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Real pleasure to be here today and, really glad to hear that, you guys have been thinking about the kind of the
shift
and the fact that it's not really about information it's about what we do with it, because
that's very much where my mind went when I started to think about,
What I was gonna talk about here today and how I was gonna frame some of the things we've been
doing at BitTorrent
so the information age is sort of broadly what we've been sort of
told that this is that we going through.
and I think that's correct, right? I mean we're sort of shifting from
the Industrial Revolution, Industrial Age to an age
based around information but, it seems to me that it's not really about
the stuff. It's really about what we do with it and it's about
how we think about sharing it and at
this particular point in time that's becoming, this particular in the last few
months has become
really really a, really really interesting point and I know lots of people are
thinking about.
To just sort of explain what I mean like we've had several different information
technologies and
we've, we've decided to they've allowed us to do things in different ways
so telephone
was a one to one network and then we had radio and TV and those for broadcast those were one
too many
and for both those we develop business models and they
change the world in in lots of really great ways.
Then the internet came on which was a many to many network and
the way we thought about the internet as we've had the Internet up until now
is as as the web as a place
as a series of connected places IP addresses
the web is, the web is a network of places that you can go
and that's an interesting thing to think about because that's not necessarily the
only way to think about the internet we're starting to see
the limitations and some of the, some of the sort of scarier things of
having places and addresses and central points in the Internet where
people can
control things or look at things belonging to other people or snoop on
other people's communications.
All of these subjects and themes been coming up over the last few weeks,
in various guises. But this isn't the only way to think about the internet and
I wanna talk about the way that we think about the internet at BitTorrent because
it's slightly different, so,
the way we think about the internet and the way,
a lot of people, Van Jacobson at "Park" and
lots of different people at M.I.T. and other places,
are very into this idea of something called "Content Centric Networking" which is
an Internet that's not about: "where" but about "what"
it's not about the place but it's about the content itself
and the idea is you don't, if you don't have a place
then you don't, you don't have firewalls you can
you can hard code free speech into society.
Which, I believe is, is probably a good thing to do.
So the idea of a many to many network with no places,
a content centric network as it's called is a theoretical concept.
The only real-life concepts, the real-life working example of a content
centric network, that all the academics working on this point to,
is BitTorrent and the way BitTorrent works is there are no servers because,
everybody who uses BitTorrent the 170 million people
who use BitTorrent every month their laptops are the servers there's no server farms
there's no big central
infrastructure and that means that means, that means
several things, that the thing that's really powerful about that is
this network can grow exponentially, the more people using it
the faster it gets, the more people sharing a piece of information across
BitTorrent
the faster it is to upload and download that, that piece of information.
So it's a really, really interesting technology it's the closest we've ever got
to creating a perpetual motion machine it's fascinating,
but, it hasn't been portrayed that way over the last 10 years you think about,
what people talk about when they talk about BitTorrent, it's chaos, it's
anarchy, it's usually the word piracy people think about BitTorrent and they think about
the "Pirate Bay," or "isoHunt" or, downloading movies illegally.
The reason that, that's something that people think about
is BitTorrent is an open source protocol and lots of different people use it
for lots of different, lots of different reasons, so every time Facebook
updates Facebook, they use BitTorrent to push that update
same thing with: Twitter, Wikipedia, Etsy,
the large Hadron Collider uses BitTorrent to
to move around large data-sets, same thing with the human genome project
none of those guys have to ask BitTorrent incorporated's permission to do that
because it's open source because it's been a public in the public domain for,
12 years now , and the Pirate Bay
don't have to ask our permission either, if we shut down BitTorrent
the company tomorrow
Facebook, the Pirate Bay and the Large Hadron Collider could all continue to use BitTorrent.
But BitTorrent's not for piracy is actually it's actually really, really
useful technology, it was designed to replace
HTTP and I'm proud to say it actually kind of
it's starting to. So the BitTorrent protocol moves more information now than
HTTP so,
every single piece of information on the web if you take YouTube and Facebook and
iTunes and combine them,
they move less information every day than the BitTorrent protocol.
Our founder Bram Cohen created the BitTorrent protocol
to do exactly that, he looked at the web and was like: "this is great for moving
tiny pieces of text and pictures but
when we start moving around massive, massive files and more importantly when machines start
moving massive files to each other
without even talking to us. Then we're going to need something much much more powerful
than HTTP" and that's why he created BitTorrent
and it seems to be working. But people think of us as a piracy company
because
this is how disruptive technologies come into the world.
