easy to swap, and generations have grown up making copies of albums and tapes for friends. A quick glance at the FastTrack file sharing network lists nearly 3 million users swapping from a pool of over 501 million music files. And FastTrack is just one of many file sharing networks where you can swap music files. (Many of those 501 million files are probably duplicate files with different names—but still, that’s a lot of files.) To stop this widespread thievery, the RIAA periodically issues well-publicized lawsuits against file sharers across the United States. While some people stop sharing music files at home for fear of lawsuits, many others have simply started downloading files at work, shifting the blame to their employer’s comput Chapter 9: Sharing Music COPYING CDS One of the easiest and most common ways for people to increase their music collections is also the most anonymous: borrow a CD from a friend and copy it on your computer. Because most computers come with CD burners, and nearly every office-supply store sells blank CDs, empty CD cases, and precut blank CD cover labels, all you need to do is use a popular CD burner such as Easy Media Creator (http://www.roxio.com) or Nero (http://www.nero.com). Making a copy of a CD has never been easier. Of course, no matter how many friends you may have, you probably don’t have access to all the CDs you want to copy. Many people turn to another music source: the public library. Besides offering books and magazines, many libraries also offer records, CDs, and videotapes. For example, the Phoenix Public Library’s online card catalog (http://www.phoenixpubliclibrary.org) lists several thousand CDs available for checkout, including some of the latest music, such as Outkast’s 2004 Grammy winner, FINDING MUSIC ON THE INTERNET Never mind the libraries or borrowing from friends—most of today’s music-file finding is happening online on file sharing networks, newsgroups, websites, or FTP sites. Each source offers varying degrees of convenience, speed, quality, and anonymity. DOWNLOADING MUSIC FROM FILE SHARING NETWORKS File sharing networks are the most convenient Internet music source because you simply enter the name of a recording artist, song title, or album name, and your search will return a list of relevant, available files. The biggest problem, though, with file sharing networks is that the selection of available songs varies greatly. If you search for music by older recording artists, such as Jimi Hendrix, file sharing networks will likely only offer the hit songs from that recording artist. While this can be useful for creating your own “Greatest Hits” collection for a particular artist, it does restrict you to a limited selection of files. In comparison, if you search fo FINDING THE BEST AUDIO FILES For most novices, the fastest way to find and download music is to join one of the many file sharing networks. Unfortunately, the quality of music on the various file sharing networks can range from excellent to downright dreadful, and it’s often impossible to know the audio quality of a file until it has been downloaded. Some file sharing programs, such as LimeWire, grade the quality of a file with zero to four stars, as shown in Figure 9-8. With such a rating system to guide you, it’s generally best to download only files with four-star ratings. Figure 9-8: LimeWire rates the quality of a file from zero to four stars so you can determine the quality of a file before downloading it. Many novices convert songs from an audio CD to an MP3 file without really understanding technical details like bit rate. The bit rate determines the audio quality of a song by defining how much audio data gets sent from the storage medium (such as an MP3 file) to your decoder ( THE PROBLEM WITH FILE NAMES There’s no set way for naming music files, and many people have their own preference. As a result, you may run across several files with different names that could all contain the same song, like these: Steve Winwood Dear Mr Fantasy.mp3 Dear Mr Fantasy.mp3 05 Steve Winwood Dear Mr Fantasy.mp3 Even more troublesome is when people misspell song titles or artist names or even make up their own name for a song when they don’t know the real song title. To provide some standard, most music files include an ID3 tag that contains-information about the song, such as title, artist, album, release year, genre, and track number. When you play back songs that have all or part of their ID3 tags filled out, your audio player should display this information on the screen. However, most CD burners don’t fill out the ID3 tags automatically, and many people don’t bother entering this information, so many music files will have incomplete or empty ID3 tags. Unfortunately, portab WHO’S STEALING FROM WHOM? The recording industry blames the drastic plunge in CD sales on people swapping songs over file sharing networks. However, even that basic assumption isn’t a fact but rather one of many hypotheses for why CD sales have dropped in recent years. The fact is that book sales have dropped dramatically too, as have sales of many other items, and not all of these losses can be directly linked to file sharing networks. THE PRICE OF CDS Curiously, while the cost of manufacturing a CD (once the recording has been mastered) is much less than the cost of manufacturing a vinyl record from $13.01 to $14.64, between the years 1991 and 2001. The attorney generals of 43 states and territories even accused the major music companies (Sony Music Entertainment, EMI Music Distribution, Warner-Elektra-Atlantic Corp., Universal Music Group, and Bertelsmann Music Group, as well as retailers Tower Records, Musicland Stores, and Trans World Entertainment) of conspiring to fix CD prices. Chapter 10: Finding Movies (or TV Shows) Overview Never hesitate to steal a good idea. —Al Neuharth Soon after people began downloading music, the movie industry saw itself as the next logical target. Yet it felt secure, because movies were too large for most people to trade online easily, and most personal computers didn’t have the hard disk space or processing power to store or view an entire movie file anyway. These technological limitations fell in quick succession in the mid-’90s with the combination of cheaper and larger hard disks that offered several gigabytes of storage; faster processors that could play video files; and most importantly, the widespread adoption of broadband connections that allowed massive movie files to be transferred quickly across the Internet. Ironically, the switch from