Why blocking Thepiratebay was one of the most stupid moves of the Spanish law in the last years

As most of you might be aware of, the well-known BitTorrent tracker Thepiratebay was blocked in Spain back in March 2015 as requested by a court order. Several copyright protection companies praised this decision, but it was later confirmed by the «Asociación de Gestión de Derechos Intelectuales» (also known as Agedi) that this block was imposed due to a complaint they placed in the «Comisión de Propiedad Intelectual».

Of course, many companies started treating this case as a «huge victory for copyright holders» as if this was going to stop people from getting pirated content. Not only has it been completely futile for that, but I’d say that even more people might be getting pirated content only to bypass the restriction (this did actually happen in France).

Please don’t get me wrong, by no means am I saying that I do not think that any individual or company who works hard to produce something should not get the revenue produced from it. The main point of this article is to stress how extremely ineffective the measures taken towards this end are, as well as how inadequate the model that content creators propose is.

The problem with piracy

Do we have a problem with piracy? Sure! It would be unfair to say that authors, musicians, programmers, game designers, artists… all over the world get all the revenue they should from their work. However, and while this is no excuse for piracy, the industry model that they want to impose is simply unacceptable for nowadays standards.

There is no doubt that selling a cassette tape or a CD years ago was an adequate model for many reasons, but first and foremost, due to the technology that there was present at the time; however, years have gone by and things have changed. While it is perfectly legitimate that they try to get the most revenue out of their hard work, they have gone obsolete; despite the fact that it would be unfair to criticise them for such an endeavour they must understand that no industry can remain unchanged for years, and they are no exception.

Technology has changed, and so have people’s habits. Having 10 songs in a CD is no longer something that one can understand, neither is paying a certain amount of money for each and every song you want to listen. That is the reason why programs and apps such as Spotify have become so importand and widely used. Spotify has been able to adopt new standards in an aging industry, and this is no easy task. Artists want to continue living in a world like that of 30 years ago, but they do not seem to understand that resisting to change will not help them; no matter how hard they try, the world will go on, either with or without them.

Spotify has offered something new, something that is fair for everyone and provided with a new approach to music: paying a fee every month to listen to all the music you wanted, without limits. Ads were nowhere to be seen (you are already paying a fee, why should you have ads?) and a wide range of music of all styles was available to users. Millions of users showed that people were more than happy to pay for listening to music, and this should have been a turning point for music companies. People were happy to pay, they were simply not willing to pay for the old model were you bought CDs (at a high price) and had the same music until you decided to pay again and buy new CDs.

Moreover, ever since Spotify started offering their free accounts where ads were included as the only tradeoff, more and more people have been using it, thus reducing piracy significantly.

Movies and series suffer from the same problem as music did (and still does, regardless of how much Spotify and services of the like have improved the situation). Netflix has a solid offer that can improve things in the cinema industry as much as Spotify did in the music one. However, not all authors and producers want to be on these services as they believe that they get less revenue than they do with the older methods; even though they do not seem to understand that maybe people are not going to buy their music if they cannot listen to it in their favourite music service, but will get a pirate copy instead.

 

What Spain decided

Thanks to our great and glourious (note the sarcasm) «Ley de Propiedad Intelectual» (a.k.a LPI law) a website can be closed only because of linking to pirated content (and not necessarily hosting it). This is not the only issue with this law, though (hence the «great and glorious» sarcasm at the beginning), as many controversies have arised due to this LPI law for things such as the procedures required to take down a website in the entire country, which is overly obscure and the judge does not have full power over such a decision, the Canon AEDE, which forced Google News to be closed in Spain as it forced anyone who copied a «significant» portion of your content (what a «significant» portion is was not described though) to pay you (regardless of whether you wanted to be paid or not; if you reject the money, an association will get the money for you, so the one who copied will have to pay anyway): it was no surprise that many Spanish newspapers soon regretted this decision as the close-down of Google news made them loose money (instead of earning more, as they had hoped). There are many more issues with this law, you can read them here: http://www.xataka.com/aplicaciones/no-solo-canon-aede-esto-es-todo-lo-que-perdemos-con-la-nueva-ley-de-propiedad-intelectual

