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The Torrentfreak Situation

Some of you may have seen the torrentfreak post that came out earlier today.

A part-time employee of ours, who got a wee bit too excited thought it would be a good idea to leak information about one of our products to torrentfreak. The product (which was internal alpha until this morning) is focused on integrating the bittorrent and Red Swoosh protocols into Firefox.

First, I am not exactly elated about the situation. Though his heart was in the right place, he was in no way authorized to discuss this product with anybody on the outside. Taking things even further he also had pretty irresponsible comments about Bittorrent, and about Bram Cohen in particular. You can read the article if you want to see the gory details, but brash comments about taking over Bittorrent “within a year” and Bram Cohen soiling himself made it so I had to respond to the story here.

So our apologies to Bram. Bittorrent is something to be proud of and Swoosh is contributing to the community.

Second, I want to say that it is not really Red Swoosh’s style to mouth off about our tech before we’ve even released something to the public. We like to have our technology speak for itself, and we ultimately try to stay out of the spotlight when we have nothing public to back up claims.

Third, I want to make it clear that Red Swoosh does not intend to rewrite Bittorrent’s protocol. We have been planning support for the Bittorrent protocol (and briefly mentioned so in a few interviews last year but instead of re-inventing the wheel, we intend to support the standard Bittorrent protocol while incorporating algorithms and technology to make a positive impact to Bittorrent’s speed and efficiencies. And another thing. . .FoxTorrent was just an internal working name, we'll keep you posted on naming when final release is out.

Well, that's what all the hub-bub is about. The foxtorrent page shows only our internal alpha but we look forward to releasing our official FoxTorrent client shortly.

Thanks,

Travis Kalanick -- Chief Swoosher

The Ratio Problem

Ratio

We couldn't have said it any better:

"1. It is impossible for all users to maintain a ratio over 1."

It constantly amazes me how many sites require a ratio over 1 because doing so is a mathematical impossibility."

Thoughtkeeper dives into the math, but what he basically says is that as soon as one downloaders' ratio goes up, someone else's goes down.

We've found through our own research that the best system is one that maintains overall network efficiency. Just like Amazon's very-Swooshable S3 storage service, our network uses the power of cloud computing to make sure that downloads are always reliable, always fast, and never bog down your own bandwidth with all that super annoying "super seeding" nonsense.

Thanks, Thoughtkeeper, for giving us a shout-out at the end of your post. As we roll out new services and gradually emerge from "stealth" mode, we expect many more people to have their "Swoosh" moment.

Hmmm....maybe we've said too much already???

Not-So-Rapidshare

  • Wait Periods.
  • Pop-up ads.
  • Misleading interfaces. (Where's the Download Button? is the new Where's Waldo?)
But who would blame a file-hosting service? They're hosting our files, aren't they? For free, right? And they need to recoup their bandwidth costs, right? Oh, right. The age of bandwidth costs is over. What do you think? Would you prefer an integrated P2P network, or are you comfortable with the Wait-N-Download model?

Exile on Hype Street

Johnny Cakes

It's the best thing to happen to music since the Rolling Stones.

It won the super-puba grand prize at the recent Mashup Camp conference, and has gotten a level of exposure and success that few of its geeky, aggregating-data web service brethren could dare hope for, nevertheless achieve.
It's the Hype Machine, and it helps you find music.

Well, let's be more specific. The Hype Machine helps browsers find music. It helps long-tail musicians and DJs get more exposure. And most importantly, it helps blog-owners attract new people to their sites based on targetted, contexual interests.

But for blog owners, the added attention from the hype machine is a double-edged sword. The focus is contextual, which is brilliant. When I search for "Peter, Bjorn, and John" on the Hype Machine, I get brought to sites like Discobelle and Palms Out Sounds.

And then I download the songs.

Now multiply this process thousands of times for popular tracks, and you can begin to fathom the problem: that's a lot of bandwidth for little-guy bloggers, who often have stringent limits on their entry-level web hosting contracts.