storing movies on video cassette (VHS) to DVD marked the final step for Internet movie piracy. Ripping a video off a DVD is much faster and more convenient than ripping that same video of Chapter 10: Finding Movies (or TV Shows) COPYING A MOVIE The movie industry can’t completely stop video piracy; but it can limit it as much as possible. Perhaps the simplest way for people to steal movies is by copying them using a process known as back-to-back copying. Anyone can simply connect one VCR or DVD player to another VCR or DVD recorder and play a legitimately purchased movie in one while copying it onto a blank cassette or DVD in the other. However, the process is slow, and it limits the video pirate to copying only those movies already available on videotape or DVD. Also, if the movie is converted from DVD to videotape, it’s not a perfect digital copy, but since it’s free, many people don’t mind the minor imperfections in the copy. As a result, back-to-back copying can never be stopped, so it remains a nagging thorn in the movie industry’s side. Note Because most people want the latest releases, many pirated videos come from recently released DVDs of popular TV shows, such as an entire season of The Sopranos. PI TYPES OF VIDEO PIRACY Internet piracy is just one part of the overall piracy problem faced by the movie industry. Movie studios are concerned about three general types of piracy: Hard goods piracy Sale of illegally copied videos at swap meets and through online auction sites and email Circumvention devices Tools used to break the copy protection on legal DVDs, making it possible to copy a film Internet piracy Distribution of movies over the Internet PIRATING HARD GOODS (VIDEOTAPES AND DVDS) Internet piracy accounts for an estimated $3 billion in lost revenue yearly. But the real piracy threat is from fake VHS and DVD copies of films, which account for an estimated $30 billion of lost revenue yearly. Counterfeit movies are often sold through swap meets, by mail order, via online auction sites, and by street hustlers. To lure unsuspecting people into buying pirated films, many video pirates repackage movies as sequels to popular movies. For example, if you were to pick up a copy of “Glad DOWNLOADING MOVIES Because movie files are typically huge, most people break them into parts so that others can download the individual parts that they need, rather than downloading a single, massive file. Not only can small files be downloaded faster, but more people are likely to offer them, so it increases the chances that you can download the same file from multiple sources. Figure 10-4 shows an example from Kazaa. Figure 10-4: Many movies appear on file sharing networks, divided into several smaller files. Just because you happen to find a file that contains a movie you want, it doesn’t necessarily mean that the video quality will be good enough to make the movie worth watching. Besides people filling the Internet with poor quality videos, the movie studios themselves often hire companies, such as MediaForce, which purposely flood a file sharing network with bogus movie files that contain nothing but static in an attempt to discourage video piracy. When people download and view a THE FUTURE OF VIDEO PIRACY ON THE INTERNET Every time a new consumer technology appears, the movie studios proclaim that it will kill off their business. When television sets first arrived, the movie studios worried that free television shows would stop people from going to movie theaters, but television wound up creating another market for movies. When VCRs and video rental stores appeared, the movie studios once again feared that nobody would go to movie theaters, but video rentals wound up creating another market for movies. Now that file sharing networks have arrived, the movie studios have started screaming that nobody will drive to the movie theaters. We’ll know in a few years whether the movie industry’s fears have finally come true or whether the Internet will provide yet another source of revenue for the studios. Chapter 11: Sharing Books Overview I have seen men hazard their fortunes, go on long journeys halfway around the world, forge friendships, even lie, cheat and steal, all for the gain of a book. -A.S.W. Rosenbach The world of rampant copyright violation and file sharing has angered the music industry and now threatens to encroach upon the publishing industry as well, with a practice dubbed bookwarez. Like recording artists, book authors often differ in their views about releasing their books on the Internet's file sharing circuit. When a publisher accepted science fiction author Cory Doctorow's first novel, Doctorow decided to use the Internet to boost publicity for his book. After receiving permission from his publisher, Doctorow created a website (http://www. craphound.com) to give away the book in e-book form while simultaneously trying to sell it through bookstores. "You can download it," Doctorow wrote, "put it on a P2P net, put it on your site, email it to a friend, and, if you're Chapter 11: Sharing Books SCANNING A BOOK One reason why books aren't traded as often as music or video files is that the average American only reads one book a year, so there are fewer people willing to trade, let alone steal, a book (except this one, of course). A second reason involves the amount of work needed to convert a printed book into a digital file, unless you're able to steal the digital file. (See the "Cracking an E-Book's Copy Protection" section later in the chapter.) Believe it or not, most books that appear as bookwarez are meticulously scanned in by hand, one or two pages at a time. It's a boring, time-consuming job: automatic high-speed scanners are too costly for most file sharers. For faster scans, some people purchase a sheet feeder for their scanner, cut the book apart at the binding, and slide the sheets through one at a time. After saving the scanned pages as graphic files, the bookwarez maker can either convert them to text using optical character recognition (OCR) software (like OmniP SCANNING A BOOK WHAT TYPES OF BOOKS ARE STOLEN? The most common e-books found on the Internet are advanced computer books from O'Reilly, Que, Sams, Microsoft Press, New Riders, and Peachpit (see Figure 11-2). Figure 11-2: E-books from O'Reilly appear frequently on newsgroups and file sharing networks. The latest bestsellers also often appear on the Internet. J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix appeared as an e-book on file sharing networks and newsgroups just hours after