Ashwin Navin, former president and co-founder of BitTorrent Inc. has left the company after four years. Thus far, the company hasn’t been a great success, but the BitTorrent protocol is more alive than ever. Now he can talk more freely, we ask Ashwin about his view on the future of BitTorrent, piracy and online media.
Navin, who stays involved with BitTorrent as a board member, will start a new venture with a couple of friends including YouTube’s Steve Chen. Their goal is to support new tech startups in the San Fransisco area, and provide them with office space where they can work on their ideas.
His position as president of BitTorrent never held Navin back much. With quotes such as “iTunes DRM Inspires People to Pirate Content,” he was very clear about his attitude towards digital rights management for example. Still, he often found himself in an awkward position, where he had to please the average BitTorrent user, but also the big Hollywood studios.
Now Navin has quit his job at BitTorrent Inc, we decided to do an exit interview, hoping he can speak a little more freely. “My BitTorrent tenure certainly didn’t feel like four years,” was the first thing Navin told TorrentFreak. “But time flies when working among good people, world-changing ideas, and great fun! What attracted me to BitTorrent in the first place, and what is still inspiring to this day, is its ability to provide people true digital freedom.”
Indeed, the BitTorrent protocol provides freedom, but that is also why the entertainment industry is hesitant to adopt it. They don’t want freedom for consumers, but they do want to maintain their cash flow. Nevertheless, one way or another, BitTorrent provides the entertainment industry with a whole new set of tools, something with which Navin seems to agree.
“For its direct and indirect benefits, I believe BitTorrent sits among the handful of important technology breakthroughs such as the printing press, broadcasting, and the Internet itself. Why? Today’s publishing technology – like blogs, BitTorrent, and video sharing sites for example – quite directly forge a level playing field for creativity,” Navin said.
“Indirectly, these tools force large media companies to realize that there is no longer scarcity or a stranglehold on distribution that locks people out of self-expression. Anyone can speak to the world in any format, without filters. Freedom of Speech has never been so available to the masses. How these large corporations respond to this fundamental realization will benefit many many millions of people–creators and consumers alike.”
Navin hits the nail on the head here. BitTorrent is a great technology with a lot of potential. The thing the entertainment industry has to do, is find a way to leverage it. Listening to consumers instead of trying to shut them up would be a good place to start. The Internet has put the consumer in control, and it’s time for the copyright holders to realize this. Or as Navin puts it:
“The free flow of information and entertainment over the Internet doesn’t diminish the relevance of high value, professional entertainment at all. It does force the publishers to be more quality conscious (make fewer flops, and more hits). And the great cardinal sin in this era would be to withhold your content in exclusive deals or to be too precious with your creation. Now’s the time to be more promiscuous with your distribution strategy than before: be everywhere at once, wherever there are eyeballs you can count.”
“In the previous era, there was a lot of forgiveness when 3 or 4 companies owned every road to the consumer. Publishers could produce a crap movie or TV show and get away with it. But when there are millions of ways to get to the user, or in other words, millions of “channels” to choose from, the best entertainment presented in the most frictionless format always wins.”
So, Navin argues that piracy leads to less crap. The entertainment business now has to make stuff people actually want to listen to or watch. Unfortunately for them, it is getting harder and harder to influence and direct consumers to see things the way they want to. Information is more free than ever before and consumers have a choice now, and that will not go away. It’s up to Hollywood to take the next step, and compete with piracy.
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The Pirate Bay has canceled its plan to launch an OiNK replacement. BOiNK was supposed to revive the hundreds of thousands of music albums that were lost during the raid, but The Pirate Bay will leave that up to more specialized private BitTorrent trackers.
The plan behind BOiNK was to re-upload all the lost OiNK torrents to a public tracker called BOiNK. However, it turns out that the music loving pirates didn’t need The Pirate Bay to help them out because several new sites sprung up to replace it mere days after OiNK went down.
Pirate Bay admin Brokep, who listed some of these alternatives on his blog a few weeks ago, noticed this as well and decided that BOiNK wasn’t needed anymore. “There are so many people opening up new music trackers right now so there’s no need for us to go and do that as well.”