So this puts the Hype Machine in a strange position. Success for a web service has everything to do with going with the flow - finding the momentum and riding it.

The Hype Machine sucks at this.

No offense, Anthony, but bloggers aren't really hosting their own content anymore. Now that Blogger is offering custom domains for $10 a year, even fewer people are going to pay for web-hosting services.
Instead, they're opting for file-hosting services like ZShare, which allows for an unlimited number of downloads, and Swoosh-powered solutions like FileHo.

The emerging explosion of file-hosting services success is really not a good thing for the Hype Machine. Especially as the file-hosters plan to unveil their own vertical aggregation engines, which will allow direct downloads. That's bad for the Hype Machine, and bad its constituency of long-tail bloggers.
So here's our challenge to Anthony Vlodkin and the Hype Machine (and any other services that want to beat Vlodkin at his own game, because it's never too late):

  • Offer to reduce your bloggers' bandwidth usage by more than 90%.

90% is actually a safe bet. Expect something more like 96-98%.

And wait - the bloggers don't have to do anything! All they have to do is continue to host files on their own servers, but they won't have to worry anymore about eye-watering bandwidth bills every month.

And all you (the aggregator) have to do is automatically add the following prefix to each file:

  • http://edn.redswoosh.net/

(more info here)

The code is super-easy, and we can help you out with it. Just holler in the comments, and we'll get in touch. Once you get that nailed down, we have some other goodies like our in-page downloader and embeddable media player that will make your site even easier to use for end-users than it is right now.
If we don't help reduce your entire blog network's bandwidth hassles by at least 90% and double the end-user speed and usability, we'll owe you a coke. And an apology.

So go ahead and try it out. Let's take this thing to the next level.

-Johnny Cakes thinks this PB & J Girl Talk remix is the best song of the year, of the week.

The Four P2P Models

Every time I pull up my Google News Alerts on ‘P2P’, there’s yet another P2P start-up getting funded, and yet another big company making some kind of partnership in P2P, and of course some kind of new-fangled P2P killer-app that will “change the world”. Isn’t like every cool app that comes out now powered by P2P? Isn’t Bittorrent the company taking over?. .. oh, maybe that’s bittorrent the technology. . what’s the difference again?? I saw one article that said P2P filesharing was going to help find the cure for cancer ,. . .oh wait, that was me 6½ years ago ;)

There are a few major things going on in the P2P industry, but man, there is A TON of vapor in the P2P industry press, and with it even more confusion. Here’s my attempt at breaking the P2P tech space down into its parts so we all can be a little more informed, and maybe help the pundits and journalists more easily cover the chaos.

P2P Business Model #1 – Illicit Distribution

To date, the only P2P companies that have become popular got their millions of clients distributed (or their 10’s of millions of daily page views) by powering mass piracy. There’s no better way to get your client out there or to get your site in the top 1000 than to help people get their favorite TV, movies, video, music for free. Think Napster, Scour, Kazaa, Azureus, uTorrent, piratebay.org, www.btjunkie.com. These guys are easy to recognize, they are providing you with the access and downloads to content you want for free. Almost exclusively, these applications and sites are powered by ads and adware.

P2P Business Model #2 – Content Portal

Conversation amongst two Silicon Valley Entrepreneurs:

Entrepreneur #1: Hey, YouTube is pretty cool
Entrepreneur #2: But the quality sux
Entrepreneur #1: True, but I can get anything I want with a click of a button
Entrepreneur #2: Maybe, but all the clips are super short, like 3 minutes long
Entrepreneur #1: True
Entrepreneur #2: Hey, bittorrent is cool
Entrepreneur #1: Yeah, but the downloads are slow, unreliable, and how do you make any money delivering illegal stuff for free
Entrepreneur #2: Yeah, but iTunes is pretty cool, pretty decent quality and they sell stuff for $$
Entrepreneur #1: Maybe, but the bandwidth bills must be killing them, there’s no way they can scale that for video
Entrepreneur #2: Hey, what about YouTube meets iTunes, with a little high-performance bittorrent underneath the hood??
Entrepreneur #1: Muahahahah. . . .we’re going to be RICH!!

