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Info Tech March 13, 2008, 5:00PM EST

Meet a Pirate's Best Friend

(page 2 of 2)

The Recording Industry Association of America says it will pursue music piracy wherever it takes place. The industry groups make the point that online theft erodes the profits they need to pay artists to create the next blockbuster movie or hit song.

CORNER THE MARKET?

Jon acknowledges the need for the industries to make money. But he says the prices for new movies and albums are simply too high, built on the business models of the past. By using new technologies like online distribution, artists can still be compensated adequately for their creations while charging less. He adds that he may screen out copyrighted material if he's compelled to do so.

When Jon decided to open the service to other people, he wanted a memorable name. YouTorrent seemed to fit because movies and music are usually shared on the Net as streams of content known as torrents. Although somebody else owned the youtorrent.com name, Jon negotiated to buy it for $20,000. Jon says it costs him about $500 a month to run YouTorrent. So far, the site, which is free to use and carries no advertising, isn't generating any revenue.

Jon hopes for a payback through online ads by consolidating the market for torrents, which he thinks is too fragmented for most people to use. "If I can corner the torrent market," he says, "everyone would rely on the site for profits, just as people look to Google for search-based ad revenue."

Asked why so many smart techies get into pirated music and movies, he says a lot of people pretend they're doing it to take on the Hollywood Establishment. But the truth, he says, is that it's a way to get traffic—and by extension, money. "To be brutally honest, it's now ruthless on the Internet."

For a guy less than two years out of college, he sounds pretty savvy about business. Yet as Jon gets up to leave the café, his tattered canvas Velcro wallet and beat-up tennis shoes suggest his teen years aren't completely in the past. Perhaps Jon has been able to tap into what young Web surfers want because, in the end, he's one of them.

Links

Yo Ho Ho!

Perhaps the most notorious Web site for illegal downloads of music and movies is The Pirate Bay. The site, started by a group of Swedes, has used that country's lax approach to copyright enforcement to continue operating, even as similar Web sites have been shut down by legal assaults. In a 2006 profile called "Secrets of the Pirate Bay," Wired magazine's Quinn Norton tells the story of the controversial site and its efforts to keep offering free content to people around the world.

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