“Understand the risks. See the benefits.”

I was browsing the latest in piracy news (yargh! I’m a pirate!) when I came along this blog post, an alleged interview with aXXo, a person that is assumed to be a teenager whose repackaged dvd rip torrents have become so popular they have become a search term in itself. Don’t bother reading the interview, it doesn’t appear to be him/her and is boring regardless. It was the comments after that interested me.

It seems, a lot of people hate this character for, and I’m not kidding, releasing well packaged, decent quality, small sized encodes of releases by other groups and then making them available on public torrent trackers.

Well, why the fuck would anyone have a problem with that? Well, the problem appears to be, for these assholes, that he makes the films too easy to get for the average user, and that he’s taking credit.

Reason one blows my mind away, so I’ll start with the foggier point. While it’s true that a lot of people don’t realize that aXXo is generally not ripping the movies or acquiring the rips himself, merely repackaging, compressing and redistributing the work of other groups, it’s also true that he’s created something new that has meaning. By being selective, choosing only good quality rips and then encoding them at a decent rate, he’s essentially created a brand.

If it has aXXo on it and a lot of seeders, basically you know it’s not going to be a cam, the audio synch is not going to go out, and you’re not going to be asked to visit 25 pr0n sites to get the password for the rar file. Should he give credit to the original group in the .nfo file? Maybe. But they would probably get pissed at that as well.

This reminds me a lot of the old days when we would trade mp3s, via IRC, and then later Napster. There was a lot of resistance to making this cool little toy public. And after mp3s got widespread, suddenly we had ratio ftps. The “l33ts” (i.e: 13 year old boys) would have us believe that the only way we could get good music would be to sign up with their bullshit servers, and really, their music taste was always suspect at best. Napster, of course, didn’t end. Networks like Audiogalaxy, WinMX and the shockingly powerful Gnutella would come to allow us “masses” to make good on the promise of free music. And we gave back with our shares. We fought the private ftp servers (whether you knew it or not) by simply sharing, downloading and spreading your music as far as the fucking internet could see.

But now we seem on a breaking point, where public sharing is considered to be uncool. The way to be “in” is to be part of private bittorrent trackers for either music or film. This isn’t so different from the ratio ftps from days ago.

Here’s how this works: the general public is not your enemy. In fact, they are the ones that are going to find and encode that kickass 1967 movie that you don’t know about but is really fucking good. Just like Napster, they are the ones that are going to kick this thing into the fucking future. Just because you get a DVD a few months before release, you don’t get to control this. It’s a revolution.

Those who pursue private trackers fall into 2 categories: elitists and pussies. I assume there is a combination of both in the motivations of the casual user. “If I’m on a private tracker I won’t get sued.” “If I’m on a private tracker I’m better then the rest.”

Let go of those 2 really shitty attitudes. It’s a fucking one in a million chance of getting sued. Join the rest of us sharing music in a community. And don’t be such an elitist pussy.