Does the death of Qvod P2P have anything to do with porn trafficking?

This week, Kuaibo, which was supposed to be completely dead, has made headlines again. The wife of Wang Xin, the former CEO of Kuaibo, opened a Weibo account for her husband last week, seemingly trying to play the emotional card. This move has also been very effective, and major media outlets are scrambling to restore the whole story of the incident. I just don't know if it can help Wang Xin with the lawsuit he is facing.

In fact, Qvod itself is suspected of violating laws, but I still feel that something is fishy about what it has violated. Because in the past two years, Baidu , Youku, Sohu , Wanda (yes, this company also got involved) and Tencent, another protagonist of this public prosecution , all pointed out the infringement of Qvod. The public prosecution charge was indeed "knowing that the above Qvod media server installation program and Qvod player were used by Internet users to publish, search, download and play obscene videos, but still allowed them to spread on the Internet, resulting in a large number of obscene videos. "

The Haidian District Procuratorate believes that Qvod and Wang Xin and four others spread obscene materials for the purpose of profit, and the circumstances are particularly serious. The above-mentioned defendants and the defendants should be held criminally responsible for the crime of spreading obscene materials for profit. The editor is not a legal expert, but after looking through the Copyright Law of the People's Republic of China, I found that there seems to be no more severe punishment for video infringement except fines (if there are any omissions here, please correct me). However, the dissemination of obscene videos is different. In the past, the owners of obscene websites who were punished were sentenced to about 5 years in prison. If it is just a fine, these "criminals" like Qvod may still make a comeback, but it is different after being sentenced. The Internet video market in 5 years will have nothing to do with them.

In addition, whether a P2P software should be considered as a pornographic entity is a matter worth discussing. Let me explain it below.

Does P2P have anything to do with pornography?

In simple terms, technology itself can provide a good way to spread pornographic videos, but we cannot completely deny P2P because of fear of choking. Skype Internet phone also uses P2P technology, but because it does not involve the infringement issues brought by P2P, it has become the standard technology of many communication software and has not been criticized by anyone. The so-called P2P infringement is all related to the application of file transfer. P2P copyright file transfer is an illegal act that is expressly prohibited in many countries, but China does not have relevant legal provisions.

As for the prosecution of Qvod itself spreading pornographic videos, it is technically untenable because the data transmission of P2P files is from one user to another, and no intermediate server is used. Qvod is a file transmission carrier, but not the initiator. The subject of this process of spreading pornographic videos should be the data uploader who stores the pornographic videos locally. Of course, this uploader may also be Wang Xin and others, but the editor is not clear about the details of the evidence of the case and dare not make any rash remarks. However, a company with ideals should not be so stupid as to do such a thing with such a weak legal awareness. If this is true, Wang Xin deserves to die.

Looking at foreign cases related to P2P file transfer, many defendants sued by large media companies are P2P seed carrier websites, the most famous of which is The Pirate Bay, which I will talk about in detail later. However, most of the lawsuits against P2P software itself abroad ended with the plaintiff losing the case, because as long as the software developers prove that they have no ability to prevent the sharing of copyrighted materials, the software can be considered legal. In addition, if P2P is killed without distinction between good and bad, copyrighted music software such as Spotify can be closed down directly. This is like someone building a highway, but then there are illegal vendors transporting contraband on the highway. If the police do not arrest illegal vendors when arresting people but instead arrest the people who build the highway, isn’t it a bit unreasonable?

Can P2P software control the content transmitted by users?

In fact, we have ways to monitor the content transmitted by users, but this weapon is not in the hands of P2P software developers, but in the hands of operators. At present, foreign network operators have means to distinguish P2P traffic (after all, P2P has a negative impact on the network load capacity of network operators). If some countries do not have provisions prohibiting snooping on user privacy, they can further monitor these P2P traffic to distinguish whether it is infringing content.

AT&T, a US operator, has submitted a patent that can accurately monitor infringing and legal file sharing traffic in P2P networks. This system can help AT&T prevent pirated downloads and prevent network congestion. Well, at this point, netizens should understand that the three major operators can be asked to monitor pornography and piracy. But do P2P software developers have the ability to handle such things? It can be said that it is technically feasible, but it is not legally acceptable. The following content will contain technical details, and netizens who don't like it can go directly to the next subheading.

The process of P2P file sharing is equivalent to transferring blocks of data from one computer to another. In a P2P network, each end user's computer is connected to other end users through the Internet. The file used for connection is the seed file (tracker), which is used to track all end users who use this seed and establish mutual connections between them. There is no concept of server in the middle. The work that P2P software needs to do includes tracking seed users, allocating bandwidth to individual users, and providing more download traffic for users who upload more, which is the so-called "tit for tat" algorithm. Therefore, P2P is more about user coordination, and has nothing to do with the content of traffic transmission.

This is why when you use Qvod to watch videos, you will find that the Qvod software downloads the videos to the local folder, which is for the purpose of uploading videos. So if Qvod really needs to, regardless of the cost and legal issues, it can indeed distinguish whether there are such illegal videos on the user's computer. However, basically no software is stupid enough to do such a thing, because such software is no different from a virus, it is basically a Trojan horse. I wonder which netizen would like some of his special folders to be known by others.

Regarding the students who were in jail at The Pirate Bay

In fact, even in countries with a very sound copyright system, the attitude towards P2P piracy is very controversial. In fact, it all comes down to "profit". Next, I will tell you the story of The Pirate Bay. What I want to express here is that respecting genuine products is not a sacred thing, but a matter that can be discussed. There is nothing wrong with following the law (in fact, there is no legislation for P2P file transfer in China). What's more important is not to go too far.

