December 5, 2010 at 17:22The Men Who Stole the World (article translation)
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, which they turned into program code freely published on the Internet. These four, none of whom have graduated from college, have created the principles of the digital media environment in which we are now. Then they essentially disappeared.
In 1999 at Northeastern University, freshman Shawn Fanning wrote Napster, thus ushering in P2P file sharing and the new paradigm of “all-absorbing information” without the mediation of a major studio or publisher. TIME and FORTUNE posted his portrait on their covers.
In the same year, the Norwegian teenager Jon Lech Johansen, together with two unknown programmers, wrote a program that cracked the DVD protection, he became known as “DVD Jon.” He was 15.
In 1997, Justin Frankel was an 18-year-old hacker from Sedona, Ariz ., wrote a free MP3 player called WinAmp, which became a must-have program for Windows computers, and helped the digital music revolution. In the 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 by force. Millions still use it.
In 2001, Bram Cohen, 26, wrote a p2p file transfer protocol called BitTorrent, which introduced 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 that would make it impossible to receive money from the sale of films, music and TV shows. Artists and musicians will no longer be able to earn. And huge entertainment corporations, Time Warner among them, will be razed to the ground. Pirates will come for corporate America.
“Nevertheless,” we wrote in 2003 “you cannot make money on information where it is free.” And if the apocalypse came, Fanning, Johansen, Frankel and Cohen would be his riders.
Apocalypse Not
So, the apocalypse did not happen. The entertainment industry has changed, more complex and more consistent than we expected. If you want to understand what is happening in the digital world now, then the story of what happened and what the pirate kings 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 they had ever been in it.
Fanning - the only one of four who decided not to give an interview left the media-apocalypse business early. In 2001, Napster was shut down by 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 off the musician whose work he had downloaded.
But by that time, free file-sharing clients were spreading randomly, and buyers were busy aimlessly stuffing hard drives with music. They exchanged more than 3 million files in August 2001 alone. It is reliably impossible to make money on this exchange. 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 Electronic Arts in 2008 for $ 15 million - the first big paycheck. His current startup, Path, launched in November, is a photo-sharing service for the iPhone.
What about Napster? He still exists. The brand was sold at auction after bankruptcy and resold again, but was never restored to anything significant. Now, under the wing of Best Buy, he is trying to catch up with iTunes with the slogan “More than a music store.”
The pirate who wasnt
As the author of Gnutella, Justin Frankel was Fanning's rightful successor. In contrast, Justin made a profit very early. In 1999, after WinAmp fired, AOL bought the player and Frankel’s company, Nullsoft, for about $ 100 million. Frankel became an AOL employee, who was also very wealthy in his 20s.
This was not a wonderful merger. Together with Nullsoft Frankel had to write the best software that he could, and give it to the void. At AOL, software trading has had a detrimental effect on product quality. Frankel recalls: “What I was working on was like: We want to succeed in profit from this product. We are making a deal with these companies, so the product must earn. ” “But nobody cared about the user’s opinion.”
Meanwhile, Frankel wrote Gnutella in his spare time. This was a great idea: unlike Napster, the system is completely decentralized, without a main server and without an “OFF” button that lawyers could click. He posted it on the Internet in March 2000 with a note “See? AOL can do good things! ”But Napster’s reinvention didn’t make Frankel fall in love with AOL, a huge internet company trying to reunite with Time Warner, just in the midst of a Napster lawsuit. He quit in 2004.
Then he, instead of basking in the glory of the glories of his creations, simply left. He was no longer involved with Gnutell and did not try to capitalize on this project, even after 10 years LimeWire - the most popular Gnutella network client still has 50 million users. “I wrote Gnutella to prove that this is possible. Let us not profit from this. ” So it makes no sense to do anything with this, it's a concept. ”
Frankel, having recently moved from San Francisco to New York, now works in his company Cockos (don’t ask), which is developing the Reaper audio package. He constantly improves it, and works very closely with his customers, in the tens of thousands, not millions. “This is not the task of constant growth and struggle for the image of the company. I just enjoy the process and do what I like. ” He will most likely never say he is the most dangerous geek in the world, as Rolling Stone did in 2004. “I think piracy is not so dangerous. In the end, people who build their business models on the strict control of everything and everything get a defective model. And I say this as a developer of programs where there is always a certain level of piracy. ”Gnutella has a long history for him. Digital Piracy: Did it destroy the music industry? Not. Should the music industry adapt? Of course, many will say that this will only get better. You have to get people to focus on quality, small groups and things like that. ”
"As far as the big business of hits and pop music, did that suffer?" He continues. He shrugs and laughs. “I hope so.”
