YQL and The Pirate Bay

For reasons best known to themselves, certain sections of the entertainment industries seem to believe that bolting the stable door shutting down The Pirate Bay will stop all piracy.

It's as though they think that people won't be able to use a proxy, circumvent the Cleanfeed block, or simply use a search engine to find another torrent site.

Build Your Own Pirate Bay?

Proxying is a very simple concept.

• Alice is forbidden from speaking to Bob.
• Alice can speak to Eve.
• Eve can speak to Bob.
• Alice, therefore, can use Eve to communicate with Bob.

So, a user who wishes to access The Pirate Bay would have to do something quite complex to use a proxy? No, this is all there is to it:

SELECT * FROM html
WHERE url="https://thepiratebay.se/search/ubuntu/0/7/0"
AND xpath='//tr'

This uses YQL and xpath to extract all the information from a Pirate Bay search (in this case, for Ubuntu - which is legally distributed through Bit Torrent).

Simply, this asks Yahoo (an American site) to contact The Pirate Bay (a Swedish site) to deliver information to a user in Britain.

You can play with the results yourself in the Yahoo Console.

This returns a JSON string which can then be easily parsed (e.g. using jQuery). Simple.

Aha! But What About Downloading A Torrent?

In the olden days (well, last year) there was a fly in the ointment. You had to download a .torrent file from the website. That meant that you needed a way to connect to, in this case, The Pirate Bay or find a proxy which was willing to transfer files.

Nowadays, people use the magnet protocol. Here's what a magnet link looks like:

magnet:?xt=urn:btih:fa692da0488aee23e5eb605a87be934ad7cec106

Short enough to fit into a text message and, handily, can be embedded in an HTML document with no need to download an extra file. Paste those 60 characters into your torrent client, and it will connect to the cloud and start downloading the file you requested.

So, a single web request to Yahoo and a line of JavaScript code is all it takes to circumvent this blockade.

Next Move

So, do the UK courts need to order ISPs to block Yahoo as well? Or play whack-a-mole with all the new torrent sites springing up? Let's not forget, in 2004 the huge Bit Torrent search engine Suprnova was sued out of existence. Just like with the Hyrda, a decapitation lead to multiple sites springing up.

Piracy is a problem of convenience. A pirated copy is

• Faster to download.
• Quicker to watch (no unskipable trailers).
• More convenient to transfer to different devices.
• Global availability (no artificial regional restrictions).
• Immense back-catalogue (Star Wars, for example).
• Cheaper.

The only downsides are that they are often of dubious legality, and occasionally of poor quality.

The entertainment industries have to compete on all these points. I'll admit, that they will almost certainly not be able to compete with "free" - although monthly unlimited subscriptions come close.

The rest are problems of their own making. I described how I downloaded The Phantom Menace back in 1999. 13 long years later and the movie industry still isn't even close to where it needs to be.

Amazon have done pretty well from selling raw MP3s - a simple web interface, pay a small bit of money, instant high-quality download which is DRM free. Where's the equivalent for films? Or for TV? Or radio?

The pernicious restrictions around geography also must end. I want to watch Veep just as much as the Americans do. Why do I have to wait even an hour, let alone a week?

Finally, Star Wars still isn't available to (legally) download. If I have a hankering for Jar Jar Binks at 3AM, I have to order a DVD and wait while it is physically transported from a warehouse. That's such a 19th Century way of thinking that it hurts my brain.

Get all that right and maybe - just maybe - the "piracy problem" will solve itself.

Of course, alternatively, it may be too late. For 13 years people have been used to downloading without paying. That's a long period of learned behaviour. How content providers can convince people to change the habit of a lifetime is beyond my knowledge.