going on sale. And practically every book and short story written by Isaac Asimov, Ursula Le Guin, and Roger Zelazny can be found on newsgroups or file sharing networks along with horror stories by Stephen King (see Figure 11-3). Other popular e-books are ones that cover taboo subjects, like lock picking,-erotica, creating fake IDs, building your own handguns, password cracking, brainwashing, hacking, cable and satellite TV descrambling, and the usual penis-enlargement techniques. For many downloaders, the thrill CRACKING AN E-BOOK'S COPY PROTECTION Traditional paper and hardbound books can be cumbersome to copy, but electronic books can be copied as easily as MP3 files. To protect their electronic books, publishers have come up with copy-protection methods designed to discourage widespread illegal copying and encourage legitimate purchasing. That's the fantasy anyway. The reality is that no one has settled on a standard-e-book file format that every computer can use. Even if it's possible to grab a copy of your favorite best-seller as an e-book, you might not be able to read it on your computer or operating system. Some publishers even hope that copy protection will force people into buying separate versions of the same e-book if they wish to read the e-book on different computers. But forcing people to buy different versions of the same e-book is like forcing people to buy two different copies of the same CD just so they can play one CD in their car stereo and the other in their home stereo. FINDING ILLEGAL E-BOOKS Some people steal books for fun. Others steal books to avoid paying for them. But no matter what the motive, you'll find that the Internet may be the biggest library in the world, with books available from eBay, newsgroups, and all the popular file sharing networks. BUYING COPIED BOOKS ON EBAY More than 20 million items are bought and sold on eBay at any given time. Just as bootleg DVDs and CDs often sneak into swap meets, copied books (as well as movies, music, and software) turn up regularly on eBay. It's surprisingly easy for somebody to sell a CD stuffed with hundreds of bootleg computer books (as shown in Figure 11-4). Figure 11-4: Many people download books from the Internet and then resell them on CDs through auction sites like eBay. When a CD with nearly 100 books sells for as little as $15, it's obvious that somebody's selling copies without permission from the authors or publishers. Some sellers avoid postage costs by simply emailing copied e-books to THE FUTURE OF E-BOOKS Publishers want to restrict copying while readers want the freedom to read their e-books in any form without artificial limitations. Compounding the problem of copy protection, e-books also face an uphill battle for widespread acceptance, since no single file format has emerged as a standard. To fix this problem, several companies have banded together to form the Open eBook Forum (http://www.openebook.org), but more time has been spent squabbling over Digital Rights Management and copy protection, so don't expect its members to find a solution to e-book piracy any time soon. Unlike the music industry, where corporations spend millions of dollars buying the rights to songs only to see their investments get swapped across the Internet for free, book publishers are in a slightly more favorable position. For book publishers, the greatest expense comes from printing and distributing their products, which is exactly what e-books eliminate. After people cracked the copy THE FUTURE OF E-BOOKS AND PIRACY No matter how effective copy protection may be, it still can't prevent the simplest form of book stealing: scanning a book page by page. In Japan, bookstores are wrestling with a new problem called digital shoplifting, where people use cameras in their cell phones to take pictures of books and magazines instead of buying them. Perhaps the real future of e-books lies with e-paper, dubbed Gyricon (http://www.gyriconmedia.com) by its Xerox PARC creators. Gyricon consists of a thin layer of transparent plastic filled with millions of small black and white or red and white beads in an oil-filled cavity. When voltage is applied, the beads rotate to present a colored side to the viewer, mimicking the appearance of a printed page, complete with text and graphics. Gyricon can be reused, it is brighter than today's reflective displays, and it consumes minimal power. If Gyricon becomes popular, trading e-books may become as common as trading MP3 files, and then th Chapter 12: Pirating Software (WAREZ) Overview It is certain that stealing nourishes courage, strength, skill, tact, in a word, all the virtues useful to a republican system and consequently to our own. —Marquis de Sade Given the astronomical costs of some programs, such as Adobe Photoshop, Microsoft Office, or Quark XPress, many people justify stealing software by arguing that software companies overcharge for their products in the first place. In some parts of the world, a single word processor can cost more than most people make in a month, so it’s no surprise that software piracy is so rampant. Software piracy isn’t new. Even as early as 1976, during the fledgling days of the personal computer, software piracy threatened to halt innovation in the software business. Recognize this guy? AN OPEN LETTER TO HOBBYISTS By William Henry Gates III February 3, 1976 An Open Letter to Hobbyists To me, the most critical thing in the hobby market right now is the lack of good software courses, b Chapter 12: Pirating Software (WAREZ) THE WAREZ UNDERGROUND When people pirate software such as games, operating systems, utilities, and applications, they call those pirated copies warez. While organizations such as the Business Software Alliance (the BSA, at http://www.bsa.org) claim that software piracy causes publishers to lose $13 billion in revenue every year, that figure can be impossible to verify. For instance, many people pirate software for nothing more than the thrill of finding the latest copy of a popular program so they can earn bragging rights among their friends; they may never even use the program. Others enjoy toying with pirated programs but never use them for an extended period of time. Despite the fact that some programs are copied and pirated by thousands of people, not everyone who pirates software does so to avoid buying it. In some countries, certain programs are simply unavailable or are so outrageously expensive that few people can afford to buy a legitimate copy. In those cases, people may pira HOW COMPANIES FIGHT BACK While