Torrents for Dummies, v1.

0, 12/10/2006 (Preface: This is a "for Dummies" tool, not a remotely exhaustive list of everyt hing you'd like or maybe even need to know. It also won't raise your IQ above it s base level. I.e., if your IQ is 90 or less, you're still going to be a moron e ven with facts at your disposal. For the purpose of this document, a "Dummy" is not necessarily a stupid person -- just someone who doesn't yet know how to do t hings properly.) Contents: What Torrents Are Free stuff you'll need Downloading Torrents Creating Torrents A Word to "Piracy Preventers" =-=-=-=-=-=-= What Torrents Are: (Bit)Torrent is, quite simply, the most efficient means of trading large files o n the internet. By "efficient", I mean one person (you) connecting to the severa l other people simultaneously. By "large", I mean "bigger than your typical vide o or TV clip or whatever else fits on YouTube". Limewire and eMule are good for small pictures and music files, mediocre for TV episodes, and generally useless for anything huge (at least with present incarnations). Nobody, unless they have enormous bandwidth, wants to trade a DVD-sized amount of data (4.3gigs) multipl e times if it's possible to do so only once -- and torrents are designed to enab le that. (Indeed, it's possible for people to trade torrents of archives which a re bigger than any one person's hard-drive.) About the smallest thing that can reliably "perpetuate" (see below) via BitTorre nt circa 2006 is 100mb, and then only if the .torrent file is created with many trackers, is promoted properly, and is of rare and desireable material. Terms: "Torrent" -- general term for a file being distributed via BitTorrent P2P techno logy. ".torrent" -- a file extension type; indicates the small text file one creates o r downloads which enables trading torrent-trading of the larger, parent file. Ba sically, it governs how that file is to be "hashed up" into smaller chunks and s hared by the clients. "tracker" -- a server which hosts a .torrent file, and whose "announce" URL is i nside it. "client" -- the file-trading application of a seed or peer. "seed" -- someone trading a file who has 100% of it. "peer" -- someone trading a file with less than 100% of it. "swarm" -- the combined mass of seeds and peers. "perpetuation" -- the ability of a torrent to maintain 100% of the file's pieces throughout the swarm; if it ever drops below 100%, someone with a complete copy will have to re-establish a connection to "re-seed" -- or the torrent will lang uish and eventually die as peers give up and leave. A well-designed and well-pro moted torrent can perpetuate for years without re-seeding by its initial creator or anyone else. A badly designed and poorly promoted torrent will require perpe tual seeding by its initial creator. A .torrent which requires constant re-seedi ng may as well just be a file sitting in a Limewire or eMule "share" folder, bec ause it isn't exploiting the technology. ...enough of this slightly technical junk, because you're not reading this for t

hat (Google up more on your own) Let's carry on, then. =-=-=-=-=-=-= Free stuff you'll need: (All of the following assumes a PC running Windoze.) * PeerGuardian (mandatory privacy utility; also useful for IP address-blocking) * AVGfree (recommended anti-virus utility) * uTorrent (recommended, Azureus is OK; avoid BitLord and BitComet like the plag ue) * eMule (optional) * Firefox (recommended browser, along with NoScript, FlashBlock, AdBlockPlus and RemoveThis Permanently extensions -- just to make spam-free webbin'-around tole rable; you could easily spend weeks downloading and customizing extensions for F irefox, because it's so damn fun.) ...that's it. Go find 'em, install 'em, and then come back. (If you cannot easil y find all of these with a basic search-engine, there exists a strong likelihood that your IQ is less than 90; please do the human species a big favor by diving under the wheels of the nearest bus before you breed.) =-=-=-=-=-=-= Downloading Torrents: The dirty little (not-so-)secret about torrents is that you do NOT need to go to some obscure tracker-hosting site to search for most of them. However, they do make many torrents easier to find by categorizing them, and most torrents are ge nerally "hosted" (the .torrent file is located there) at a tracker site. So....where are all these tracker sites? You dummy, why are you asking me? Throw "torrent tracker site" into your favorite search-engine, and wait three seconds . -- That wasn't hard, was it? I prefer sites in which files can be commented up on); Demonoid and Torrentspy are pretty good in this regard for US-originated ma terial. Some sites require you to register to use them. (RULE: ANYONE ASKING FOR MONEY TO TRADE TORRENTS IS A CON-ARTIST. "Donating" to a site in adjust your sh are/leech ratio is fine, although if you're a leech, your IP address may end up being frequently banned anyway.) To find torrents of files, search for "(name) torrents" in a web-browser or eMul e, or your bookmarks of prove-reliable tracker sites. You