Wednesday, January 05, 2005

P2P piracy pyramid

Jeff Howe and Erik Malinowski at Wired believe they've got the lowdown from insiders on how copyrighted films, games and movies get onto P2P networks. An interesting read.

Malinowski sums up the process,

An industry "insider" gets a copy of the digital file; s/he passes the file to a "packager"; the packager (or "release group") compresses the file and passes it to a "topsite" with which they have an exclusive relationship; "when the topsite (or "distributor") drops a file the avalanche begins";"couriers" grab, copy and transfer the file to "dump sites" and then the main P2P networks like Kazaa. "For the couriers, the payoff is props from their peers and credits redeemable for goods on upper levels of the pyramid"; once they get to the main networks Jo Public can get access.

Something of a kernal of a business model for the content distribution industry?

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