no one knows exactly how much piracy hurts software publishers, piracy undoubtedly translates into significant lost sales, especially when people buy counterfeit goods while thinking they’re getting a legitimate copy at a greatly reduced price. With millions of dollars at stake, software companies fight back against the pirates using a variety of tactics. SERIAL NUMBERS: THE KEY TO INSTALLING SOFTWARE To prevent people from copying their programs and handing them out to everyone, many programs won’t run on your computer until you enter a serial number, which is usually a series of seemingly random letters and numbers. Of course, any legitimate buyer of a program can simply pass out the serial number along with the pirated copy of the program. Because the serial number was valid to begin with, it will work on any number of pirated copies of that same program. In fact, many warez websites, such as MSCracks.com (http://www.mscracks.com), shown in Figure 12-3 WHERE THE WAREZ ARE Finding warez can be tricky. Although any search engine, such as Yahoo! or Google, will turn up lists of warez websites, few of those sites will provide actual working copies of anything. The reason is simple. After taking all the time and risk of snaring a pirated copy of a major program, why would anyone blatantly advertise their law-breaking activities and offer to give away the fruits of their crime for free? To profit from their warez, many sites will force you to download spyware or display a barrage of pop-up ads that you will likely need to click through before you can (presumably) access their warez. (These pop-ups may contain nothing more than fake links which, when you click them, make money for the site owner.) Finding a warez website isn’t easy, but it’s still possible. WEBSITES While most warez websites offer enticing lists of programs like Photoshop, Dreamweaver, or Microsoft Windows, they’re more often designed to lure people into seeing pornography Chapter 13: Sharing Video Games Overview Games lubricate the body and the mind. —Benjamin Franklin Nobody really buys a computer to balance their budget. Most people buy a computer to access the Internet or play video games. And while the music industry suffers from declining sales, the video-game industry continues to enjoy record-breaking sales. The European Entertainment and Leisure Software Publishers Association (ELSPA) (http://www.elspa.com) even claimed that video-game sales in 2003 hit $18.5 billion and forecast continuing growth of up to 10 percent every year. That’s a heck of a lot of dough. Naturally, with so many people playing games, there will always be a minority who want to steal them. To keep that minority as small as possible, video-game manufacturers employ a wide variety of tricks. Some try traditional copy-protection mechanisms, and others use colored ink to print secret codes that users must enter whenever they want to play the game. (The colored ink keeps the cod Chapter 13: Sharing Video Games VIDEO GAMES AS WAREZ In the world of the computer underground, warez is a slang term for any software illegally traded online. While some people who trade warez, known as warez traders, specialize in collecting popular applications like Adobe Photoshop or Microsoft Office, most warez traders focus on video games. (See Chapter 12 for more on how people download warez from the Internet.) Newsgroups offer a rich source of video-game warez, because they give warez traders the chance to offer a popular program on a specific date. Warez traders always strive to offer warez the same day or a few days before the official release date of a popular program, and newsgroups give such traders a forum to date-stamp and post their files for everyone to verify. To find Windows games, visit alt.binaries.cd.image.games and alt.binaries.games. To find Macintosh games, visit alt.mac.games. For ROM images of games for the Sony PlayStation 2 or Microsoft Xbox, visit alt.binaries.cd.image.xbox and alt.binari VIDEO GAMES AS EMULATION While many people pirate the latest computer video games, many others seek out video games from their youth. Such video games may have originally appeared in coin-operated arcade machines or specialized home video-game consoles that have long since been discontinued. Arcade machines and game consoles basically consist of a dedicated computer and a video game stored in a ROM (read-only memory) chip. Video-game consoles allowed people to play different games by plugging in different game cartridges that held different games burned into their ROM chips. The problem is that unless you have the actual hardware to run a particular video game and the ROM chip that holds the game, you can’t play the video game. To overcome both problems, game enthusiasts have developed ways to burn the contents of a ROM chip to a digital file, known as a ROM image, and they have created emulation programs that allow a Windows, Macintosh, or Linux computer to emulate the actual hardware THE LEGALITIES OF ROM IMAGES Emulation programs themselves are not illegal, but it is illegal to copy and distribute the ROM images they run. Still, the legalities blur when one considers that U.S. copyright laws allow people to make backup copies of computer programs for archival purposes. So if you create a ROM image of a video game that you already own, you’re within the boundaries of the law, but if you download a ROM image of a game that you already own, you’re breaking the law, because you aren’t allowed to transfer copyrighted information over the Internet unless you either own the copyright or have permission from the copyright holder. Many video-game ROMs are of games produced by companies that are no longer in business. As such, ROM traders assume that the copyrights are no longer valid. However, according to U.S. copyright law, copyrights remain valid for 75 years from the date of publication. And a game doesn’t enter the public domain simply because the company that produce Chapter 14: Sharing Pornography Overview I’ve looked on a lot of women with lust. I’ve committed adultery in my heart many times. This is something that God recognizes I will do—and I have done it—and God forgives me for it. —Jimmy Carter Probably one of the few facts the media gets right about the Internet is that despite the promise of online libraries, workgroup collaboration, and shopping from your computer, one of the most common uses for the Internet is looking at pornography, and you don’t have to look very far to find it. Once one of the most heavily trafficked