might also get used to bookmarking a category list, such as TV > Anime at Demonoid, or some such. Down load the associated .torrent file (usually a tiny thing well under 200k in size. Drag-and-drop the .torrent file onto uTorrent's icon (on your desktop), and away you go. "Leech" -- that's what you are if you download more than you upload, and particu larly if you don't share at all. Things aren't as bad as the early BBS days in t he 1980s (since there are some people around with MONDO upload capability who ca n "seed" more than scores of other peers combined), but as a general rule you sh ould try to trade at least 50% of what you download in a heavily-traded torrent (swarm of fifty), even in a modestly-traded (few dozen) one, and about 150% in a thinly-traded one (less than ten). In uTorrent, just check the General tab, and it'll tell you how much you've uploaded and downloaded. Azureus will actually n ag you if you try to close the torrent after finishing but have shared less than 100%. "Seeding" -- That's what you're doing if you're uploading after the file is 100% complete. It's important that you do this if you're the only seed in the swarm

-- it's not absolutely necessary that you seed until someone else is at 100%, bu t certainly at least until there's a "distributed copy" in the swarm -- under th e General tab in uTorrent, look at the right end of the Availability bar for the number; there will be a distributed copy when the number is at least 2.x (i.e., if you quit when availability is reading 1.978, that means you'll be bugging ou t -- you were the "1." part seeding -- and leaving only 97.8% of the file behind among other peers. "Initial-seeding" or "Super-seeding" -- Do NOT seed this way unless (A) you've c reated the torrent and are getting it off the ground (see below) for the first t ime, or (B) you know you're the only seed, and it's a thinly-traded torrent. "Leech", AKA "Strangler" -- someone who has his uploads throttled to a useless, neglible amount. Even when they're at 100% and seeding continuously, this isn't terribly helpful and just aggrevates everyone else and drives some people away ( meaning there's even fewer peers to trade the torrent). -- HOW TO AVOID being a "strangler": Under the General tab in uTorrent, look to the lower-right for "Pie ces" followed by a number in the form of something like "2315x512k" or "703x1mb" or "3,912x4mb", etc. Try to ensure that your upload capacity to the torrent is at least 1/250th the amount of "x" (i.e., if "x" is 1mb, then try to trade at le ast 4k/sec), or it's difficult for other peers to get complete "pieces" and "blo cks" from you in a timely manner even if you seed around-the-clock all week. Nex t, make sure you're not trading so much OTHER crap that you're strangling the to rrent in question. Note: Most clients will attempt to "match" your download and upload bandwidth, so the more you share the more you get; also, some registery-r equired sites track user "ratios" and ban leeches. =-=-=-=-=-=-= Creating Torrents: General considerations -- you don't need to make a torrent if one already exists containing the files to be shared, and is well-traded by existing seeds and pee rs. If the file you want to trade is a TV show or movie more than ten minutes ol d and less than twenty years old -- the odds are higher than 99% that someone el se with considerable technical skills has already "ripped" it, created a torrent , and the torrent is successfully "propogating" (being traded). Basically, you'l l just be wasting your time and filling the "Uploads" area of a tracker site wit h useless clutter. Other people will post comments telling you that you're a dip for not searching first. "Scene" -- "the Scene" is the cutting-edge of releasing "rips" of new material ( i.e., shamelessly pirated pre-release DVDs and the like). If you're reading this , you're not part of "the Scene". I am not part of "the Scene". If, while upload ing a ten-year-old anime .torrent to some exclusive, schway site, you check a "T his is a Scene release" box out of curiousity to see what will happen, don't bla me me if you're subsequently shredded like a hunk of raw, bleeding meat dropped in front of a starving wolverine. "Repackage" -- This is a general term for taking files made by someone else (whi ch you've downloaded) and creating a new torrent for them. This is acceptable an d even necessary as technology evolves, and as hosting sites obsolesce. (I repac kage torrents constantly, usually to increase the number of trackers in the .tor rent file so as to ensure perpetuation of rare material.) It is considered impol ite to remove any pre-existing accreditation or encoder tags to a "ripper" or cr eator of the file, and such may result in you acquiring a bad reputation. "Ripping" -- An increasingly general term for creating computer-viewable compres sed video files (usually XVID .avi) from other, larger media, such as captured s treaming-video from TV or vid-cam, or DVD VOB files. Originally it solely meant creating perfect duplicates of copy-protected or encrypted media.

