Why do people "pirate" software and other intellectual property? The answer isn't as simple as you may think. This isn't a book about noble thieves, or cheapskate freeloaders - rather it is an examination of the culture which thrived around a social object. It just so happened that the social object was piracy.

This is one of the clearest takes I've seen on subcultures as Alternative Reality Games. People are playing a game where the reward is fake Internet points, an elevated reputation among other players, and a sense of danger / excitement. It is incredibly similar to the hype around crypto today.

It has a brief look into ASCII art aesthetic and how the Demo Scene came to be intertwined with the Warez Scene. I think some of the analysis of "concrete poetry" is a little overblown - these aren't formally trained artists engaging in studied creation, they're bored kids mucking about trying to look cool.

And it is "cool" which is at the centre of this book. Reputation - no matter how fungible - is about being cool. The subculture develops to maintain that cool. And then the rules come in so that people can definitively say who is cool. Which then prompts a backlash, name-calling, and splintering. Thus the cycle begins again.

There are a few oddities. The author addresses the fact that it is hard to do a proper investigation where there are no interviews and where the participants are secret. The start of the book trying to tie the Scene to the stock market I found a bit unconvincing. But he does a terrific job explaining the technology, the terminology, and the slang of the era.

You also have to wade through a large amount of "padding". I'm not sure the book needs quite so many lists and tables - but that might just be me not understanding how academic studies work.

If you remember this song, you'll enjoy this book.

I thoroughly recommend you read it. But there's no official eBook copy. Why?

If you trawl the Dark Web™ (2nd page of Google) you're sure to find hundreds of samizdat copies. Some laboriously typed up by hand, others scanned and OCR'd by machines. All of them filled with imperfections, and none of them making money for the original publishers or the author's estate.

The audiobook seems to be still available. But the dead-tree copy seems relegated to the second-hand shelves.

It looks like the book is being republished next year, but with no sign of an eBook. It is infuriating.

This grumpy post isn't really about Future Shock. There are so many books which are hidden from our knowledge. I know Google used to scan in books, but got clobbered for copyright infringement. But that's not good enough. It's error-prone, lacking semantics, and locked in to one provider.

In the book "The Long Tail" we were promised that the future was "selling less of more". That is, the marginal cost of digital reproduction meant that stores would have infinite supply of an infinite variety of stock. Sure, some things would only sell a copy or two per year. But who cares? The cost of storage, reproduction, and transmission, is negligible.

Sadly, that turns out not to be the case. I'm sure there is a digital version of the book at the publisher - but the format used to create the printed book probably isn't suitable for selling to the public. An ePub copy requires someone to typeset it, validate it, check it on a variety of devices, clear the rights, design a cover, generate an ISBN, load into bookshops - and probably a thousand other things that I can't even imagine.

Non-digital-native files are expensive to convert to digital files. And with uncertain returns, it's no wonder so many critical texts are unlocked only by piracy. This is not a long-term strategy, and is of dubious legality and morality.

We need a better way to free up human knowledge.

A friend of mine recommended an obscure book, published a couple of years ago. The blurb made it look right up my alley, so I tried to buy it. I only read eBooks, but I couldn't find it anywhere for sale in the UK. Amazon had a listing for a paper copy, but it was permanently out of stock.

In desperation, I went straight to the publisher. They would ship a dead-tree book across the Atlantic to me. With shipping costing even more than the book.

I found someone on Twitter who was posting highlighted screenshots of the book, so I Tweeted him and the publisher to find out where to get a copy. He graciously offered to send me a PDF.

At which point, the publisher waded in - furious at the situation.

How dare you give this away for free? We're a small publisher and we have to sell books to stay in business!

Fair enough. So I asked them where I could buy an eBook version. Their response was disappointing.

It's only available on Proquest and Ebsco. Sorry!

Both of those are academic databases, available on subscription only, with no public pricing available.

So, let's be clear. You don't want people giving it away, but you won't actually sell me a copy?

What do you want me to do? Not read your book?

I took the emailed PDF. I'm not particularly proud of that. The book is good, and I'm enjoying learning from it. I just wish I could have paid for it.

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.

Ten years ago, I posted on usenet that I'd watched a bootleg of The Phantom Menace. I discovered the post recently and it got me thinking about how little progress has been made in the digital download arena.

The actual resolution of the bootleg

Picture the scene, it's my first year at university and, like any good geek, I am obsessed with Star Wars - Episode I.  So much so that I help run a fan site, ThePhantomMenace.co.uk.  The guys on my corridor are similarly hungry for Star Wars.  We all grew up with it and we all love it.  Yoda's benevolent gaze eases us through our homesickness.

With Yoda watching over us, we can't possibly fail our exams!

George Lucas is a visionary when it comes to what we now call social media. Huge, detailed websites chronicle every development in the world of Star Wars. Behind the scenes movies, proto-blog posts, forums and chat rooms all blossom around this incredible social object.

Then, at the last minute, it all goes wrong. The release date for the movie is set to 19 May 1999. For the USA.  or those of us stuck in the UK - where the movie was filmed - we have to wait 2 months.

How I felt

I can't accurately describe the sense of betrayal that many of us felt. Not only were we going to have a needless wait - we were excluded from our new-found social life.

We couldn't frequent any of our favourite haunts lest an American blurted out a spoiler. Going online at all was going to be perilous - a casual glance at the wrong website could accidentally reveal something as momentous as Luke's parentage.

A few days after the première, I was ranting about this imposition when I received and anonymous email.

"Heard you couldn't see the movie. Click here. "

I clicked. It was in the innocent days before 419 scams and rampant malware.  This is what greeted me:

TPM1.mpg - 650MB

TPM2.mpg - 650MB

It took over 24 hours to download. The whole corridor kept a vigil, counting every bit as it matured into a byte. We ran out of disk space at one point and had to delete all sorts of important coursework. I missed lectures. I didn't care.

With popcorn, beer and inflatable sofas we gathered in the room with the biggest monitor - 17 inches.

The Most Profound Cinematic Experience Of My Life.

Much has been written about the merits - or lack thereof - of The Phantom Menace. But for me it was the culmination of 18 years of waiting. The grainy picture & tinny sound didn't diminish my enjoyment. I was with my friends and we were watching the movie months before anyone else in the country.  It redefined my relationship with cinema and content consumption.

The next year, Napster exploded in popularity. Those of us on blazingly fast University connections were already downloading TV shows and movies using the humble Windows File Sharing utility.

Since that day, ten years ago, I've paid to see The Phantom Menace - once on VHS, once on DVD, a few times in the cinemas. I've bought the books, the t-shirts and the video games.  I know it doesn't excuse the fact that I downloaded an illicit copy, but it is the perfect example of supply and demand being coupled with the disruptive power of the Internet.  Once my demand could be satisfied with "official" source, that's where my money went.

We've moved a long was since then. We can now download perfect quality copies of movies which play on any of our devices. High definition, surround sound, DVD extras downloading in less time than it takes to view them.  The movie industry writhes in pain, wondering where this viscous assault on their livelihood came from.  They missed the boat ten years ago. They try - but I still can't legally download The Phantom Menace. The movie downloading "problem" is caused by demand far outstripping supply - this is not a threat; it's an opportunity!

We're living in a fantastic multi-media landscape of limitless possibilities.  Can someone please tell the movie studios?