It has long been possible to download MP3 music files from the internet, including illicit, digital recordings of commercial CDs.

However, the growing popularity and availability of broadband internet access has taken piracy to a new level; it is now perfectly possible to download full-length feature films, put them onto recordable CDs and watch them on a DVD player.

Some of these movies are top-quality DVD rips (huge files, excellent quality) while others are roughly VHS videotape quality (smaller files, acceptable quality), and still others are truly shoddy affairs where somebody has pointed a shaky camcorder at a cinema screen (tiny files, unwatchable quality).

The point is that anyone with the mind and the means to do so can download and watch the latest blockbusters usually weeks before they hit the local cinema.

The question is whether these digital pirates still pay to watch films at the cinema. Broadband has turned movies into the new MP3s and the studios are panicking.

We've surveyed the current state of play to assess the impact that broadband piracy is having.

To avoid any doubt, let us be absolutely clear that we do not in any way condone or encourage the piracy of copyrighted material.

Long, long silver
The first hurdle facing any discussion of piracy is the question of scale. Just how big a problem is it? The truth is that nobody knows for sure.

Howard Berman, a US Congressman with an active interest in the subject, said: "Internet piracy losses are almost impossible to calculate. A recent report by Viant [a Boston-based consultancy firm] estimates that 400,000 to 600,000 pirate versions of movies are downloaded every day over the internet.

"In April 2002, 1.1 billion files - the vast majority containing copyrighted works - were downloaded through the KaZaA peer-to-peer [P2P] file trading network. Piracy is also widespread through FTP sites, IRC channels and auction sites but cannot effectively be quantified."

The Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), a body charged with protecting film copyright, claims that $3bn (£1.9bn) of revenue is lost annually through piracy as a whole.

But it conceded: "Due to the difficulty in calculating internet piracy losses, these figures are not currently included in the overall loss estimates. However, it is safe to assume that internet losses cause untold additional damages to the industry."

These are big assumptions indeed. Given that there is no reliable and comprehensive way to tell who's downloading what from where, is the internet really such a pirate's paradise?

Treasure Island
Let's drop any hint of hyperbole and bring it down to basics. The fact is that anybody with an internet connection can find and download an absolute wealth of illegal material, and in our tests we succeeded with minimal effort. As Berman suggests, P2P networks are prime treasure troves.

Enter a search term - Coldplay say - and you can take your pick of whatever Coldplay songs other users happen to have on their computers.

All it takes is just one user to turn an album into a bunch of MP3 files and within hours dozens or perhaps even hundreds of people can have their own copy of the original record.

With the growth of file sharing showing such exponential growth, any illegal recording released 'in the wild' is essentially unstoppable.

While P2P networks reap the notoriety, file sharing is also rife in other areas. Take newsgroups, for example. These are discussion groups hosted on a network originally designed to carry simple text messages, but encoding techniques mean that they can now also host digital audio and video files.

The result is that music, movies, computer games, software and more can be shared in newsgroups for free, and the copyright owners get not one penny in payment.

Moreover, while it's certainly true that some P2P networks are vulnerable to anti-piracy lawsuits and can ultimately be forced out of business or onto the straight and narrow as Napster could certainly testify, the same is not necessarily true of other file-sharing channels.

Sailing close to the wind
One distinction that often gets lost in the piracy figures is that between people who share music, movies or whatever for pleasure and those who flog contraband for cash.

"There is no justification for internet piracy," said Congressman Berman. "There is no difference between pocketing a CD in a Tower Records and downloading copyrighted songs from [file-sharing network] Morpheus. Theft is theft."

How you feel about this statement is central to the issue of digital piracy. Is downloading music or movies always and absolutely the same as shoplifting?

Some people swear that they only download material that they would not otherwise buy ("so nobody really loses"); some just like thumbing their noses at the copyright owners ("they make too much money anyway"); and some claim that music piracy actually works to the artists' advantage because it increases their exposure to a wider audience ("they'll make more money in the long term").

You may find these arguments spurious but the fact remains that digital piracy is so easy and so far removed from the source that, to lots of people, it just doesn't feel like theft.

That, perhaps, is the key to the current situation: legal and moral considerations aside, you don't suddenly sprout a blue beard or develop a parrot fixation by filling your hard disk with illegal files.

Pirates of pens' rants
Of course, copyright owners are not prepared to take piracy lying down. If you upload a movie to a newsgroup, you may well receive a strongly worded cease-and-desist letter from the MPAA. Quite frankly, however, it takes more than that to shiver the timbers of a dedicated file poster.

Besides, if you merely download material, the chances of anybody taking any action (or even noticing) have hitherto been negligible.

The Holy Grail for copyright owners lies in a range of technologies known collectively as Digital Rights Management (DRM), which are essentially a set of measures to control what you do with a product beyond the point of sale.

That is, you can enjoy an audio CD in your own home but you can neither make copies of it nor distribute them electronically to anyone else.

The next big thing could be something codenamed Palladium, a system being mooted by Microsoft that will, among other things, 'lock' data to a particular set of hardware to hamper carefree copying.

However, it's entirely possible that the world will never see a foolproof DRM system; remember, a P2P network (or even a simple email list) ensures that a single copy of any illicit material can reach a global audience almost immediately.

Similar problems affect encryption technologies. DVD movies, for example, are scrambled to prevent films being copied. Inevitably, somebody soon cracked the encryption system and then distributed the requisite software on the internet.