newsgroups on the Internet, alt.sex was where people routinely swapped graphic sexual images to cater to all types of sexual fetishes. Nowadays, alt.sex has been flooded mostly with spam and many other sex-related newsgroups suffer from this problem as well. Because of the popularity of pornography on the Internet, the porn industry-became one of the first industries to face file sharing problems when people started scan Chapter 14: Sharing Pornography FINDING PORNOGRAPHY Perhaps in a backhanded attempt to shut down file sharing networks, several U.S. government officials have focused on the fact that file sharing networks can be used to distribute pornography (as if cable TV, printed magazines, and the government’s own post office can’t also be used to distribute pornography). U.S. Rep. Joe Pitts (R-PA) actually introduced the Protecting Children from Peer-to-Peer Pornography Act (HR 2885) in 2003 to keep pornography off file sharing networks. But before trying to slap government controls on legally evasive file sharing networks, Pitts might want to start by legislating search engines, webcams, and websites, all of which offer free porn to anyone who can find it. FINDING PORNOGRAPHY WITH SEARCH ENGINES Perhaps the simplest way to find pornographic pictures on the Internet is to ask for them using an image search engine, such as Google’s image search (http://www.images.google.com). By searching for the word porn with Google’s filter PORNOGRAPHY: A REFLECTION OF SOCIETY Nothing incites heated emotions faster than the topic of pornography. Whether you find it in bookstores, magazines, cable TV programs, or on the Internet, pornography has evaded all attempts at both definition and regulation. Comedian Bill Hicks once commented, “The Supreme Court has defined pornography as anything without artistic merit that causes sexual thought. Hmm. Sounds like every commercial on television, doesn’t it?” Some people say that pornography is free speech. Others say that pornography is evil, although what’s pornographic in one culture is just considered normal behavior in another. Janet Jackson caused an uproar when she inadvertently flashed her breast during a half-time Super Bowl presentation, yet women in many European and Latin American countries routinely walk around topless on public beaches. Too often, government authorities have used pornography as a smokescreen to mask their true intentions, whether it’s to justify regula Chapter 15: Miscellaneous Thievery Overview The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked. Who can know it? —Jeremiah 17:9 When kids began swapping music, they certainly weren’t doing anything new. Another generation had already been swapping for years. Many needlework enthusiasts, often older women and grandmothers, had saved money by copying and sharing “counted cross stitch” needlework patterns: grid-filled pieces of paper with instructions for stitching ornate designs on pillows and wall hangings. At first, the women simply made a few copies on the copy machine, passing them along to friends. When computers and scanners became popular, women could scan the patterns and email them to friends much more easily. For example, Carla Conry, profiled in an August 2000 Los Angeles Times article, created an Internet ring on Yahoo! called “Pattern Piggies Unite” where hundreds of avid traders met to swap scanned patterns. To weed out any industry snoops, the women demanded t Chapter 15: Miscellaneous Thievery STEALING SOUNDS Although the music industry bemoans music swapping by its customers, many musicians are also swapping different types of music files. For example, a wide variety of computerized music programs, like Sony’s ACID and Sound Forge lines (http://mediasoftware.sonypictures.com) let musicians create songs on a computer by mixing loops of presampled sounds. Other samples, like those from Spectrasonics (http://www.spectrasonics.net) are created directly for a musician’s keyboard or synthesizer, letting players create and record orchestras of exotic sounds. The prices of many samples, like Quantum Leap’s “Voices of the Apocalypse” for $499 (http://www.soundsonline.com), exceeds the budget of most musicians. That makes the alt.binaries.sounds.samples and alt.binaries.sounds. samples.music newsgroups popular stops for musicians who are eager to try out the latest samples, stay on the technological edge, and simultaneously stick to their budget. STEALING GUITAR CHORD CHARTS Very few musicians make money from their music, and fewer still would be called wealthy. Many aspiring guitarists who can’t afford lessons or songbooks, but who still want to learn the latest Steve Vai licks, drop by the alt.binaries. guitar.tab newsgroup. This newsgroup contains scanned-in tablature showing chords, guitar leads, bass tracks, and other music for specific songs and bands. Blues legend Robert Johnson’s work, for instance, appears in Figure 15-2. Figure 15-2: Guitar players scan in tablature from popular songs and swap them on Usenet’s alt.binaries. guitar.tab forum. Once copied and stored on a computer, these music charts are easy to print out and carry in a guitar case or give away to friends during jams. Most importantly to starving musicians, such charts are free. STEALING HDTV SHOWS Thought downloading a DVD took a long time? Try downloading a High-Definition TV (HDTV) show from the alt.binaries.hdtv newsgroup, created in early 2004. An HDTV post of the movie Shrek consumed 4.159GB, a post so large that people spent several 24-hour days downloading it with their broadband modems. The newsgroup’s posts are so large that some newsgroup veterans fear that newsgroup servers won’t be able to handle the increased load. Of course, people have been heralding the demise of newsgroups since file sharing first began, but to be safe, visit the newsgroup while the looting’s available. STEALING BANDWIDTH Bandwidth theft, also known as hot linking, is similar to plugging an extension cord into the neighbor’s house and using it to power your electric heater so you get all the benefits while someone else pays all the bills. Similarly, some people don’t bother storing images on their own website’s server. Instead, they’ll just link to an image being displayed on somebody else’s website. Although their website’s page still looks the same to a visitor, the other person’s web server does all the work of sending the image. That makes the host’s web server work harder, sometimes resulting in higher charges or even “bandwidth exceeded” problems for the host server, but not for the