With Direct Connect, legal file sharing just a network away

File sharing has a new face on college campuses and other
networked environments ““ Direct Connect. Due to selective
pressure from lawyers representing the entertainment industry, file
sharing programs have continually improved and become more
efficient to avoid legal problems.

Direct Connect succeeds because it does what its name implies
““ it sets up a direct connection from one user to another.
These two users simply share each other’s
“backups” of movies, games and programs. You can even
instant message the person you are downloading from, or any other
user. And yet this probably doesn’t mean anything new for the
entertainment industry.

A hub is a self-contained unit that a group of people dial into.
Think of it as a kind of elite Kazaa. But, instead of being
connected to the entire world as on Kazaa, you are connecting only
to the members of a certain hub. The hub administrators can set
rules for their hub.

On the UCLA hub, you have to share at least 2 gigabytes of files
to enter and there are restrictions on things like viruses. The
best part about DC is since only the people on a certain network
connect to the hub, the users enjoy vastly superior download speeds
when compared to programs like Kazaa, which are bandwidth
limited.

Up until now, I haven’t even mentioned the legality of
Direct Connect. As I understand it, fair usage laws allow people to
make backups of their programs, music, movies, and even software as
long as they are not distributed for profit. But if I have a
collection of movies and programs on my computer and I share them
with another person, I’m sure that the entertainment industry
could portray this sharing in a negative light.

So what do we do? We (the collective we) hit the entertainment
industry where it hurts the most “¦

The Academy Awards is a wonderful annual event that gives
recognition to achievements in the film industry. Whoopee. What
concerns me is for the academy to choose the winners, all of the
nominated movies are sent out on DVD in a great big package,
probably inconspicuously labeled “this side up” or
“do not copy these unreleased movies onto your computer and
share them on the Internet.”

Inevitably somebody got a hold of these DVDs and compressed them
to the Divx and Xvid formats for easy sharing. Later, they popped
up on DC as “DVD-Screener-Divx” or the like. Now, like
something out of “American Idol,” the masses can join
the Academy and screen all of the nominees!

I predict the Academy is going to adjust its practice of sending
out DVD screeners and instead implement a high-tech method of
securely streaming the movies. I also predict that the newly secure
screeners will be intercepted and show up on file sharing programs
anyway.

That said, the type of people who download movies off of DC go
through the effort of finding the right codec and probably have a
large DVD collection anyway. For them, downloading screeners
wouldn’t effect whether or not they bought the DVD. In other
words, most people would download and watch movies they otherwise
wouldn’t have bought (thus no loss to the entertainment
industry); and they will download the movies they really love
because they can’t wait to watch them, and then they will
still buy the DVDs when they come out.

The biggest error that the entertainment industry makes is
assuming that a song or movie that was downloaded is a lost
sale.

E-mail Esposito at [email protected].