Four-Eyed Monsters
Of the four horsemen of the apocalypse, Bram Cohen is the only one working on the same project as 10 years ago. He is a co-founder and research leader at BitTorrent, a respectable San Francisco-based company engaged in the commercial application of incredibly effective content distribution technology.
This is an amazing company: a legal business built on technology that is used for copyright infringement 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 share of the legal one brings the company's income.
Like Fanning with his Snocap, Cohen is trying to transfer his brainchild from the world of piracy to the legal world and make some money. In 2007, at a time of explosive growth, BitTorrent entered into an agreement with 20th Century Fox, Paramount, Warner Bros. and MGM to form the Torrent Entertainment Network, which offers films, TV shows, and video games for purchase and rental.
Like Fanning, Cohen realized that breaking out of a pirated business is harder than it first appears. “It was awful,” says Cohen. The Torrent Entertainment Network was closed at the end of 2008. In retrospect, it can be seen why this did not work. BitTorrent technology is not friendly enough to a mass audience and requires a certain level of knowledge. She is able to move large amounts of information very quickly. When you want to make a profit, you have to slow down the transmission speed, track and control the data using the clumsy DRM technology that limits the end user’s actions.
“I learned a good lesson from that setback,” Cohen says sadly. Now he is focused on working with people who want what he offers: fast digital distribution. “Instead of going to major content holders and paying them the privilege of profitable use of our channel, we just take the thickest channel that we have and go to interested people.”
Now his company works with the creators of the Four Eyed Monsters indie film and authors independent TV show Pioneer One. This is disappointing: Cohen is at the forefront of the incredible technology that every programmer dreams of, and the big players don't take it seriously.
So why is he trying? As a legend among programmers, Cohen could easily get a job at a large corporation. But that is not his style. “I need some freedom.” He is currently working on something completely new: a p2p system based on real-time streaming data, instead of transferring in parts. This project has enormous potential for the dissemination of "live" information, such as news or sports over the Internet. He still leads BitTorrent, but doesn't spend much time anymore. “I did almost everything when I released the first release.”
The Easy Way Out
So what happened last year with a pirate apocalypse? In the US, piracy has not become as disastrous for publishers as everyone thought. A report by the US Government Accountability Office in April did not confirm the strong link 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 anarchist look and great code don't work the way you want in the prudent world of legitimate commerce. A good code allows the user to make a choice, but a free user is not very good for business. What you really need is complete control, which allows the user to do only what you allow.
Another reason the media apocalypse will never happen: Steve Jobs. April 28, 2003, on the same day that TIME published a large digression on 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 Snoсap and the others were defeated. Because how can you compete with free?
A simple, attractive interface, a tight policy of negotiations between Jobs and music studios, an elegant service with which you can download music without any hassle have brought iTunes success, despite the non-gratuitous 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 overrated, especially where there is digital output.
Fanning, Frankel Cohen and Jon Lech Johansen were never fully pirated. Jon did not want to crack DVD protection to crush Hollywood. He did this because he wanted to watch movies on his computer running Linux. Since in 1999 there was no movie player for his system, he and his partners decided to do this.
When the Motion Picture Association of America found out about this, there was a complaint about Johansen to the Norwegian government. Next was an arrest. Jon suffered two trials, and both times was acquitted. Hacking the DVD you bought is no longer legal.
Johansen was genuinely interested in dealing with digital products purchased 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 reverse engineered FairPlay, Apple's DRM technology. But then he noticed how attractive the experience of using Apple products was and decided to transfer it to a more chaotic world of non-Apple products. “We saw that many devices can work much better.” “So we started making 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 a Rosetta stone for digital media files: it can convert, synchronize and organize files between 500 different devices and combine them together 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 worn off by making an advertisement with the slogan: “Cure for iPhone addiction. Your iTunes library on any device. In seconds. ” Advertising was placed opposite the Apple store.
Johansen rejects any attempt to link him to piracy. “I support fair use, if you have legally acquired the content, you have every 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 opportunities it gives people. Here's the real reason why a pirate apocalypse will never happen. Pirates do not need films and music to be free financially, they want real freedom.
Original
This is my first experience of translating such a large volume. I welcome healthy criticism in every way. If you find errors, translation flaws, please let me know via Habrashta so as not to “litter” in the comments
And again: I tried to arrange it as a translation, but the link was not swallowed, I had to do so.