site hot linking to the files. Bandwidth theft is fairly common on the Internet, whether through malice-or ignorance. However, it’s easy for a victim to detect pilferage from their website. Their server keeps a record of every file being dished up, as well as the website that requested it. When someb STEALING WEBSITES Some people don’t just steal a few images from a neighboring website. They steal the entire website. It’s much easier to change a few words on an existing site than to create one from scratch or hire a web designer. So, after changing a few links, the pirates post the copied site onto their own server under their own domain name. This saves them the time and expense of creating their own websites from scratch while mimicking a more established company’s website that can trick people into buying products from the thief’s website rather than the original website that the thief copied. The Internet’s open nature makes stealing a website fairly easy. Just choose Source from a browser’s View menu, and a text editor quickly lists the web page’s programming. There are even specialized programs, like SurfOffline (http://www.surfoffline.com), that will download up to 100 files simultaneously, copying a website as fast as your Internet connection allows. Once you’ve copied and STEALING PHOTOGRAPHS AND IMAGES Anytime you view a photo or image on the Internet, your browser automatically stores it on your computer in your browser’s cache, which is a folder for temporarily storing images. This way, the next time you visit a previously viewed web page, the browser loads the web page’s images from your computer rather than from the Internet, making the web page load faster. Of course, any image saved in your cache can also be shared. Naturally, this causes great concern to photographers trying to sell their work through the Internet. Few people will purchase photos that they can’t preview, but any image that can be viewed online can also be saved and stolen. To keep people from stealing images, most photographers follow some or all of the following guidelines for preventing image theft: Don’t place the image on the Internet at all. This is the safest method, but it defeats the purpose of trying to sell photographs through the Internet. Use visible or invisible wat STEALING RECIPES According to the U.S. Copyright Office, mere listings of recipe ingredients aren’t subject to copyright protection. Add an explanation or directions for using those ingredients, however, and it’s an original work, subject to copyright laws. Of course, that hasn’t stopped people from sharing recipes for hundreds of years. Today, people often post recipes on the Internet, whether they’ve created the concoction themselves, typed it in from a favorite cookbook or magazine, or copied and pasted it from a cooking program or recipe CD. Once posted, the recipe becomes part of the Internet’s huge (and often illegal) library. For instance, if you search Cook’s Illustrated (http://www.cooksillustrated.com) for mashed potatoes, you’ll find a pointer to a mashed potatoes recipe from January 2003. The website doesn’t list the recipe, though, because the magazine charges a subscription fee for access. But chefs who don’t want to put down their spatula and pull out a credit card can f STEALING EVERYTHING DIGITALLY Needlework patterns, sampled sounds, guitar chord charts, HDTV shows, websites, photos, and recipes—these are just a few things now stored digitally that once took other forms. Computers make things easy to copy, which initially caused rejoicing among many industries. But now that computers are small and inexpensive enough to enter most homes, practically every industry that deals with printed or recorded information is battling Internet piracy or will have to do so eventually. If you’re really worried about Internet piracy, become a plumber. There will always be some things that can never be digitized and stolen with a computer. Part 3: The Future Chapter List Chapter 16: The Legal Alternatives Overview Nothing is illegal if a hundred businessmen decide to do it. —Andrew Young File sharing is perfectly legal in itself; it’s only when you share certain types of files that you may be breaking the law. So while the recording industry tries to track down blatant file sharers and haul them to court while millions of people continue sharing files anyway, there’s a third group of people who have seen the popularity of file sharing and decided to capitalize on it rather than sue it. These new legal file sharing networks collect money through subscriptions or charges for each file downloaded, and they redistribute part of that money as royalties to the copyright holders of the files. The public is happy because they can download the files they want without the risk of getting sued, the copyright holders are happy because they get paid for their work, and the file sharing networks are happy because they get to earn money legally too. Unlike the freewh Chapter 16: The Legal Alternatives MUSIC With so many file sharing networks offering free music, why would anyone want to pay money to download the same music from a fee-based service? The biggest problem with free file sharing networks is that you can’t always download a given file when you want it, and the audio quality of any music file on a file sharing network may be questionable. To address these problems, along with the legal issues surrounding file sharing, many companies have started their own fee-based file sharing businesses where you can download music legally. While these legal music file sharing services guarantee the audio quality of their files, their selections of files may be limited, since they need to secure permission from every record company whose music they carry. Also, they often use proprietary file formats that restrict copying and playing. For example, Musicmatch (http://www.musicmatch.com), MusicNow (http://www.musicnow.com), BuyMusic (http://www.buymusic.com), Streamwaves (http://www.stream MOVIES Movies can take several hours (or even days) to download, even over a fast broadband Internet connection. So while full-length movies aren’t traded as easily over file sharing networks, many people are still willing to invest the time to download massive video files legally or illegally. Not surprisingly, movie studios hope to avoid the fate of the music industry by jumping into legal movie downloads before it’s too late. If you don’t care for the latest Hollywood blockbusters that emphasize special effects over substance, then you