The P2P content portal is the flavor of the month. Bittorrent Inc. is pitching their own content portal where they are PAYING the studios for licenses to their content . Look at Joost . . . the Kazaa/Skype guys are at it again, redefining TV by trying to create an online Cable Co. of sorts powered by P2P. . .and again, Joost will need to pay content owners for access to licenses and content, and then will create a branded channel/player where they sell the content and ads around it. Look at Azureus , Inc. (primarily an illicit distribution background) with their legit site Zudeo paying BBC for access to content. . .

The keys to success are going to be licensing a broad library of content while marketing to and acquiring a consumer base. They’re going to have to compete head to head with Yahoo!, Google, AOL, MSN, and iTunes to do this. That’s a tough fight. In addition Azureus, and Bittorrent Inc. are going to have to turn illicit piracy products into legitimate commerce brands. Didn’t work so well for the folks that have tried before: Napster, and Scour come to mind. They’re going to need to deliver the content for cheap, and P2P is necessary, but P2P won’t be a strategic part of the business if/when they’re successful getting the marketing and licensing right (P2P won’t matter until they have lots of users).

They’ll ultimately compete with the other portals, and ultimately want the best technology out there to make the economics work, and it won’t matter whether it’s their P2P tech or not, the same way most Internet co’s lease bandwidth instead of laying their own fiber (who wants build the power plant?). Regardless, there have been couple of big gambles with 10’s of millions of dollars put into this space, and only time will tell if they play out.

P2P Business Model #3 — Infrastructure

Websites pay BILLIONS for bandwidth every year. We’re entering the video era of the Net, television and video will be delivered over IP networks. . . bandwidth expenses are going quickly to 10x what they are now. Why should people pay for bandwidth?? Can’t data transfers of popular content be localized to ISPs? Commercial-grade P2P infrastructure definitely makes better use of scarce existing bandwidth on the Internet.

Furthermore, the only difference between a webpage with a bunch of links to content, and a P2P app is that the P2P app delivers the same links with no bandwidth costs. Bottom line is that the only unique technological benefit to P2P is the substantial efficiencies of data transfers. Sounds like a no-brainer to become the new architecture and infrastructure for the Internet?? The main challenge for P2P Infrastructure companies (Red Swoosh included) is their ability to get their clients distributed in a massive fashion. Once the clients are out there in a major way, the rest will be a slam dunk. If 20% of the users have the Red Swoosh client, then any website can save 20% on bandwidth using Swoosh p2p infrastructure.

P2P Business Model #4 – Device licensing

Any of you guys seen DivX’s business model? DivX has been the video codec of choice for p2p pirates since the last decade. Because pirates want to play their “acquired” content in their living rooms on their big tv’s and with their great sound system, DivX is making brisk business by getting paid $1 for every box deployed that is “certified” DivX.

Bittorrent is now trying the same thing, except they are trying to license the Bittorrent name to boxes that want do download torrent files . Granted bittorrent was initially open-sourced under the MIT License , so it’s unclear if it’s even possible to enforce that trademark or if it’s the new Kleenex, but we’ll have to watch and see. Regardless, there’s lots of content going to boxes, and P2P will most definitely make it there.but we’ll have to watch and see. There’s lots of content going to boxes, and P2P will most definitely make it there.

Conclusion

So there’s a lot of activity in the P2P space, but in the chaos there is so much more more hype. Good news is that it can all be broken down into these four basic business models. Journalists should use these to parse through noise and find the goods. Who is blowing smoke, and who's got something real that they bring to the table.
There's still a lot of work before the land is grabbed, and the winners chosen. This is the map for the P2P business battles to come.