It is not the purpose of this article to educate you on making "full-rips", or b yte-perfect copies of CDs and DVDs. (IMO, they are just transitory storage forma ts, and in twenty years will be just as quaint as casette-tape and LP records ar e now, and you may not have anything in the house which will even play one.) It is also not the purpose of this to educate you on how to properly and efficientl y compress video (go elsewhere for that), but I will clue you in to a few annoya nces which I loathe: (1) If you're ripping TV episodes, edit off the end-credits , particularly if they contain commercial overlays blaring at maximum volume or are very long (e.g. "filler"), and even the front-credits if they aren't particu larly cool or memorable -- everybody hates downloading 25% more gunk than they n eed to, and "purists" who want "everything" can go buy the DVD or DL a full-rip to get every last unblemished pixel. The purpose, after all, of compression is t o make things SMALL so they download FAST. -- But all that said, Magic DVD Rippe r followed up with AutoGK do a nice ripping VOBs down into managable .avi To create a torrent, you need a .torrent-file creation utility. Fortunately, uTo rrent has one built right in, and it's a very nice one indeed because it SUPPORT S MULTIPLE TRACKERS (queue chorus of singing angels). A brief word on trackers, or more properly, tracking sites (mentioned above in the download section): They fall into the following categories: * Public tracker -- no registration required to upload or download a .torrent. M ost of these are just server addresses placed into a .torrent file and intercept ed by index sites. Want to make your very own public tracker? Instruct eMule or Limewire to share a folder containing .torrent files. Wow! That was difficult. ( Of course it won't be spidered by Google and index-sites, and immediately discov ered by the whole planet -- but that's another matter.) * Index -- a website which searches for and archives the locations of .torrent f iles. Example: Torrentz.com * Hosting site -- a website, sometimes with a "BBS community" flavor, which host s .torrents and which sometimes requires registration. Many of these permit web search-engines to "spider" them, and permit inclusion of their tracker address w ithin a multi-tracker .torrent file. Registration is chiefly to prevent spamming . Examples: Podtropolis or Torrentbox. * "Narcissist" -- a tracker requiring itself to be listed first, or exclusively, within a .torrent file in order for it to work; there may be only one "narcissi st" per .torrent. Piratebay and Demonoid are narcissists. * Private -- registration required, may be invitation-only, prevents search-engi ne spidering, and the group is reclusive and frowns upon or inhibits its tracker address from use in multi-tracker torrents. Step-by-step -- Collecting tracker addresses * Go to http://www.openlitebt.com/trackerlist/ and obtain a list of public track ers. If the site is down, web-search "torrents public tracker list". Also take n ote of the trackers used by others (see "testing" below). * For .torrent hosting sites, obtain their "announce" address (it's usually prom inently displayed somewhere on their upload page). * In a text-editor (e.g., Notepad), cut-n-paste & format all of the tracker addr esses so that each has an empty line between them. -- Testing tracker addresses * Launch uTorrent and begin seeding a torrent you've already completed. * Right-click on the name of a torrent you're trading, and go down to Properties in the pop-up window. * Click once in the tracker list displayed, down-arrow to the end (if not visibl e), and cut/paste in the list you created above (duplicates are harmless). Hit O K. * Wait about ten minutes, highlight the torrent and look in the General tab. Obs