In 1999 at Northeastern University, freshman Shawn Fanning wrote Napster, thus ushering in P2P file sharing and the new paradigm of “all-absorbing information” without the mediation of a major studio or publisher. TIME and FORTUNE posted his portrait on their covers.
In the same year, the Norwegian teenager Jon Lech Johansen, together with two unknown programmers, wrote a program that cracked the DVD protection, he became known as “DVD Jon.” He was 15.
In 1997, Justin Frankel was an 18-year-old hacker from Sedona, Ariz ., wrote a free MP3 player called WinAmp, which became a must-have program for Windows computers, and helped the digital music revolution. In the 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 by force. Millions still use it.
In 2001, Bram Cohen, 26, wrote a p2p file transfer protocol called BitTorrent, which introduced 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 that would make it impossible to receive money from the sale of films, music and TV shows. Artists and musicians will no longer be able to earn. And huge entertainment corporations, Time Warner among them, will be razed to the ground. Pirates will come for corporate America.
“Nevertheless,” we wrote in 2003 “you cannot make money on information where it is free.” And if the apocalypse came, Fanning, Johansen, Frankel and Cohen would be his riders.
Apocalypse Not
So, the apocalypse did not happen. The entertainment industry has changed, more complex and more consistent than we expected. If you want to understand what is happening in the digital world now, then the story of what happened and what the pirate kings 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 they had ever been in it.
Fanning - the only one of four who decided not to give an interview left the media-apocalypse business early. In 2001, Napster was shut down by 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 off the musician whose work he had downloaded.
But by that time, free file-sharing clients were spreading randomly, and buyers were busy aimlessly stuffing hard drives with music. They exchanged more than 3 million files in August 2001 alone. It is reliably impossible to make money on this exchange. 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 Electronic Arts in 2008 for $ 15 million - the first big paycheck. His current startup, Path, launched in November, is a photo-sharing service for the iPhone.
What about Napster? He still exists. The brand was sold at auction after bankruptcy and resold again, but was never restored to anything significant. Now, under the wing of Best Buy, he is trying to catch up with iTunes with the slogan “More than a music store.”
The pirate who wasnt
As the author of Gnutella, Justin Frankel was Fanning's rightful successor. In contrast, Justin made a profit very early. In 1999, after WinAmp fired, AOL bought the player and Frankel’s company, Nullsoft, for about $ 100 million. Frankel became an AOL employee, who was also very wealthy in his 20s.
This was not a wonderful merger. Together with Nullsoft Frankel had to write the best software that he could, and give it to the void. At AOL, software trading has had a detrimental effect on product quality. Frankel recalls: “What I was working on was like: We want to succeed in profit from this product. We are making a deal with these companies, so the product must earn. ” “But nobody cared about the user’s opinion.”
Meanwhile, Frankel wrote Gnutella in his spare time. This was a great idea: unlike Napster, the system is completely decentralized, without a main server and without an “OFF” button that lawyers could click. He posted it on the Internet in March 2000 with a note “See? AOL can do good things! ”But Napster’s reinvention didn’t make Frankel fall in love with AOL, a huge internet company trying to reunite with Time Warner, just in the midst of a Napster lawsuit. He quit in 2004.
Then he, instead of basking in the glory of the glories of his creations, simply left. He was no longer involved with Gnutell and did not try to capitalize on this project, even after 10 years LimeWire - the most popular Gnutella network client still has 50 million users. “I wrote Gnutella to prove that this is possible. Let us not profit from this. ” So it makes no sense to do anything with this, it's a concept. ”
Frankel, having recently moved from San Francisco to New York, now works in his company Cockos (don’t ask), which is developing the Reaper audio package. He constantly improves it, and works very closely with his customers, in the tens of thousands, not millions. “This is not the task of constant growth and struggle for the image of the company. I just enjoy the process and do what I like. ” He will most likely never say he is the most dangerous geek in the world, as Rolling Stone did in 2004. “I think piracy is not so dangerous. In the end, people who build their business models on the strict control of everything and everything get a defective model. And I say this as a developer of programs where there is always a certain level of piracy. ”Gnutella has a long history for him. Digital Piracy: Did it destroy the music industry? Not. Should the music industry adapt? Of course, many will say that this will only get better. You have to get people to focus on quality, small groups and things like that. ”
"As far as the big business of hits and pop music, did that suffer?" He continues. He shrugs and laughs. “I hope so.”
