RAR, Matey: Talk Like A Video Pirate

It’s International Talk Like a Pirate Day, and with all due respect to the actual seafaring pirates of Somalia and Indonesia, most modern pirates are busy scourging online for intellectual booty. They’re not unfurling topsails, shivering timbers or walking planks, either, but seeding cams on the scene and blacklisting leechers.

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A scourge to monetizing television and film content online, certainly, but the Flying Spaghetti Monster faithful would argue that a rise in international piracy is our best hope to staving off global warming. And besides, there ain’t no party like a Pirate Party, because a pirate party don’t stop — even when the guvnor’s fleet tries to batter its efforts with a battery of DRM.

Whether you’re out to keelhaul copyleftists or considering a career trolling networks for plunder, pop a can of your favorite energy grog and update your patois with some online distribution lingo.

Pre-air, Cam, Telesync, Screener: Pre-air refers to a television show that hasn’t aired yet; cams are video camera copies filmed in a theater; telesyncs indicate soundtracks derived from the original source vs. a camera microphone, and often recorded by a projectionist; and screeners are copies, usually of DVDs, that are distributed to the media and publicity representatives ahead of a release or airing.

Spoofs, Honeypots, DRM and Malware: These are the weapons of the anti-piracy forces, as well as the dreaded meta-pirates who prey on unsuspecting content pirates (is there, truly, no honor among thieves?). Spoofs are properly named but ultimately worthless files; honeypots are sites set up to entrap greedy pirates; digital rights management (DRM) is the layer of obfuscation meant to limit unauthorized distribution; and malware is a malicious program sometimes embedded in spoof files or file-sharing clients that can compromise your machine, including adware, spyware, trojans and viruses.

FTP, Usenet, Gnutella and BitTorrent: The most popular means of distributing large files in chronological order. File Transfer Protocol (FTP) and Usenet were the original ports of Internet pirates, but now Gnutella, eMule and BitTorrent are the protocols of choice. Now Zmodem transfer from a BBS over 1200baud — now those were the days of great pirate lore!

Seeders, Peers, Leechers and Ratios: On BitTorrent networks, seeders upload packets from a complete copy of the file, while peers download and share packets amongst one other. Leechers are people who don’t download as much as they upload, giving them a bad transfer ratio — the greedy or just lazy pirates who are often booted from exclusive private trackers.

Private Trackers, RARs and Passwords: Private trackers are like file-sharing clubs, and are formed to protect against leechers in order to manage traffic — they often offer a more up-to-date and reliable selection than public traffic and a place for pirates to congregate in the forums, but invitations are limited. The trackers require a password, and sometimes the files are encoded in RAR format in order to password-protect them for members.

The Scene, Crews and Topsites: This is where releases or popular films and television episodes first appear. The scene is older than any protocol, and crews are formed among like-minded pirates for the purposes of sourcing, re-encoding, releasing and distributing copies among topsites. From there, they filter into general circulation.

Hackers, Proxies, Blacklists and White Hats: The elite guard that develop the latest strategies for evading the MPAA navy. Hackers crack the DRM that hobble official copies; proxies and other anonymization techniques enable one to shop the black market with some secrecy; blacklists on both sides attempt to keep prying eyes away from buried treasures; and white hats are non-pirate hackers who simply believe in freedom of the networks.

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