This is something i've thought about before I was at BitTorrent, I wrote a book
called "The Pirates Dilemma",
did a lot of research into how, how disruptive media is always kind of
is always, is first portrayed as something that's gonna destroy everything.
So take this guy this is a, a guy,
one of the first kind of music industry pirates, his name was Thomas Edison,
and he invented this machine here which is a phonographic record player.
When he invented it, musicians looked at this machine that
essentially played, exact copies,
of, of live performances which is what they did to earn money
and they could not understand, neither could Edison at the time they were both
came to a sort of,
you had this massive argument for years about the fact that this machine is gonna put
musicians out business, people
musicians were literally calling Edison a pirate, until they developed the idea of
a record label and royalties and Edison records was born,
and they kind of figured it all out and that's how the record industry was born.
Edison went on to invent, filmmaking technology and
and his business model for that was, was lets charge a licence fee to every,
every filmmaker who's going to use this technology. Well, lots of filmmakers didn't
like that, because the license fee was very high so this is one guy who didn't like that
who Edison thought was a pirate, his name is William.
William was a filmmaker based in New York and
he wanted to make films but he couldn't make them in New York because,
Edison's lawyers were everywhere and they would shut him down if he made a film
without paying the license fee.
So William and a bunch of other filmmakers actually fled New York
and they moved to this, this town close to the Mexican border
on the west coast which was still then, the very much the Wild West
and they started this community of pirate filmmakers
and the idea was that they were close enough to the Mexican border that if they
got word that Edisons lawyers were coming out from New York,
they could all they can go and hide out over the border and wait unitl
those guys had gone.
They beat Edison and they'd, they kept running around him
and this town of pirate filmmakers is still there today, it's called "Hollywood"
and that guy William's second name was Fox.
So if you go back through the history of disruptive media formats and
disruptive new technologies,
ther's always piracy the first decade is always disliked.
"Oh my God this is gonna destroy the world" and then suddenly people start to
say "hang on a second...
maybe we can do something interesting with this?" But I don't wanna, I mean,
I don't wanna sort of not acknowledge the fact that people are using the
BitTorrent protocol for piracy so this is a story that came out a
few weeks ago. The finale of "Game of Thrones" was downloaded 5.2 million times
by people using the piratebay and that's crazy, that's a, that's a problem right
that piracy. A lot of people think, one of the producers of Game of Thrones actually said
he wasn't sure if this was a problem and maybe this was helping,
but let's just say for argument's sake this is a problem in this is something that we
as a society need to think about and hopefully fix.
I think we getting towards that I mean the thing that we've sort of seen and the argument
I made in "The Pirates Dilemma" was, the best way to fight piracy isn't to like just
stamp it out in an endless game of "Whack-a-Mole" but it's to figure out the
value that piracy is creating the kind of this grey market
and copy that value in a, in a legitimate way
and and deliver that to consumers in a way that makes sense for them if and if you can
beat the pirates through convenience
or better experience, a lot of times you'll win out and we're starting to see some really, really
great examples of that.
So Facebook was based on a fast sharing service called "Wirehog"
that Mark Zuckerberg was working on. If you look at the architecture of iTunes
or Spotify
they look a lot like Napster if you look at YouTube, I mean YouTube
was all piracy when it started. Netflix's is very much a streaming site that's based on
the architecture of pirate streaming sites.
All of these, all of these sites which were essentially walled gardens where,
good transactions can happen with legitimate content,
were all based on, business model started by internet pirates a decade ago
which is,
is pretty interesting. There's kind of a problem with this architecture though
I don't know if any of you spotted any I tried to sort of
draw it so it was easy to understand, but what we're doing is,
is good like all of these things a fantastic and i'm a big fan of all of these Services and use them all
But this is kind of a broadcast model and I'm really glad that DK
brought up that, that Peter Drucker quote that "culture eats strategy for lunch",
because this is strategy what's happening over here. This is, create
a store the way that we've always done, create something centralised
and then broadcast it over here. The problem is this over here is culture
and once you get the content from out of these places
it's going to keep spreading around here because this is a many to many network
designed to infinitely make copies of everything that we ever create
and that's just the cultural fact no, now no matter how many,
more gardens we build and how good the walls are. So there's something going
on there that's,
that's, not quite perfect and we look at this at BitTorrent and we,
we always think how can we build a distributed solution?
A decentralised solution to this problem, because as other things going on here
that are, that are,
starting to, people are starting to respond to. If you talk to filmmakers about
Netflix or YouTube or musicians about Spotify
some of them like it, some of them don't because the fact is there's not one business
model for digital content anymore.