Four-Eyed Monsters
Of the four horsemen of the apocalypse, Bram Cohen is the only one working on the same project as 10 years ago. He is a co-founder and research leader at BitTorrent, a respectable San Francisco-based company engaged in the commercial application of incredibly effective content distribution technology.
This is an amazing company: a legal business built on technology that is used for copyright infringement 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 share of the legal one brings the company's income.
Like Fanning with his Snocap, Cohen is trying to transfer his brainchild from the world of piracy to the legal world and make some money. In 2007, at a time of explosive growth, BitTorrent entered into an agreement with 20th Century Fox, Paramount, Warner Bros. and MGM to form the Torrent Entertainment Network, which offers films, TV shows, and video games for purchase and rental.
Like Fanning, Cohen realized that breaking out of a pirated business is harder than it first appears. “It was awful,” says Cohen. The Torrent Entertainment Network was closed at the end of 2008. In retrospect, it can be seen why this did not work. BitTorrent technology is not friendly enough to a mass audience and requires a certain level of knowledge. She is able to move large amounts of information very quickly. When you want to make a profit, you have to slow down the transmission speed, track and control the data using the clumsy DRM technology that limits the end user’s actions.
“I learned a good lesson from that setback,” Cohen says sadly. Now he is focused on working with people who want what he offers: fast digital distribution. “Instead of going to major content holders and paying them the privilege of profitable use of our channel, we just take the thickest channel that we have and go to interested people.”
Now his company works with the creators of the Four Eyed Monsters indie film and authors independent TV show Pioneer One. This is disappointing: Cohen is at the forefront of the incredible technology that every programmer dreams of, and the big players don't take it seriously.
So why is he trying? As a legend among programmers, Cohen could easily get a job at a large corporation. But that is not his style. “I need some freedom.” He is currently working on something completely new: a p2p system based on real-time streaming data, instead of transferring in parts. This project has enormous potential for the dissemination of "live" information, such as news or sports over the Internet. He still leads BitTorrent, but doesn't spend much time anymore. “I did almost everything when I released the first release.”
The Easy Way Out
So what happened last year with a pirate apocalypse? In the US, piracy has not become as disastrous for publishers as everyone thought. A report by the US Government Accountability Office in April did not confirm the strong link 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 anarchist look and great code don't work the way you want in the prudent world of legitimate commerce. A good code allows the user to make a choice, but a free user is not very good for business. What you really need is complete control, which allows the user to do only what you allow.
Another reason the media apocalypse will never happen: Steve Jobs. April 28, 2003, on the same day that TIME published a large digression on 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 Snoсap and the others were defeated. Because how can you compete with free?
A simple, attractive interface, a tight policy of negotiations between Jobs and music studios, an elegant service with which you can download music without any hassle have brought iTunes success, despite the non-gratuitous 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 overrated, especially where there is digital output.
Fanning, Frankel Cohen and Jon Lech Johansen were never fully pirated. Jon did not want to crack DVD protection to crush Hollywood. He did this because he wanted to watch movies on his computer running Linux. Since in 1999 there was no movie player for his system, he and his partners decided to do this.
When the Motion Picture Association of America found out about this, there was a complaint about Johansen to the Norwegian government. Next was an arrest. Jon suffered two trials, and both times was acquitted. Hacking the DVD you bought is no longer legal.
Johansen was genuinely interested in dealing with digital products purchased 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 reverse engineered FairPlay, Apple's DRM technology. But then he noticed how attractive the experience of using Apple products was and decided to transfer it to a more chaotic world of non-Apple products. “We saw that many devices can work much better.” “So we started making 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 a Rosetta stone for digital media files: it can convert, synchronize and organize files between 500 different devices and combine them together 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 worn off by making an advertisement with the slogan: “Cure for iPhone addiction. Your iTunes library on any device. In seconds. ” Advertising was placed opposite the Apple store.
Johansen rejects any attempt to link him to piracy. “I support fair use, if you have legally acquired the content, you have every 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 opportunities it gives people. Here's the real reason why a pirate apocalypse will never happen. Pirates do not need films and music to be free financially, they want real freedom.
Original
This is my first experience of translating such a large volume. I welcome healthy criticism in every way. If you find errors, translation flaws, please let me know via Habrashta so as not to “litter” in the comments
And again: I tried to arrange it as a translation, but the link was not swallowed, I had to do so.