The Web Responds to Our Steve Jobs Letter

Ever since we posted the letter Johnny Cakes wrote to Steve Jobs, we've gotten some great perspectives coming from around the blogosphere.

One well-thought post written by Mike from Buzzword Compliant discusses some of our major challenges.

Some of them really hit home with us - we need to step our game up! But at the same time, we want to clear up some misperceptions about how the swoosh service works.

For instance,

"Hurdles to content drive away users. As anyone who has designed online systems knows, every single additional page load you force users to through will drive some of them away. Why do you think Amazon decided to patent the “1-Click checkout” and not the “12-Step Checkout”

We're working on improving our usability right now for both downloaders and distributors. But truth be told, swooshing is the easiest media delivery system we've ever used, and we don't just say that because we made it.

Don't believe us? Check out this tutorial from the Learn More section of our site.

Swooshing is really that easy, and it's getting even easier as we're beginning to integrate directly into popular file-hosting services. Our goal is to be as transparent as possible. We want to keep the focus on the content while increasing download speeds and lowering bandwidth costs.

If you're an end-user and bandwidth costs aren't a concern to you, remember that with up to 99% percent less bandwidth costs, your download servers won't have to overwhelm you with pop-up ads, donation requests, and other ways of paying the (avoidable) bills.

"Metcalfe’s law: networks increase in value proportional to the number of users in the network. I’ve never come across a link that’s asked me to load up RedSwoosh. "

Redswoosh starts really heating up with as few as ten users. It's easy to compare RS to all other P2P apps, but its our sheer efficiency, even in small numbers, which makes us distinct.

"It doesn’t work on the Mac. I’m hoping that they’re doing browser sniffing of some sort and redirecting links from Mac users so they aren’t totally out of luck."

Coming soon! Really really.

"RedSwoosh is positioning themselves against Akamai, which is most likely about the most expensive hosting on the planet, but I think they’re missing the true game changer in the field which is Amazon’s S3. While S3 is mostly referred to as a way to backup your files, it’s actually a massive file hosting operation as well. It’s debut has forced up the amount of bandwidth associated with many other web hosting services; blunting RedSwoosh’s value proposition. Nevermind the fact you can take advantage of Amazon’s huge uptime and bandwidth to directly distribute files for 15 cents a Gigabyte."

We're with you on that one. We're glad that Amazon is opening up S3 to developers, just like we do. We're hoping for some innotative crossovers that combine the best of our P2P with massive utility computing offered by S3.

And keep in mind that S3 is hyped for its disruptive capability in storage - that's not our bag baby. Amazon's bandwidth still costs twenty-cents a gigabyte, and for popular bandwidth-intensive services that use S3, the cost will make a difference.

With even a few users, Redswoosh brings down bandwidth costs to nothing - "free bucks and thrifty-free cents", as Johnny Cakes likes to say.
Mike also suggests that we "license RS technology to power individual applications. For example, WoW distributes their massive patches and updates via P2P."

That's a great idea, Mike. We'll be keeping an eye on your blog in case you have any others.

Until then, it's time to start rolling out more changes. If you have any suggestions for how we can improve our service, drop them in the comments.

We'll be watching, and featuring good suggestions regularly on the blog.