 

So linking to pirated content is a criminal offence by this new law, that basically implies that having this «link» (it is actually a magnet for a BitTorrent program) is a criminal offence and can get your website taken down in Spain:

Note it is an invalid magnet, I removed all information from it… I do not want to get into problems 🙁

magnet:?xt=urn:btih:XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX&dn=XXXXXXXXXXXXX&tr=udp%3A%2F%2Ftracker.AAAAAA.com%3A80&tr=udp%3A%2F%2Fopen.BBBBBB.com%3A1337&tr=udp%3A%2F%2Ftracker.CCCCCCCC.tk%3A6969&tr=udp%3A%2F%2FDDDDDDDDD.com%3A6969

 

What Spain though a good solution was

So taking down all websites that provide with pirated content is a great solution, isn’t it? Not quite.

Maybe this is what some lawmaker thought, but this has proven to be a terrible attempt at reducing piracy. Sure, for a lawmaker for whom the latest invention he/she was able to grasp was the telephone, this can look like a great way to do so. But if you live in the real world, you should realise it is not.

Many studies have shown this to happen, for instance with the disastrous HADOPI law in France (you can read more about it here: HADOPI law), which not only didn’t manage to decrease piracy by penalising users, but it made it increase instead. It came to no one’s surprise that the law was repealed.

So, if you try to open your browser and open the well-known piracy website Thepiratebay you will realise you can’t.

Most ISPs blocked it by removing the DNS entry from their DNS servers.

The DNS (Domain Name Server) is the service that translates domain names (such as estonoentraenelexamen.com) into the IP address that is actually used to connect to the server where the website is hosted. In our case, our domain is translated into 217.160.237.212. Something similar should happen with thepiratebay. However, it doesn’t. The reason behind such an issue is the court order we previously mentioned.

Is this a good way to prevent someone from getting into the website? Definitely not. It only takes a few seconds to bypass this restriction, just change your DNS servers to Google DNS servers (8.8.8.8 as primary DNS server, 8.8.4.4 as secondary). If your ISP is inspecting packages and dropping them if they come from thepiratebay, just use a VPN or Tor. However, we do not want to explain how to bypass these restrictions as it is not the main point of this article. We only want to show how easy it is to bypass such a restriction.

 

Here you can see what my ISP’s DNS Servers records are for thepiratebay:

You can see that it doesn’t hold any IP address for this domain. So whenever we try to open the website, our browser will not be able to get the IP address where it should connect, thus blocking our access.

However, if we query any DNS server outside Spain (such as Google’s DNS Servers), where they are not legally required to block the website…

Surprise! We get the actual IPs of the website. So only by changing the DNS servers we could have gone into the blocked website. It only took us the effort of changing the DNS servers.

 

We have basically bypassed a restriction that took legislators, copyright holders and judges 2 years to impose in barely 5 seconds.

Isn’t it funny?

 

It would have also been quite easy to bypass it if they had used more complicated blocking techniques (packet sniffing for instance), simply by encrypting the traffic by using a VPN or Tor.

 

The solution

Given that this is an extremely bad way to block access to the website and that there is really no solution to completely block the website, the solution is to offer something people are willing to pay for.

The music industry model is extremely old, so is the cinema one. Sure there are some alternatives, but some producers try to resist to change as much as they can, naïvely thinking that doing so will get them to earn as much money as they used to. Forget about that. If you are offering something users are not willing to pay for, they will just get a pirate version of it, no matter how hard you try to avoid that from happening.

The solution is to start offering new and more logical solutions such as Netflix, Spotify, Google Play, and many more.

Stop thinking of a way of going back to the world as we knew it 30 years ago, and start thinking about how to make these industries adequeate for the 21st century. Only then will you be able to somewhat reduce piracy.

 

As I well stated, this is not a way to defend piracy, but it is a way to express that users would rather pay for something that offers them more. Users are willing to pay for good solutions, such as Spotify, Netflix… but not for the old industry model. Authors and content creators must get money, but as with any other industry, they must rethink it, and come up with better and modern solutions that allow them to get all the revenue they want while giving users something they are willing to pay for.