erve which trackers are good and which are flakey or dead (note that trackers wh ich require a .torrent to be hosted aren't going to work in this test because yo u haven't uploaded anything yet; just assume they'll work if the web-site is ali ve n' kicking). Weed your list of dead trackers accordingly -- now you're almost ready to create a .torrent file. -- Organizing a folder of files for a torrent * Make sure that (a) people want your file, and (b) can't get it already, and (c ) is "meaty" enough, size-wise, to be applicable to torrent-trading (at least 10 0mb. preferrably a lot more) -- unless you're willing to seed it constantly. * Make sure that a "narcissistic host"'s it-came-from-here files are included (D emonoid requires one), or the .torrent will be rejected when you upload it. * If the name of the entire "path" is over 255 characters (i.e., C:/longass-name /longass-name/etc), some clients either won't be able to create the .torrent and /or trade it on your or other peer's end. So give your drive and folder names a trimming. * People will strongly desire to beat you to death if your release is a password ed .RAR archive or ZIP archive. Even if you're a "Scene" releaser trying to beat out some other guy by nanoseconds. In fact, after beating you to death, they'll want to raise you from the dead just so they can beat you to death all over aga in. This is BitTorrent, not fucking usenet -- it has hash-numbers and clients th at auto-kick peers who trade bad data, so that kind of stupid segmenting is comp letely unnecessary. * Give the files comprising your torrent recognizable names that search-engines capable of indexing .torrent contents can utilize. (This is another reason RAR a nd ZIP archives are loathed -- nobody really knows what's inside them until they DL the whole steenkin' thing.) A list of ten TV episodes named "DW1" and "DW2" (etc) won't elicit much traffic (and particularly not if "DW" stands for "Deadwo od", because there's already lots of torrents for those) even if the .torrent fi le itself is given a nice name because there will be fewer search hits and there fore fewer peers. * Lastly, if the to-be-torrent'ed files are located on a remote drive, "map" the network drive, and make sure that your client creates the .torrent and seeds/tr ades the file via the drive appearing under My Computer (rather than My Network Places). -- Creating the .torrent. * With uTorrent, this is simplicity itself. Go to File in the upper-left, and dr op down. * Cut-n-paste in the list of trackers which you accumulated and vetted above. It could be one private tracker, or include dozens. Make sure any "narcissistic" h ost's tracker is first. (Note: uTorrent will remember the list of a created .tor rent and default it to the next time.) * One tweak which is EXTREMELY helpful for perpetuation: do NOT create your .tor rent with "default" block-size. Instead, reduce the size to about a fourth of wh atever is default (defaults are 1mb for CD-sized material and 4mb for DVD-sized, so you'll want to use 256k and 1mb accordingly). If your torrent is of material which you think will be of lesser interest, make block-size one-eight of defaul t. (Example: A DVD is released of a ten-year-old, niche cartoon, it leaves one e pisode off, and you have a TV-rip of it. File size is 250mb. Default block size is 512k, so you create a torrent with 64k blocks.) * Why are small block sizes good for torrents? BECAUSE SLOW PEOPLE ARE A TORRENT 'S FRIENDS! Modem-users slowly plod along, taking forever to get from 95% to 100 %, and as they do, their client software steadily trades the rarest blocks in th e torrent. Meaning: The smaller the blocks are, the more quickly slow peers can trade them and keep the torrent healthy. * When are small blocks sizes bad for torrents? If you go back in a time machine about ten years, you might find yourself using a computer without the processin g power to handle the overhead of torrents with 24,000 blocks instead of 600, an d had a hard drive so small that it couldn't hold a nearly infinite number of "b

loated" 150k .torrent files (which resulted in problems for tracker servers). So me clients, including uTorrent, take insanely long to parcel out tiny blocks in superseed mode (for torrent files this tiny, just release using regular seeding) . -- So why not make all torrents with 16k blocks? Because many hosting sites ma intain limits on .torrent files sizes, and because there IS overhead involved in tracking all the darned things. The point of diminishing efficiency returns is reached at about 128k for 700mb (I've had little trouble keeping low-demand 700m b torrents perpetuating for months without re-seeding with 256k blocks). * Click the "Start Seeding" box before hitting OK. * When the .torrent is done, uTorrent will ask you where to save it on your driv e (so save it). You'll then observe it up and trading with no seeds (other than you) and no peers. Right-click its name and go down to Properties; click "Initia l Seeding" under "Other Properties" at the bottom-left of the pop-up window. * If you mess with anything inside the subdirectory of a multiple-file torrent b efore it's seeded to completion, there's an excellent chance you'll screw it up and people will berate you when they're stuck at 99% and can't get one last bloc k because it keeps failing the hash-check and their client is kick/banning you e ven though you're the person who made the torrent! So hands-off that puppy once the .torrent file is created, and before the torrent is 100% and healthy for wee ks. -- Announcing the .torrent * Basically, this is where you upload the small .torrent file to various & sundr y hosting sites. Try to hit up a half-dozen. Write an intelligent description. P eers will begin trickling over in about twenty minutes to a half-hour if you're posting to public-trackers. * uTorrent doesn't always pick up newly-joined peers immediately; I find that ri ght-clicking and hitting Update Tracker every five minutes herds them in more qu ickly at the beginning. * You may agonize if you spent a lot of time creating a fat, several-gig torrent , and get only three peers, but be patient. Some index sites won't update to inc lude your torrent for a day. -- Help! I'm in a node behind a firewall and need to "port-foward"! * This is beyond the scope of this document (good luck hunting elsewhere), and i s usually highly specific to the user's hardware, software and ISP. * If you're in a metro area, it's seldom a problem anyway, and there might even be a silver-lining to it (at least as far as initial-seeding is concerned). I'm in a metro area, don't port-forward, and haven't had any trouble seeding torrent s -- a well-traded torrent will almost always have several peers whose clients a re acting as bridges between others -- and these peers tend to be "high quality" peers with good upload capacity (the silver-lining), and needless to say that i f all the peers on your list share magnificently, you'll seed your torrent quick ly and efficiently. -- Seeding efficiently * A word on "initial" seeding versus (regular) seeding: Regular seeding: Your cl ient sends blocks as they are requested by peers, with preference to those that are rare, as it has time and is able to determine which are rare (which is not a lways possible). Initial seeding (AKA "super-seeding" in some clients): Your cli ent sends each block only once, and doesn't "cycle" until it's trading all of th em. A "perfect seed" would therefore consist of you uploading each and every "se ed" block once to peers who refrain from dropping out before they've traded them again at least once, and the distributed copy reaches 100%. You generally have to seed 150%-200% with regular seeding to get a new torrent off the ground, but only 105%-115% with initial-seeding -- and even less if you keep a sharp eye on the peer list for "slugs" and "leeches". * uTorrent: The "Peers" tab you'll want to have open while you initially-seed. T his lets you keep an eye on everyone and identify ne'er-do-wells. * Identifying "slugs": Slugs are modem-users or people with better bandwidth who

are simultaneously downloading three-dozen different things and thereby crippli ng their per-file capacity. If your torrent has large block sizes and is dribbli ng them out at 0.2k/sec to a particular user, obviously it'll take a long time f or that user to get pieces and trade them to another peer. (Such stingy rationin g might ensure a torrent perpetuates once up and running, but it's bloody damned annoying during an initial-seed.) Your client may exacerbate a slug's lethargic behavior by "stalling" him to move on to more quickly-receiving peers (who may, unfornately, be leeches -- see below), with his client then dropping out and re connecting to ask for different block. Joy....now he's "slugging" THAT one TOO.. .. * Identifying leeches: A leech is someone who downloads more than he uploads (us ually by strangling his uploads, or just by having greater download than upload capacity), and this is extremely undesireable when you're initially-seeding sinc e it's possible for him to reach 100% and then leave before he's trading all blo cks you've sent him at least once. uTorrent has some built-in algorithms to trac k the exchanging of blocks between peers, and refrains from sending new blocks t o peers until it sees them previously traded ones appear in other peers -- and i t represents a