might like the movie selection offered at MovieFlix (http://www.movieflix.com). MovieFlix provides old movies, commercials, and television shows from the 1950s to the present, all viewable with the RealPlayer or Windows Media Player program. Some of the curious offerings available on MovieFlix include the science fiction movie Rocketship X-M, a 1954 commercial starring Betty Crocker, Betty Boop cartoons from 1948, and the 1997 documentary About Tofu. BOOKS Unlike software, music, or video, books aren’t as easy to copy, and they lack mass public appeal, because the average American only reads one book a year (but watches nearly five hours of television a day). However, the ease of copying has changed somewhat with the introduction of both audio books and e-books, which can be swapped as easily as digital files. Despite the growing ease with which people can exchange audio and e-books over the Internet, books are probably the least popular item available on the major file sharing networks. You can find the more popular audio and e-books over file sharing networks, but you’ll find a much greater selection if you go through one of the legal audio or e-book online stores instead. Such online bookstores tend to stock everything from Bibles and cookbooks to the latest bestsellers in both fiction and non-fiction, along with classic literature and reference works, so if you need to find a little-known book, you’ll probably save time going t SOFTWARE How do you make money when people can copy your product for free? In the music industry, that question has generated lawsuits and litigation, but in the software industry, that question has formed the basis for a new business model that has created new jobs and businesses—writing, distributing, and selling software over the Internet. While there are currently no legal alternatives for trading major applications-over the Internet, such as Adobe Illustrator or Microsoft Word, there has long been an underground market for less popular, but sometimes equally powerful, programs known as shareware. Unlike commercial software, shareware allows you to try the program on your computer, and if you like it, you can pay for it. Some shareware is fully functional, which means you can use it for as long as you want until you decide to pay for it. However, most shareware is restricted in some way to encourage people to pay for the program. Related to shareware is the category of open source LEGAL FILE SHARING SPINOFFS The idea behind file sharing is so simple and powerful that many people have taken the file sharing model and applied it to a variety of legal uses. Once you are finished downloading music, movies, and books from legal file sharing services, you might want to study some of the other ways file sharing technology has become a useful tool for doing more than just stealing files. LONG-DISTANCE PHONE CALLS File sharing networks work by shuffling data from one computer to the next until it finally arrives at its intended destination. Theoretically, you can send any type of data over a file sharing network, including pictures, movies, music, and even telephone calls. That’s the idea behind Skype (http://www.skype.com), created by Janus Friis and Niklas Zennström, who also created the popular Kazaa file sharing network. By downloading the free Skype software and using an ordinary headset and microphone, or the $54.99 Skype CyberPhone that plugs into your computer’s Chapter 17: How the Corporations Fight Back Overview We don’t like their sound, and guitar music is on the way out. —Decca Recording Company, rejecting the Beatles, in 1962 Chances are good that there’s an empty storefront near you that once housed a major music store. With sales of new CDs dropping every year, music companies have been shutting down shops across the country, and the few remaining stores continue to struggle. The music industry immediately identified the culprit: file sharing networks. Although people had been trading files through newsgroups and websites for years, 1999 introduced the first major file sharing network in the form of Napster, which suddenly made copyrighted files available in mass quantities to anyone who could turn on a computer. Given a choice between paying for a CD just to hear one decent song or copying that same song for free over the Internet, guess which option most people choose? With the music industry declaring file sharing piracy as the numb Chapter 17: How the Corporations Fight Back FILING A LAWSUIT When in doubt, sue. Lawsuits often depend less on a question of law than on who has the most money to pay for the best lawyers over a longer period of time. Given the massive financial backing of the music industry vs. the limited resources of Napster, it was inevitable that Napster would get pummeled in the courtrooms and be forced to shut down. The mistake Napster made was having a single computer keep track of all the songs available on other people’s computers. To find a song, someone first had to contact Napster’s computers and then needed to connect to the personal computer that actually held a copy of the song. Because Napster played an active role every time someone copied a file over its network, the courts ruled that Napster had the legal responsibility to block copyrighted material from being traded over its network. However, suing file sharing networks no longer works because the latest-file sharing networks don’t use a central computer to keep lists of ava EDUCATIONAL CAMPAIGNS Fear is one tactic that the music industry hopes will sway people to their point of view. To continue their program of fear, the RIAA placed advertisements in the New York Times and Entertainment Weekly that contained foreboding headlines warning people, “Next time you or your kids ‘share’ music on the Internet, you may also want to download a list of attorneys.” Not all of the RIAA’s campaigns focus on fear and intimidation. For young people, the RIAA hopes that a message of guilt and “education” (known as “propaganda” among dictatorships) can sway young people to its side. By bombarding young children with “educational campaigns” to teach people why file sharing is wrong, the music industry hopes people will voluntarily shy away from any type of illegal file sharing activities. Of course, getting people to be honest is especially difficult when the rewards are high (free music) and the risks are low (the RIAA can’t sue everybody). The Motion Picture Association TAXING BLANK RECORDABLE MEDIA Most big businesses write off shoplifting as a cost of doing