-James

iWaste: How Apple Can Save 15 Million Dollars

Johnny Cakes      
Dear Steve,
        Fifteen million dollars is a lot of money.   It looks like this:   15 million dollars     You make fifteen million dollars every time
  • 100,000 iPhones are sold.
  • 50,000 fourth-generation Ipods are sold.
  • You, with your personal networth of 4.9 billion dollars, sit on your ass, eating seaweed salad and planning out the rest of our lives.
With fifteen million dollars, you could buy:
  • Sealand.
  • 3,750 more Segways for Woz, and a lifetime supply of Nathan’s famous hot dogs.
  • Exactly one talking car for the Pixar campus parking lot.
  • (True, only one. But then again, it *is* a talking car, and they’re even more rare than electric cars!)
Fiften million dollars also buys about 200 terabytes of bandwidth from Akamai. And because of iWaste, those terabytes of bandwidth are being purchased with money that could buy iGet iPhones for 100,000 iPeople. But, wait! You need to spend lots of money on bandwidth, for “peak traffic”. What if millions across the globe decide to download Mean Girls as a treatise, a pledge in support of Lohanesque pacifism? What if??? So you keep the server farms iWasting kilowatts like candy. Well, allow me to iRetort. Time to bust out the abacus, Mr. Jobs. Let’s go over some iTunes Store math: According to the BBC, Apple has sold “1.5 billion songs, and tens of millions of TV shows and movies.” The average film is about two gigabytes. The average TV show is about 700 megabytes, or 70% of a gigabyte. The average song is about 5 megabytes. So let’s go over how many terabytes are needed to transfer iTunes material.
  • Music: one and a half billion songs x 5 MB = 7,500 Terabytes
  • TV Shows: 25 million TV shows x .7 GB = 17,500 Terabytes
  • Movies: 25 million movies x 2 GB = 50 million GB, or 50,000 Terabytes
  • 75,000 terabytes = A #*#&&@ TON OF BANDWIDTH. Apple’s bandwidth, using pricely Akamai servers, costs about $200 per terabyte. A lot of that money is wasted, because of the need to always be ready for the mythic International Downloading Sesh. Anyways,
    • Seventy-five thousand terabytes x $200 = 15,000,000
    Fifteen million dollars. For fifteen million dollars, you could buy the world a Coke. Or at the very least, a Shasta grape-flavored soda. So how can Apple’s fifteen million dollars be saved? Or better yet, how can a hundred thousand iPeeps get their new iPhones for free bucks? Using P2P distribution, of course. The iTunes store now uses a client-server setup. The client (your computer) asks the server for the new episode of Battlestar Galactica (Not Starbuck! Anyone but Starbuck!!!) or the new Amerie song or whatever whatever. And everyone downloads the same files from the same electricity-hungry servers. It’s not just boring. It’s wasteful. With only one person in the P2P network, downloads would be as fast as the client-server setup. In fact, the client-server setup is just a really weaksauce P2P network with you, yourself, and you. As a P2P network grows in size, the download speed increases by magnitudes, and bandwidth is used as efficiently as possible. And some of the newer P2P systems like the Swoosh have all kinds of crazy as-yet unexplored features like prediscovery and a versatile API. I insist, Mr. Jobs, that you don’t sleep on it. Save your cash. Save our strained electricity grids. Lindsay would want it that way. -Johnny Cakes Johnny Cakes is the newest member of the Swoosh entourage. He is our Downloader in Residence, and Ranter in Chief.

YouTube vs. Swoosh??

Hey guys, here's a pretty interesting exchange from our webboards on what YouTube means to Swoosh and vice-versa.

**************************************************************

Swoosh Forum post
P2P Tech: Youtube and RedSwooshBottom of Page
1 to 2 of 2

Author:singleplayer

Andy Chan is a friend and recently, an entrepreneur. He wrote a smart post about Bittorrent a few weeks back:

http://andrewchen.typepad.com/andrew_chens_blog/2006/11/possible_hurdle.html

The key point is that Youtube makes everything so, so simple. Like RedSwoosh, it gets rid of bandwidth concerns. It can also migrate with embeds (RS can do this, but who wants to have to edit code?)
Youtube doesn't require a client install, and it's very community-centric.
I don't think that Red Swoosh wants to be Youtube. It has a different set of advantages.
But what exactly are they?
How do Youtube and Red Swoosh co-exist? When do you use one as opposed to another?
I ask these questions not to be a hater, but GooTube is now a force, and I think it's best to add value to the gaps in the video space rather than try to compete head-on with the dominant player.