As a result of this and other piracy tools, DVD rips are now widely available. If content scrambling has made a difference, it's at the strictly casual level; you can't just rent a film from Blockbuster, pop it in your PC's DVD drive and copy it for posterity.

The newest weapon in the arsenal is a much-derided proposal (from Congressman Berman again) that copyright owners should be free to use 'technological self-help' measures to limit or restrict the flow of contraband in P2P networks; in short, use legal hacking against them.

If this law were ever passed, we rather suspect that disgruntled file swappers would have considerable capability to take revenge and wreak havoc by hacking into the copyright owners' own networks.

Fool's gold
Short of the development of some serious legal deterrence applicable across the globe, a DRM technology that actually works, or a sea-change in the way we regard copyright infringement, it's not at all clear that an end to file swapping is in sight.

But that, of course, does not make it right or acceptable. We asked the MPAA and the RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America) to comment on existing and potential anti-piracy measures, but both declined.

Perhaps it's fitting then if we leave the last word to a recording artist with an understandably jaundiced view of the P2P phenomenon.

"Everything is free now/That's what they say/Everything I ever done/Got to give it away/Someone hit the big score/They figured it out/That we're going to do it anyway/Even if it doesn't pay."

Gillian Welch, Everything is Free

ARE YOU A PIRATE?

Alex Chapman, a solicitor at Briffa, a specialist in intellectual property law, had this to say: "Through cases such as Napster [the first and most famous P2P file-sharing network], the myth that the internet is a law-free zone is happily now diminishing.

"However, Napster itself was very much on the fringes of what is and isn't infringement. What is much more clear is the infringement that arises by the actual users of networks like Napster and indeed the internet generally.

"Downloading any copyrighted work necessarily involves copying it. Under the terms of the Copyright Designs and Patents Act 1988, anyone who uses the internet to copy copyrighted material without permission is breaking the law.

"The penalties for doing so can be severe, depending on the nature and extent of the infringement. In a civil action, which would generally be brought by the copyright owner, relief will include damages, injunctions or an account of profits.

"The damages will be those payable as between a willing licensee and a willing licensor - for instance the price of the CD - plus an increase due to flagrancy."

So simply downloading the odd spot of copyright material could land you in hot water, but how about making it available to others in a P2P network or by posting files to a newsgroup?

"Distribution of infringing copyright works is more serious in terms of consequences," said Chapman. "On its own, it is just a further infringement of the Act. However, if such distribution is made in the knowledge that the work infringes copyright, then that can be a criminal offence."

The legal long and the short of digital piracy has to be this - don't do it.

COPPING OFF WITH COPYRIGHT

With so much copyright-infringing material available on the internet, and so little currently being done to thwart its distribution, the potential pirate is limited only by the speed of his internet connection and hard disk space.

Let's say you have a standard BT ADSL broadband connection. Running at around 50 per cent of its maximum capacity, and assuming no bottlenecks or interruptions in the connection, you could download around 1.8MB of data per minute. That's a whopping 2,592MB in 24 hours.

With an always-on broadband connection, you never need to log off so this is theoretically possible. However, some ISPs do impose restrictions if you are seen to hog too much bandwidth.

With standard MP3 encoding, you get roughly one minute of music per megabyte so you could download some 43 hours' worth of music. That's probably equivalent to nearly 100 albums a day - illicit material that would otherwise cost around £1,000.

You may not live long enough to listen to it all but it does illustrate the potential of piracy run rampant.

Alternatively, a feature-length film ripped and stored in the video CD format (roughly comparable to VHS quality) typically fills two blank recordable CDs (for instance, around 1,300MB). You could thus acquire a couple of movies every 24 hours.

The retail cost is much more modest - let's say £30 - but it still equates to a good deal of lost ticket and popcorn sales for the local multiplex.

CASE STUDIES

Bill Wolsey (not his real name) admits to downloading the occasional song from the P2P networks.

"This sort of piracy is often regarded in the same way that people think about speeding," he claimed. "Loads of people do it without giving it a second thought. As with speeding, introducing controls on the act itself criminalises a lot of people.

"An ex-policeman once pointed out that the police only came to be regarded with fear and suspicion by a significant number of the generally law-abiding public when speeding was criminalised."

However, Wolsey admits that copyright infringement can hit closer to home. "One of my friends is a yacht designer," he said. "At a boat show recently, a chap came up and said he liked the design and would like to build himself a boat.

"My friend told him how much the design would cost and the punter just laughed. He said he knew where to get hold of the plans and he'd just copy them.

"Now, my friend makes his money by charging for every set of plans. If he doesn't sell plans, he doesn't eat. It's as simple as that. The question is, where do we draw the line? Somewhere at the end of that line is the artist, writer or designer."

Website editor Michael Rose has absolutely no doubt about the wrongs of piracy.

"P2P clients are somehow seen as great liberating technologies, freeing music from the evil music industry bosses, but moving ones and zeros around is no different to moving gold doubloons around. It's just faster and easier," he explained.

"People are committing petty theft without even blinking. At the end of the day, it feels really good to know that what I own is mine: no karma, no strings, no nagging thoughts."

See also:

RIAA vs P2P

The US trade body is now bringing the full weight of the law to bear on individuals who dare to download a track or two from the web. But the users are fighting back ...  01 Aug 2003

Intel boss blasts Hollywood

Disney and Fox cast as chief villains in digital rights delay drama  19 Feb 2003

Microsoft slammed for Palladium 'lies'

Detailed paper on digital rights software provokes angry rebuttal  29 Oct 2002

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