The arrival of the internet didn’t automatically result in the unparalleled levels of piracy we see today, but the potential has always been there.

Right from the early days, private FTP sites and the Usenet newsgroup system have been used to exchange illicit content, in particular pornography and cracked software. This dates back well into the mid-1990s. But although these methods of illicit distribution were considered a problem, they didn’t warrant today’s headlines.

Piracy’s now the norm

Online piracy is no longer a niche for nerds. Nowadays, many kids grow up expecting to see the latest series of 24, Lost or Heroes via their computers long before it ever reaches the TV screen in the UK.

The practice is hardly viewed as being illegal, almost the same as lending a VHS copy to friends never was. Two factors have contributed to the recent ‘avalanche’. One is peer-to-peer (P2P) technology, and the other increased bandwidths through broadband.

Both tackle the performance problem, although P2P has also made prosecution much more tricky. The benefits of broadband are obvious, but as fast as it may be there is one drawback – the upstream bandwidth is always many times smaller than the downstream.

So broadband is not much good for sharing your files to lots of people. This is where P2P technology comes in. If lots of people are trying to get hold of the same file, they can contribute the bits they have downloaded already to other downloaders.

The small amount of upstream bandwidth each one contributes can then combine to make faster downloads for everyone. This capability of P2P technology is what has taken file sharing from the shady fringes out into the mainstream. The first popularisation of P2P has now become virtual legend.

Even your grandparents will probably have heard of Napster, and its demise at the hands of the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA). After Napster’s closure, services like Kazaa, LimeWire and Morpheus took over.

The golden age of BitTorrent

But the real P2P revolution was the introduction of the BitTorrent protocol. This splits files into identical pieces from 64KB to 1MB in size, which can then be sent non-sequentially, unlike a web or FTP download.