substantial improvement over "dumb super-seeding" used in older c lients, dropping seeding percentage from 115-120% down to 105-110%. -- But some clients, notoriously BitComet, have "tricks" to quicken downloads for their user s which have unfortunate side-effects for you, the initial-seeder, if the BitCom et user is a leech (and he may be without even knowing it solely due to his choi ce of software). * BitComet "drop-outs" and "0.0% fakers". Some versions of BitComet are aware of that fact that peers with no pieces at all are preferentially traded to by most other clients, and exploit this by falsely reporting their users as having 0.0% when they hand-shake with those clients. Then, while or after receiving a block , it falsely reports its upload bandwidth (the number in uTorrent's "Peer dl" co lumn) as being much higher than it really is to trick your client into sending m ore blocks right away, and then, if it doesn't get them them, "chokes", disconne cts, reconnects, and does the same thing all over again, repeat ad-nauseum. Asid e from the leeching problem, it messes with uTorrent's attempts to track where y our OTHER peers are sending their received blocks, and thereby send them additio nal blocks in a timely manner. There's more and worse (Google it up), but suffic e to say that a few BitComet leeches "tag-teaming" together can eviserate your a ttempts to initially-seed a torrent if you're not paying attention, as they migh t hog up to 30% of your seed blocks and not trade away more than 5-10% of them t o other peers before they hit 100% and "insta-split" (gee, thanks, guys). If you 're firehosing from a T1, it's not a problem -- but for anyone else with lots to upload and finite bandwidth, it's damned maddening. For this reason, ALL BitCom et peers are automatically kicked from some servers, and some clients (e.g., Azu reus) have built-in IP-blocking mechanisms. Some "professional leeches" hack the ir own BitComet client to report itself as something else in order to avoid this -- but the repeated disconnect/reconnect behavior is instantly recognizable. * Slugs and leeches will do a number on your efficiency, and especially so the l arger your torrent's block-size (slugs are notorious for stall-disconnecting hal fway through 1mb and larger blocks; leeches are to be avoided at all costs). IP address-blocking with PeerGuardian: uTorrent does not including address-blocking due to some funny ideas its creators have (they deliberately will not include t he feature) -- but it can be easily done with PeerGuardian. Find the PeerGuardia n "blue ball" near the clock lower-right, bring it up, and click List Manager, t hen Create List. Make a new list named "Leeches". * Identifying a leech's IP address in uTorrent: Don't trust the number in the pe er's name (if it even has a number), it might be ficticious. Instead, right-clic k on a peer and Log Traffic to Logging Tab. Wait a bit, then check the Logging t ab, and you'll see his actions recorded there along with IP address. Add him to your PeerGuardian "Leech" list and then hit its close-box. * How to tell if a BitComet (or other) user is REALLY a leech, or just behaves l ike one due to his unfortunate choice of clients: (1) Watch him closely; if he e stablishes at 0.0% then reports actual percentage a second after beginning to re

ceive a block, reports a high "peer dl" number (but which steadily drops every t en or fifteen seconds or so), and then eventually drops off and reconnects -- he is NOT necessarily a leech, and you'll delay getting your torrent off the groun d if you throw him out when there are only two or three other peers "early" in a n initial-seed and you're not uploading at full bandwidth capacity. Bop back and forth between the "General" and "Peer" tabs between his connects and disconnect s. If the "Availibility" changes by increasingly large amounts during his in-and -outs -- he's a leech; ban his IP address in PeerGuardian. If you see him again in a half hour with a slightly different IP address, edit the settings in his "L eech" list entry so that "Starting IP" and "Ending IP" are, instead of the same number (usual), in the form of xxx.yyy.0.0 and xxx.yyy.255.255. * "Timing" an IP-address ban: It's a bit of an art-form, but essentially you wan t to let the leech finish receiving his block, then ban him before he gets anoth er one. Why? Because there's still a change he'll trade