He adds: “It’s simply better for us not to interfere with the music lovers that want their special ratio trackers for only scene releases and so forth. That’s not our specialty! Each to do what they’re best at and what they love the most.”
Brokep is right, it looks like former OiNK members, and releasing talent, already moved to other music trackers. Some moved to new trackers such as what.cd and waffles.fm, but existing trackers like STmusic also got a huge number of new members, as seen in the graph below:
For those who are interested in supporting OiNK admin Alan Ellis, there is an official legal defense fund set up that will be used to cover the legal costs.
The Hydra lives on…
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Continuing an aggressive campaign to defend his copyrights, pop star Prince is preparing to file lawsuits within the next few days in three countries–including the United States–against The Pirate Bay.
One of the world’s best-known BitTorrent indexing sites, The Pirate Bay has defiantly linked to pirated copies of films, TV shows, music videos, and other content while often boasting that it ignores Hollywood’s requests to remove them. The Pirate Bay does not host any unauthorized content, but the service is internationally famous for being a highly effective file-sharing tool.
Prince will file similar suits against The Pirate Bay in the U.S., France, a country with laws favorable to copyright owners, and Sweden, where The Pirate Bay is based. In addition, Prince is preparing to take civil action against companies that advertise on The Pirate Bay, many of which are headquartered in Israel, according to John Giacobbi, Web Sheriff’s president.
Prince has hired Giacobbi and Web Sheriff, a service that protects copyright materials from Internet piracy, to coordinate the legal challenges against The Pirate Bay and others who the singer believes has violated his copyright.
Giacobbi said Web Sheriff is also helping to launch an investigation into The Pirate Bay’s off-shore connections to determine whether the company is compliant with Swedish and international income and corporation tax laws.
The Pirate Bay has already weathered several attempts by the governments of Sweden and the United States to shut down the site. Yet, this is likely the largest civil challenge the Web site has ever faced.
At the core of Prince’s lawsuits are his claims that the three founders of The Pirate Bay are profiting from the work of artists without compensating them. The Pirate Bay earns $70,000 a month in advertising revenue, Giacobbi alleged. The site’s founders have previously denied that the operation makes money.
None of the three founders of The Pirate Bay could be reached for comment.
Prince, who Giacobbi said has the backing of the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry, or IFPI, the group that represents the recording industry worldwide, is only adding to The Pirate Bay’s legal troubles. The site founders also face criminal charges, according to a story published Thursday on the blog TorrentFreak.
A prosecutor in Sweden announced that he plans to press charges against five people involved with The Pirate Bay before January 31, 2008, the blog reported. The five are being accused of infringing on intellectual property.
The copyright battle that Prince has waged the past two months has not been without its costs. He was widely criticized this week when three unauthorized fan sites accused him of trying to violate their free speech rights when his handlers demanded that they remove several photos of him.
It was widely reported this week that Prince had begun suing fans. His representatives denied this.
“Prince is not suing his fans, is not looking to penalize fans and nor is he looking to inhibiting freedom of speech in any way,” said AEG, Prince’s promoter.
Prince began making headlines in September after lashing out against sites he believed were violating his intellectual-property rights.
In September, the singer said he planned to take legal action against The Pirate Bay, YouTube, and eBay. As of Friday, Prince’s lawsuits appeared to be solely targeted at The Pirate Bay.
By suing The Pirate Bay in three different countries, Prince is hoping to put financial pressure on the service, Giacobbi said. Copyright laws in the United States and France would also make it nearly impossible for a site like The Pirate Bay to triumph, he claimed.
“There is no way that they will have any defense because it’s blatant piracy,” Giacobbi said. “They’ll either have to come out and fight or just try and ignore it. In that case, we’re going to win a default judgment against them. This could be a ticking time bomb for them. They can’t outrun this. We are very confident.”
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Ashwin Navin, former president and co-founder of BitTorrent Inc. has left the company after four years. Thus far, the company hasn’t been a great success, but the BitTorrent protocol is more alive than ever. Now he can talk more freely, we ask Ashwin about his view on the future of BitTorrent, piracy and online media.