The Pirate Bay was founded in Stockholm, Sweden in 2004. Fredrik Neij, Peter Sunde Kolmisop, all 25 years old, and Gottfrid Svartholm Warg, a 19-year-old programmer, jointly developed this website that is hated by all entertainment industry giants but loved by the public.

At present, there are more than 5 million BT seeds on Pirate Bay, including music, movies, software, games, etc., and the peak number of online users is close to 60 million. In 2009, the "Global User Distribution Map" produced by Pirate Bay showed that more than one-third of the connections to the entire site came from China. But interestingly, Pirate Bay has long been blocked by mainland China and cannot be directly accessed. In short, those Chinese netizens who use Thunder BT have become the biggest beneficiaries of this "non-existent website". This website should have been the most commonly used website by Chinese users but has never been seen.

In 2005, The Pirate Bay grew rapidly, with annual advertising revenue of about $160,000. The Swedish government's inaction angered the American entertainment industry giants. Under joint pressure from organizations such as the American Film Association, the US government demanded that the Swedish government must ban The Pirate Bay, otherwise it would put Sweden on the WTO blacklist and impose sanctions.

Therefore, on May 31, 2006, the Swedish police launched a raid on The Pirate Bay. However, the police's closure of The Pirate Bay made young netizens who were used to free downloads quite dissatisfied, and the fact that the United States was proved to be the "black hand" behind the incident further aroused the resistance of the Swedish people.

On June 3, thousands of people took to the streets of Stockholm and Gothenburg to protest the closure of The Pirate Bay. The demonstration also created a Swedish political party called the Pirate Party (Piratpartiet). The founder, Rickard Falkvinge, believes that the current copyright law is outdated and has deviated from the original intention of encouraging innovation. Instead, it has become the culprit for stifling culture, hindering freedom, and curbing knowledge sharing. It does not protect creators, but large companies in a monopoly position.

As for the fate of the three founders, Gottfried Satholm-Vag was sentenced to one year in prison by a Swedish court in 2009, but he ran away without serving his sentence, and was arrested in Cambodia in 2012. Peter Sander was caught in southern Sweden after running away for two years and sentenced to eight months in prison. He is now out of prison and is said to no longer be involved in anything related to The Pirate Bay. After five years of exile, Frederik Neij was arrested at the border between Thailand and Laos in 2014. He is still serving his sentence. So, no one has a good ending when it comes to copyright disputes.

In fact, the Swedish government had no intention of arresting these students. If it weren't for the pressure from the frustrated American entertainment companies on the Swedish government, these people would have been spared from prison. This can be seen from the fact that the Swedish government has been allowing the Pirate Bay website to revive continuously. This leads to our next topic. Qvod is actually cannon fodder in the struggle between copyright owners.

Everything started with a copyright dispute

Youku Tudou currently spends more than 1 billion yuan a year on copyrights, which allows it to legally broadcast copyrighted content such as "The Walking Dead" and also allows it to gain nearly one-third of the online video market share. However, in order to justify the money it spends, Youku Tudou employs special personnel to search the Internet for pirated content.

China's online video market is expected to grow by more than 30% annually, with a market size of over 15 billion yuan. Piracy is a thorn in the side of all companies that have purchased copyrights, affecting not only the number of users but also the advertising revenue of these websites. If the huge licensing fees cannot generate returns, it will have a huge impact on the company's performance.

Zhang Chaoyang once said that Sohu paid so much money to purchase content copyrights. If the advertising or advertising sales revenue cannot offset the cost, Sohu will suffer huge losses. If piracy continues, Sohu will not be able to survive. Did netizens hear that? This is a life-and-death war. As for Tencent, a major protagonist of this incident, the main driving force behind the growth of online advertising revenue is video.

Let's take a look at Qvod. Qvod's downloads once accounted for nearly a quarter of all video app downloads. It was almost the total downloads of Youku and Baidu's video apps. At one time, Qvod ranked second in the number of monthly active users in the Android app store. What these legitimate video websites could not accept the most was that Qvod had no ads. This was like a death sentence for them. They couldn't play it at all.

So before Baidu joined forces to kill Qvod, it also created Baidu Video to compete with Qvod. There is nothing wrong with killing Qvod. The copyright law is there and everything is legal. However, it is a bit too harsh to charge it with spreading obscene videos. (The conspiracy theory here only represents personal opinion.)

Last words

In fact, after the death of Qvod, a large number of new P2P video software such as Xigua and Jiji have emerged. Those pornographic video directory websites just need to change the carrier. In fact, the Qvod software itself is not dead, and many websites can continue to use this software to spread videos, but the software has become provided by the directory website itself. Even if these software are banned one day, there are still a lot of P2P video software abroad, such as Nowvideo and Weed, which are both pornographic and infringing. It is quite easy for the directory website to change the carrier.

I think if we really want to "crack down on pornography", we should ban those directory websites. Their illegal activities are much more serious, but the scale is not large enough. Baidu knows how to ban them. Operators should also do their part to monitor illegal traffic. The death of Qvod is not a pity, but it should not have died in a muddle.

As a winner of Toutiao's Qingyun Plan and Baijiahao's Bai+ Plan, the 2019 Baidu Digital Author of the Year, the Baijiahao's Most Popular Author in the Technology Field, the 2019 Sogou Technology and Culture Author, and the 2021 Baijiahao Quarterly Influential Creator, he has won many awards, including the 2013 Sohu Best Industry Media Person, the 2015 China New Media Entrepreneurship Competition Beijing Third Place, the 2015 Guangmang Experience Award, the 2015 China New Media Entrepreneurship Competition Finals Third Place, and the 2018 Baidu Dynamic Annual Powerful Celebrity.