The, the Spotify business model, or the YouTube business model they may work for
some people they're not gonna work for everyone because
there's a different business model for every single piece of digital content out there
because it's really about culture it's about the creator and their fans and how,
they connect over here,
that's always going to be different. So you're starting to, I hear a lot of complaints
I work with lots of people in the entertainment industries
One friend of mine he's the manager "Linkin Park" and he told me about,
the first e-mail he got from Facebook after the IPO.
So, Linkin Park have 50 million-plus
fans on Facebook and they wanted to message them all,
all at once, for the first time ever,
and they, they asked Facebook how they might go about doing that
and facebook said well yeah you can do that it's absolutely fine it's going to cost you
two-hundred fifty thousand dollars.
They thought, well hang on a sec, we've just spent years and tons of money and did
all this stuff to get 50 million people
into Facebook and now, now we've got pay every time we talk to them?
The thing my friend Aaron Ray said to me from the collective was,
he was tired of building houses in other people's backyards
and that's kind of what's going on over here, so there's definitely a business
problem with this approach
Like I said all of these things a good but there's more work to
be done this to distribute solution that we haven't quite hit on yet.
There's another problem with doing stuff like this. I mean it's the old way of doing things
It's us applying the old business model to a new culture, or the old strategy to a
new culture so it's,
content in a store which is how we've always done things in the real world
but it's not necessarily how things work over here the other problem with putting
things in one place
and trusting lots of people with your information is that
you don't know what they're doing with that or who's looking at that and
I don't wanna talk too much about prism because I'm sure you've all been thinking
about this a lot but,
that was a big wake-up call. At BitTorrent we always think about servers
and distribute technologies and
you know this stuff's great but most people don't know what a server is, well,
a month ago lots of people suddenly found out what a server was and why they might
have to worry about that. The thing is we don't need servers we don't need
to necessarily build an internet this way
and we don't need to do it and perhaps shouldn't do it from a business point of view
we certainly shouldn't do it from a civil liberties point of view.
So we started to think about more okay is there a different way that you could do
something to help the content industries because right now we really want help
those guys there seems like,
there's a, there's a huge gap still that we could fill and there's a distribtued solution
that, that might be interesting so instead of thinking about putting
content in stores which is very much a sort of get everything into one centralised location.
We started thinking what if you put stores in content?
What if you actually put the transaction or the interaction that a
creator wants to have with a consumer inside the piece a content itself, because
content's going to get shared that's the culture so this is a strategy that
hopefully might fit with that.
So we started thinking about that, it's like yeah if, if someone sharing
an opportunity for an artist to connect with a fan in a legitimate way,
the more fans share it the more opportunity that creates for the artist.
We started doing experiments with, with this idea and we've been working with
filmmakers and musicians,
DJ's bands all kinds of creators, authors for the last
last two years working on this new prototype where we just put a piece a
content with an interaction in the file,
in front of the 170 million people who use BitTorrent every month and just say
hey do you wanna check this out? Like what what do you think? and we've seen some
really interesting things happen we seen,
tons and great interactions we've seen authors hit the New York Times
bestseller list, We've seen filmmakers,
sellout movie theaters in 15 cities across the states
we've seen artists get millions and millions of downloads
and click millions of e-mail addresses make real money from people using BitTorrent
because there was a different interaction happening in a
slightly different way and we're now
turning, we're now building a product based on these experiments were doing
called the "BitTorrent bundle" and the bundle is the first major change that
we've ever, ever made to the torrent file format.
What it basically does is there's a gate
inside the file it's not DRM it's not something
that can't be hacked and these things will be hacked absolutely just like every
piece a content from
Amazon or iTunes you can't change the culture but the idea is if you put
a piece of content in front of a BitTorrent user
in a way that feels organic and natural to them and if they feel like there is
something's coming directly from the artist
we've seen millions upon millions of BitTorrent users actually,
actually reward artists for their content. So the idea is you could maybe have
something before the gate
that makes it something worth sharing. So maybe it's a movie trailer
and then if you enter your e-mail address you get the extended trailer and a bunch
really cool content behind the gate.
E-mail address are really, really useful for those of you who are not
in the business of marketing content.
Most artists will tell you these days, an e-mail address is more valuable
than a 99-cent sale on iTunes because that's a direct connection with a fan
that's not a Facebook "like" that you might have to pay for that's a fan you
own for life, you have their e-mail address and they've given you permission to talk
to them that's really, really valuable.