it (especially since, as it's the last one he receives directly from you, it'll be his rarest one), and if you "heart-attack" him before he has all of it, it won't be traded again unti l you've cycled through the entire torrent. * People DO move and upgrade their software, and sometimes even reform their tra ding ethics, so you'll want to occasionally "pardon" people by purging your Peer Guardian leech file, or create several leech files for "misdomeaner" "felony" an d "capital-offense" cases. *If you're lucky, you'll break my initial-seeding efficiency record of 100.012% -- good luck. =-=-=-=-=-=-= A Word to "Piracy Preventers" ("Piracy Preventers" refers to everyone involved in attempts to thwart file-trad ing, be they persons involved in legislation, law-enforcement, or those attempti ng to create new technologies to track everyone's name, rank, forearm tattoo num ber, retinal scan and butthole size across the universe.) First! A brief glimpse of the timeline history of theater and music: 1. First sentience (100,000BC?) to about 1906AD -- If you were good, you could e arn a living performing live, because everybody likes being near other people wh o make them feel all good and tingly. Persons with exceptional memories told eve ryone else about you, and your fame spread. Essentially, those persons advertize d for you via word-of-mouth, and you got to eat better food and have more sex. 2. 1906 to 2006 -- Some performers earned additional money via sales of media co pies of their performances. It was a good gig while it lasted. 3. 2006 to The End of Time -- If you are good, you can earn a living performing live or creating a work reproducable only with exceptional expense. Good perform ers with the most "exposure" in the form of millions of copies of media spread a round among millions of fans will see their fame maximized, and consequently the ir live gate-take maximized. Actually, you can earn a PHENOMINAL living if you'r e even slightly talented, since word-of-mouth can now spread around the world at the speed of electricity. The "Rolling Stones" are so old they can barely stand up let alone play their instruments, but they're commanding $200 tickets on tou r because 35-year-old songs people downloaded off the internet sound just as gre at as the day they were pressed into vinyl...better, even. Right now, the "anti-piracy" bandwagon is jacked-up on blocks, completely immobi lized after charging full-tilt into and bouncing off of Piratebay like a rubberball -- but the remaining riders are still enamored of the idea that laws and pr isons can prevent the spread of electrons: Ten-thousand cops can easily fan out to arrest and imprison ten or a hundred file-traders. What can they do when MILL

IONS of people are trading files? Nothing save stage a few "kangeroo court trial s" to preserve the dwindling illusion they're capable of stopping anything let a lone everything, that's what. Useless. Impotent. "We can't do *shit* to stop thi s, but we're going to make a few teenagers cry on camera, e.g., http://tinyurl.c om/tmjqo -- because we're now sadists pursuing political power!" Yee-hawh! Some media-venders appear to believe that marketing "locked music", inserting tr ojans into codecs or firmware, or releasing thousands of "fakes" (e.g., as is re cently the case with dozens of corrupted "Pirates of the Caribbean II: Dead Man' s Chest" .torrents being posted daily for months on end on public-trackers) is t heir salvation -- instead of just a way of advertising near-complete flaccidity. Meanwhile, Nickelodeon has clued-in: It's selling its DVDs of the insanely popul ar "Avatar: The Last Airbender" cartoon with a trading-card. Brilliant! Somebody finally figured it out! -- You don't make money from the electronic data, but t he OTHER stuff -- the COLLECTIBLE three-dimensional junk that no one can copy pr ior to the invention of Star Trek replicators. What a novel idea! Do what majorleague baseball has been doing for sixty years and fantasy gamers for fifteen -sell stupid little laminated cardboard rectangles for BIG MOOLAH! Did you know that comic books haven't folded shop in twenty years despite colorscanners and the tiny size of jpeg files? Actually business has increased. Why d o you suppose that is? Look, youse guys in the MPAA and RIAA: Lawyers cost money, and politicians won't stay in your pocket, so stop imagining that siccing governments on "little peop le" is going to "save the recording industry". Permit me to help: * If you make a cartoon -- package the DVD inside a coloring book or along with a toy. When the coloring book is done or the toy is broken, kids are going to as k Mom for another one... * If you make music -- have a phenomenal act, consider mp3-trading "free adverti sing", and periodically release "numbered limited edition" media in which the pa ckaging itself (rather than the electronic data it contains) possesses numismati c collectible value due to its rarity. If you're a "recording industry professio nal" -- get over yourself and polish your resume, because your abilities were du plicated by software ten years ago; if you still have a job at all, it's because you've latched onto one of the few remaining bands too clueless to figure out h ow to mix, master, burn & market their music without leeching middlemen like you taking 90%. Meanwhile, the next generation of real talent looks like this, and you'll never see a thin dime from 'em: http://www.theagitator.com/archives/02730 9.php#027309 * If you make movies -- make them a mind-blowing experience in the THEATER, expe ct to make most of your money in said theaters, and make sure your theaters are bigger than shoe-boxes and what they're showing looks sharper and brighter than a hi-def home system. (There's a reason people don't trade "wrap-around" iMax fi lms...it's possible, but pointless. Read Roger Ebert's advice on his web-site.) Your CGI dragon better be bigger than a Greyhound bus, and I want to smell the s ulfer and burning fat when it fries the hobbit. * If you don't think you're able to earn a living without hiring a government to create and enforce a bunch of phony-balony laws -- then not only do you not hav e a viable free-market business model (having a mountain of shit for sale -- tha t nobody knows about because they missed 8pm last Thursday night, or the two-wee k theater-run in the city forty miles away, and you idjuts won't let 'em view a lossy file off the net -- is not a viable business model), but the attempt to se cure it represents the imposition of a random, Kafkaesque tyranny.

* If the economy is a regulatory socialist nightmare in which the prospect of op erating a nation-wide franchise (such as a rock-tour or theater-chain in which a nyone who slips on spilled beer or popcorn-butter can sue for the moon) fills yo u with dread, or the government has prevented, via commie "anti-trust" legislati on, movie producers from owning and operating movie outlets, and is seazing musi cians' instruments to sell at auction for confiscatory taxes -- then why in bloo dy hell do you think it's a good idea to hire the VERY SAME ASSHOLES to create a nd enforce MORE laws? What are yeh: Stoopid? With extra "o"s? These VERY SAME AS SHOLES who broke up your theater-chains in the 50's and imposed 40% gate-taxes o n theaters? You do remember that, don't you? You should, because it killed the " Golden Age" of Hollywood and gave us twenty more years of black-and-white movies even though Technicolor debuted in the '30s. But here you are, brainlessly dryhumping the leg of Leviathan, hoping it'll reach down and pat your heads. Fools. ... * If it hasn't dawned on you yet that television will be completely supplanted b y the internet within the next twenty years (YouTube and "stream-casting" are yo ur first taste, and Google totally flushed $1,499,999,999.99 of the 1.5 billion it paid for YouTube) -- wake up and snort the coffee-grounds. All news-reporting will be done by live-casting video-bloggers, absolutely anything ever made anyw here will be available immediatebly upon-demand despite the best efforts of repr essionist mullahs, and viewable on gigantic flat-screens costing no more than TV sets do now. The technology for storage and bandwidth will expand faster than d ata is created to fill it. Today, a hard-drive can hold hundreds of thousands of jpeg pictires. Twenty years from now (if not ten), a computer will easily hold a gig-sized "rip" of every film ever made, be small enough to wear as jewelry, o utput to wrap-around glasses, and trade wirelessly to anyone within range (much as kids are already playing video-games head-to-head wirelessly). And static IP addresses will be an ancient relic. So... evolve, you lumbering, pea-brained dinosaurs, before the comet lands. Atte mpting to outlaw mammals will get you nowhere.