Any thoughts?

**********************************
my response:


[For beginners, the similarities between YouTube and Red Swoosh is that we both give away free bandwidth for folks distributing content]

This is a good question and gets to a fundamental shift that might be ahead in the telecom marketplace.

That shift is what I call CDN Subsidies. (CDN stands for the term Content Delivery Network, Red Swoosh considers itself a P2P-CDN). I'll get into the details in a second, but first let me explain the background here.

In this new online video era, uploading, publishing, and licensing have all become easier (though licensing content is still not "easy"). What has resulted from all of this simplicity is that the new bottleneck in the marketplace is shifting toward delivery and bandwidth infrastructure.

On the revenue side of the equation, there are a host of business models that have really started to hit their stride. . .a notable example is Google's AdSense (but there are others as well). Revenues look so good and are scaling so well, that they're simply looking for new real estate, new outposts to place their profitable product.

Google asks itself everyday, "Where else can I put another keyword advertisement?", and the question that follows is "where is the most pain in the marketplace where I can essentially trade easing that pain for more real estate for my keyword advertising"

And so a perfect example of CDN Subsidies is GooTube (I wish it were called Yoogle). GooTube gives away free bandwidth in exchange for advertising real estate that they can sell. They essentially trade their profitable Ad product and bandwidth, for your content. GooTube gets their new ad real-estate (your content), and you get free bandwidth.

GooTube has created the perfect CDN Subsidy that they hope will make them gobs of cash. Heck, they don't even have to split the ad revenues (which reduces their take by up to 80%--look at the deals they've done with MySpace, AOL, etc.).

So getting back to your question, where does P2P and specifically Red Swoosh fit into all of this? Where there are a few angles here:

P2P-CDN makes networks more efficient, thereby making the CDN Subsidy more beneficial to all those involved. That could mean that Google uses P2P-CDN to basically create a FREE subsidy. They subsidize bandwidth, not by paying for it, but by simply providing an effective P2P-CDN that gets rid of bandwidth costs all together. That's truly the ultimate b-model for Google. .. . they get your content, the ad-real-estate, they don't share the profits, and they don't pay bandwidth costs. It's so good it's almost evil.

The other side of this however is that if the P2P-CDN is widely deployed, then content owners don't really need GooTube to get rid of their bandwidth costs. This allows content owners to go out on their own without whoring their content away for free to GooTube. It may also result in GooTube giving the content owners a better shake for their real-estate.

All this being said, the major aggregators on the Net are not willing to give up control of their content or their brand to GooTube who for all intents and purposes is a vast media company and competitor to the large aggregators and media co's. And they certainly do not want to have to put up with the low-quality resolution and bitrate that youtube constrains clips at. And don't forget about the 10 minute limit. And then there's the whole IPTV thing. Comcast, Time Warner Cable, DirecTV, Echostar are all getting into IPTV in a big way, delivering video over the Internet to your Tivo or DVR. GooTube just doesn't play in that world.

GooTube isn't delivering files in your RSS feed. They won't predeliver files to your users, or let them record like you might on a Tivo. They don't let you distribute in even a decent resolution let-alone hi resolution(GooTube clips can't be over 200kbps). They won't let you go over 10 minutes. They won't let you sell advertising. They won't let you get a cut of the advertising they sell on your content. Sounds like a great deal for the professional content owner, no? Not particularly.

So the bottom-line is that GooTube is the ultra-Consumer-CDN-Subsidy. But GooTube is not a professional-grade CDN that delivers content with no strings attached. That's what Swoosh does, and what we continue to do well. And the top 5000 sites on the Net who won't really use GooTube in any substantive way are our primary customers. And the bottom 100K sites that don't have control of their content and are getting a raw deal from GooTube, now have an alternative and can focus on making money instead of giving away their content for free bandwidth.