business. The recording industry, by contrast, hopes to shore up its bottom line by adding a tax on all types of blank recordable media, such as cassette tapes, CDs, flash memory cards, and even ordinary floppy disks. The theory is that because pirates must use blank recordable media to steal copyrighted works, a tax on recordable media can at least partially compensate companies for the revenue they lose due to piracy. (Technically, this additional fee isn’t a “tax” because it’s not being collected by a government agency but by a recording industry representative, so it’s a “levy.” Either way, it’s an additional cost to the consumer.) Unfortunately, adding a tax (or “levy”) to every type of blank recordable media punishes both the pirate and the law-abiding user who never records any type of music. A levy on blank recordable media is like having the police give everyone a speeding ticket for dri ANTI-PIRACY COPY PROTECTION In another attempt to protect their products, the music industry has turned to copy protection. The idea is that if the music industry can find a way to keep people from copying music in the first place, nobody will be able to share files over file sharing networks anyway. The two popular methods for implementing copy protection are copy-protecting CDs and copy-protecting individual audio files downloaded from legal music file sharing services, such as iTunes. COPY-PROTECTING CDS Two prominent copy-protection companies are MacroVision (http://www.macrovision.com) and SunnComm Technologies (http://www.sunncomm.com). In theory, copy protection might sound like the answer, until you realize that copy protection can never be foolproof. Beyond the simple fact that you can always record audio or video with the right cables connected in place of speakers or a television set, copy-protection schemes on CDs and DVDs can always be defeated because someone inevitably v ANTI-P2P SERVICES File sharing has become a popular pastime. Many people spend their time at work using peer-to-peer (P2P) file sharing programs to copy their favorite songs and movies, because their work Internet connection is often much faster than their home Internet connection, and their IP address at work identifies their employer and not them. To avoid legal liability and improve network efficiency, many corporations have turned to anti-P2P services and software. These solutions scan a network to detect abnormal bandwidth usage (which could indicate file sharing activity among employees), and they can also identify specific file sharing programs on a computer, such as Grokster or Kazaa. Anti-P2P software is likely to become as popular and necessary for corporations as antivirus software. With the continuing spread of file sharing programs, anti-P2P software could become the computer market’s next growth industry. For a quick peek at some of the more prominent anti-P2P software, v SABOTAGING FILES WITH CUCKOO EGGS Another controversial way that the recording industry has fought back against file sharing is to infiltrate the various file sharing networks themselves and plant bogus files, known as cuckoo eggs. (Cuckoo birds will lay an egg in another bird’s nest, which tricks the other bird into thinking the cuckoo’s egg is actually one of its own. Cuckoo eggs in a file sharing network are similarly deceptive because they trick people into thinking that a bogus file is actually a valid one.) Typically a cuckoo egg is labeled with the name of a popular artist’s song, and it even may have the right file size and track length. But when someone plays a cuckoo egg file, they’ll hear a few seconds of the actual song followed by cuckoo clock noises and voice messages such as, “Congratulations, you must’ve goofed up somewhere.” To deter piracy of her music, Madonna once released a cuckoo egg of her “American Life” single that contained the message, “What the fuck do you t KILLING A COMPUTER In other attempts to disrupt file sharing networks, the RIAA has reportedly hired companies to try a variety of tactics that include creating fake computers stocked with useless files of cuckoo eggs, deliberately trying to crash computers running file sharing programs, hacking into file sharing computers and deleting MP3 files (whether they’re legal or not), and launching denial-of-service attacks on blatant file sharing computers by continually requesting files, which prevents other users from accessing those files. Technically, many of these methods, such as deleting files from an offender’s computer or launching a denial-of-service attack on a blatant file sharing computer, are illegal. To fix this minor problem of legality, the recording industry’s latest attempt has been to pass a law allowing copyright holders to hack into copyright infringers’ computers and disable, block, or interfere with their activities, provided the damage doesn’t exceed a certain monetar WHAT THE FUTURE HOLDS There’s no question that sharing copyrighted files breaks the law. The problem isn’t how to stop file sharing networks. The real problem is adapting file sharing technology in a way that fairly compensates artists and corporations and yet doesn’t infringe upon a consumer’s right to enjoy the copyrighted information they purchased legitimately. File sharing networks will not be forced to go away by lawsuits, copy-protected CDs, or outright sabotage by organizations that represent the music, video, or publishing industries. Rather than fight the inevitable, corporations must find a way to embrace that same technology that threatens their current business practices. If corporations fail to adapt to change, they’ll simply go out of business like Montgomery Ward and Pan Am, or they will suffer lingering deaths of irrelevancy, like Kmart, Burger King, and Polaroid. What consumers want is the right to copy and use their music, videos, or electronic books anywhere they wa Chapter 1: Finding the Files Chapter 2: The Peer-to-Peer File Sharing Networks Chapter 3: Navigating Newsgroups Chapter 4: Instant Messaging and Online Chat Rooms Chapter 5: Finding Files on Web and FTP Sites Chapter 6: Protecting Your Identify Chapter 7: Protecting Your Computer Chapter 8: The File Formats Chapter 9: Sharing Music Chapter 10: Finding Movies (or TV Shows) Chapter 11: Sharing Books Chapter 12: Pirating Software (WAREZ) Chapter 13: Sharing Video Games Chapter 14: Sharing Pornography Chapter 15: Miscellaneous Thievery Chapter 16: The Legal Alternatives Chapter 17: How the Corporations Fight Back

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