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Piracy on the Digital SeasJosh Levin takes your questions about online movie downloading and the BitTorrent kingpin aXXo.

Posted Friday, Nov. 14, 2008, at 1:59 PM ET

(Continued from page 1)

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Josh Levin: Thanks for your thoughts. My friend Reihan Salam wrote a really interesting piece for Slate where he looked into the idea of a "music tax" that would be much like what you're proposing here.

You would pay a surcharge to your ISP every month, and in turn you'd be able to download all the music you wanted. Royalties would be paid to artists based on how often their songs got downloaded.

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washingtonpost.com: How closely do these networks and topsites mirror the systems used for more nefarious crimes (bot nets, malware creation and distribution, spam, child porn, etc.)?

Josh Levin: Good question. BitTorrent is essentially an open-air market. Torrent aggregator sites and search engines allow everyone who's interested to see what movies, music, software, and so forth are available to download. These other kinds of networks you're describing are a lot more secretive—generally private and password-protected. To learn more about topsites and "the scene" (the community of bootleggers that Wired called "The Shadow Internet"), check out this article.

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Washington: MPAA wants to charge as much as it did with DVDs for downloads. Pirates don't want to pay anything. The solution lies somewhere in the middle, where neither side wants to give in to reach. In many ways Judge Marilyn Patel—the judge from the Napster decision—has it right with her recent proposal for a royalties board. People will pay for legal, authorized copies, but they must be priced fairly (not like a DVD, which is physical and can be freely resold or given away) and they must not be overburdened by digital rights management and limited playing/viewing compatibility options.

Josh Levin: Thanks for your thoughts.

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Prairieville, La.: Hey Josh, first-time/long-time. There's a Web site that allows users to use BitTorrent to download Tiger games, but it doesn't always work. Did any of your research suggest that aXXo is interested in uploading old Tigers games?

Josh Levin: Glad to hear from a fellow LSU football fan. One of the downsides of BitTorrent as a distribution system is that it works best for files that lots of people want—mainstream Hollywood movies that have just been released, for example. Basically, when lots of people have a full copy of the file that you want to download, that will make your download go faster. I imagine that something like an LSU football game is more of a niche product. Even if aXXo did start uploading old Tiger games, your download would be slow and tedious if only a few other people were interested in grabbing those files.

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Baltimore: For Anonymous: What?! It is well established that, in the legal sense, copyright infringement is theft. What do you think the word copyright means? It means the creator of a work, once he/she has established himself as the author for legal purposes, has the right to reproduce and sell that work (copy it, if you will). This is well-established in American law and British common law.

If you don't believe me, ask the various publishers who sold unauthorized copies of the novel "The Ginger Man" when it still could not legally be sold unexpurgated in America—they found that the author, J.P. Donleavy, was a skilled and tenacious litigant willing to drive those who stole his work to ruin. This is precisely how Donleavy wound up owning Olympia Press.

Josh Levin: A response to the question of whether copyright infringement is the same thing as theft. Thanks for the interesting historical context.

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Re: Copyright Infringement vs. Theft...: In 1985, the Supreme Court itself ruled that copyright infringement is not theft. Here is an article from Techdirt discussing that case and others. (Please read it after Mr. Levin's great chat—I do not want to distract from it.) Thank you...

Josh Levin: Thanks for that article. I give you all permission to go read it if you'd like.

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Austin, Texas: Josh, when programmer buddies told me that they could easily get through the can't-see-the-whole-thing protections Google had in place for my last book, making their "we only offer snippets" claim, ah, untrue, I demanded that my publisher take it down. After all, they hadn't bought the digital rights. When a legitimate company like Google—dedicated to "do no harm"—doesn't protect a creator's property, how can one reasonably expect others to respect such rights? After all, it wasn't for nothing that some high-tech folks earned the title "Pirates of Silicon Valley," which was taken as a title to a film that I imagine one can steal online.

Josh Levin: I have no comment on whether it's easy to crack Google Book Search. But this question does point up the fact that in the digital age we're running out of things that can't be distributed online. And once something gets online, it's really really hard to prevent people from figuring how to distribute it and trade it. That's what makes the Internet so great, of course, and that's what makes it so galling for folks like the MPAA and the RIAA as well as individual copyright holders. The music and the movie industries, among many others, have a really tough challenge: They have to develop distribution systems that can compete with places that give stuff away for free. While this is really hard, it's not completely impossible. One such project that's succeeded recently is Hulu.

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Josh Levin: Thanks to everyone who stopped by to read this and thanks to everyone who asked questions. Have a good afternoon.