And hell, if Google enlists Swoosh to help them create the most fiendish CDN Subsidy (I recently saw 3 different Google employees sign up for Swoosh accounts), we're ready for duty!

--chief swoosher

TUBEshifting

Spaceshifting – when you take content you can watch in one place but instead you stream and view it somewhere else

Timeshifting – when you take content you can watch now but instead you record and view it at another time.

TUBESHIFTING – when you take content you can watch on the Tube [TV] but instead go to the Net for your streaming, downloading and viewing pleasure.

TubeShifting case study #1
Most mornings at around 6AM, I’ll get up and get my work day started from home. I’ll go for a couple of hours, and then get breakfast, usually making my way to the coffee table and turning on the boobtube. I’ll watch some mindless TV while crunching on some Trader Joe’s cereal.

Two weeks ago, just like always, I got up, started getting some work done, but when I got breakfast going and moved over to the coffee table, I brought my laptop with me. I’ve got wireless in the home, and typed in a different TV station. . . . http://youtube.com and watched clips of the Daily Show for my morning break.

TubeShifting case study #2
At home I barely have a TV. It’s like a 22 inch screen circa 1974, and to make matters worse I barely have cable. I have the basic of the basic cable plan which is $15 and includes C-SPAN 1,2,3, Discovery Channel and about 4 international stations. There’s no DVR/PVR or anything of the sort. [I know it’s lame, I’m in the market for an HDTV, and will be signing up for Dish in no time. . .please hold your tomatoes].

One of the few good shows I can watch with my lame setup is Grey’s Anatomy on ABC (broadcast) on Thursday nights. For all you start-up peeps, you know it’s basically impossible to regularly meet the regular schedule that broadcast TV lines up for us.

Last weekend, after having missed all of the episodes of the new season, I made my to iTunes and paid for and downloaded all of them. Eight bucks, is about the same as a jack-and-coke at the local bar here in San Francisco. Last Saturday morning I caught up on my Grey’s Anatomy in a couple hours sitting on the couch in front of my laptop.

-chief swoosher

How to Kill YouTube and make $10MM in 30 days

I certainly never would, but someone most definitely could. . .

1) Search YouTube looking for semi-popular content. Look for mid-range content owned by the second tier of content owners and media co's. The ideal content would be uploaded by 100-200 different folks. Find the 100's of thousands of copyrighted works that fit this category

2) Catalog all copies of the various content fitting this category, date added, usernames adding, number of views, etc. Take screenshots of everything.

3) Contact copyright owners of this content. Either a) license content from the owner on the cheap (partial rights, time-limited rights, etc) or b) Inform them that their content has been misappropriated online, and you would like to help them get shut down its illicit distribution and get paid for damages (you can split with them)

4) Sue a few of the John Doe's responsible for uploading and illicitly distributing the content. Get subpoenas to YouTube for IP addresses and other information, and get subpoenas to ISPs to reveal identities of end users uploading infringing content.

5) Launch massive PR campaign around how you have bought the rights or represent the rights to all of this infringing content being uploaded, and let the world know that you are embarking on a massive campaign to root out these direct infringers, and intend to make them pay.

6) Set up legal infrastructure to handle and process 1000's of concurrent legal actions.

7) Don't let cases go to court. Settle with infringers for $5,000 a piece (RIAA/MPAA precedent). Spend no more than 2-3 hours of paralegal time on each infringement case and settlement.

8) Process 4000 cases and settlements in 30 days (200/day, 4 per paralegal per work day, 50 paralegals on staff). Collect $20MM, share revenues with owners or pay off licenses from #3 above.

9) Net take home pay is $10MM.

10) YouTube uploads decrease by 80-90%. All infringing content left if not deleted completely out of the system begins to get filtered by YouTube's new filtering mechanism.

11) Retire in Las Vegas and die knowing that you are hated by a significant portion of the worldwide broadband population.