I’ve worked on two file-sharing services — LimeWire from 2004 to 2008 and more recently in 2019 I launched MuWire. LimeWire LLC used to pay me a salary, and the revenue came from sales of a “PRO” version of their software. MuWire on the other hand does not generate any income and never will.
My motivation for working on MuWire is multi-faceted. At personal level it began as an experiment if I can get myself to write code without money of any kind being involved. That turned out to be true and in fact was much more satisfying than writing code for money. However, at macro level the reason MuWire will never generate any income is because I believe sharing information is a basic human right and to try to monetize it is reckless, risky and wrong. In this essay I try to make the point that file sharing on the internet should be free and non-monetizable for all involved parties.
I remember the US Supreme Court case against Grokster. The decision was unanimous and some of the judges even felt the need to write extra opinions as to how much they didn’t want Grokster to stay in business. Now, it was common knowledge across the industry that Grokster was a “bad actor” — their tech support got caught helping people infringe on copyright with explicit instructions how to download mp3s of Britney Spears songs or something like that. I would venture to say that Grokster was even a straw man whose ultimate goal was to set a legal precedent. That supreme court decision started a chain reaction that took down iMesh, BearShare and ultimately LimeWire.
Now, the LimeWire tech support definitely didn’t advise anyone how to infringe on copyright, but the pursuit of profits over time became exceedingly grotesque and played right in the hands of the plaintiffs in the court case. I’ll throw a Mea Culpa in here because I not only enjoyed the profits as they trickled down to my paycheck but also allowed some of my technical decisions to be influenced by that pursuit, i.e. I ended up selling my soul on a few occasions.
BitTorrent sites were an up-and-coming concept at the time, and while the seeds of monetization were always there, it’s gotten significantly worse with abrasive advertisement, mining crypto in the browser, tracking users, selling their data and other ugly stuff. The opponents of free exchange of information have incorporated these evils into their narrative and under the guise of fighting criminal enterprises have managed to tilt the scales of public opinion in their favor.
As humans, we share information at the most basic level. We have evolved to a state where many of the things we place value in can be represented in digital form. We can use that fact to heal some of the rifts in our societies: imagine that wherever you are on the political spectrum, there is someone on the polar opposite of you, but that person has the same taste as you. With the help of the internet and a file-sharing service the two of you can connect and share what you both enjoy. That won’t turn you into friends overnight, but it will make it harder to dehumanize each other. Extrapolate this logic further and you will see that file sharing can have an impact on global problems like wars.
Luckily, the costs of creating and running a file sharing service are asymmetrical to the costs of shutting one down. I operate the current MuWire network from my home, and at the current costs I can afford to run it for several lifetimes. And just in case, I’ve documented how anyone can spin up such a network using minimal resources.
The fight is far from over, but I don’t believe the internet is lost — even if the original guys from The Pirate Bay think so. But I think it’s time to make a bolder stand on these issues.