So e-mail is one thing you could collect through a bundle
but it doesn't have to be just e-mail it could be okay well,
if you enter your e-mail you get this but once 50,000 fans enter fifty thousand e-mails
everybody gets something else the file will keep un-locking
the more people interact with it the bundle is essentially a social object that,
that changes as people do things to it as it travels around the internet
We're working towards a pay-gate so one of the gates will just be
okay well you don't have to give us your e-mail to go,
get e-mailed when this movies out in theaters maybe just pay us eight-bucks
and you get to watch this movie right now that's something else were working on
and maybe there could be a second gate where okay,
when this movie makes X amount of dollars,
or pounds, something really, really cool happens.
So the reason we're building all these different types of gates into the file is
again we don't, were not a content company we're a technology company
and what we've learned from working with, with creators and artists is,
there's all these different business models and the best thing we can
do is give them
a file format that they can configure themselves to work with
their fan base in a way that they know makes sense for them, so ultimately when we
release the bundle
the bundle publishing platform which will be Q4 of this year,
it's going to be up to you what you put either in front
of this gate, before this gate
and how fans open it and how many gates there are
and what you do with it and the thing I'm really excited about this
here is, is not the you know someone's gonna make a million dollars
selling stuff for a bundle - I'm sure they will.
I'm really excited about the crazy things that that nobody can see coming.
I won't tell you the name the artist but one of the most famous artist in the world
e-mailed us the other week like bizdev@bittorrent.com
just said "hey I am this guy and
I'm really, really excited about this bundles thing, I want you to come down
and meet me at my house, in Hollywood
and talk to me about how we 're gonna release my new album.
So we flew down I'm and we met with this artist, in this giant house and I went with
you know all these numbers and very prepared about how much money we could
make this artist because that's what will they wanted to hear.
This artist just looks at me and says:
"What if to get my new album you just have to buy your friend and ice cream?!"
And that blew my mind because, that's, I mean like I sort of got it so was like okay
you have the biggest house on this hill in hollywood
of course you're at that point in your career you just would like to see fans buying each other ice creams
that's amazing like the cultural interactions that,
that might happen because, content becomes a social object in the more it's
shared the more something
good can happen. That's really, really powerful i'm a marketer i'm thinking about money
and e-mails but,
artists are thinking about ice cream so I can't wait to get this
into the hands of people. So yeah the big idea is the more these are shared
the more value they create and and that's new that's not something we've seen on the
internet before,
I'm way, i'm way over time so i'm, i'm gonna wrap it up but the
the big point of what we're trying to do at BitTorrent, this is one
more really good stat, so, Game of Thrones is downloaded 5.2 million times which was
lauded by the press as the record amount of downloads
of something on BitTorrent ever. We actually beat that with a bundle
which got downloaded 8.6 million times, so we're already seeing these things work
they're already beating piracy at kind of its own game.
This bundle wasn't just shared on our site, it was shared on the pirate bay
It was shared everywhere that pirated files are shared because that's what bundles are designed to do
But the great thing is this, this bundle from "Epic Meal Time" which is a really
good cooking show which involves lot of like bacon and crazy stuff,
you should check it out. The guys from Epic Meal Time
we're earning money and gaining fans with every single share
of this bundle so that's super cool. But this isn't about necessarily just the
content industry,
I mean we wanna fix this right now because we see an opportunity but,
really what we're trying to do is a company is think about the society
that we build next and this idea of things being distributed
as being really, really important so bundles as way to democratise content distribution
We have a new alpha which is great called sync which is
a way to, share all of your personal information between all of your machines
whether it's your phone or your laptop or whatever,
with no servers at all, so think about "Dropbox" with no servers.
If no one, if there's no server there's no cloud then,
no one can look at your data except you and that's kinda the idea of sync.
We've got another really, really cool technology which you can check out on
our the lab section of BitTorrent.com which is BitTorrent live, which is probably the
most disruptive thing we've ever built.
The way live works is it's, live streaming based on the BitTorrent
philosophy so,
the audience is the power of the stream, the audience is the broadcast which means the
more people watching,
the more powerful more resilient the stream gets, the big problem with streaming is if
too many people are watching something,
it always breaks. Well this would let nine million people watch a stream from
one phone coming out of Tahrir square,
and it wouldn't break and no government could shut it down we actually did a beta test
from Tahrir Square at the weekend and it held up perfectly.
It was really, really incredible. So the thing I wanna leave you with is just that,
this really is about, what we do with information
and how we think about it and the decisions that we make now
as a society I mean now this year 2013
will affect how our grandkids get to use information and the kind of societies
that we have so,
it's really important and I think we should all think about more so I'm
grateful to be here talking with you guys
Thank you.