You have an IP address linked to your computer, and if you block that IP address, people can't necessarily determine where you are or who you are. A lot of people use this when they use BitTorrent or use streaming sites.
The real key here, and the reason I built my company this way, is that I could see five years ago that everyone was already paying for content: they were paying for it with their data. People have been paying for content for a long time. People think that data is not worth anything and that they can't monetize it. But actually, you can; we do it all the time.
What most people don't realize is that BitTorrent is a file-sharing service. Each person has a little bit on their computer. But the interesting thing is that the trackers that track all the BitTorrent traffic moving through are public. Anyone can grab this data—the government, companies like mine. You just have to have a very good filtering system. The person who built our filtering system happens to be a friend of the Bram who built BitTorrent. So we have the best filtering system in the world, no question.
But we also have a Ph.D. on staff who knows how to clean that data, because the data can be very messy. First of all, if you're downloading an episode of Being Erica, and it's episode one, and you can also download the entire season of Being Erica, most people will put that as one thing. You have to strip that out or filter it to make sure that you have two separate areas: how many people are downloading the whole season and how many people are just downloading one episode. This is what we talk about when we talk about filtering.
Going back to this whole idea that you're paying with your data, there is so much free data on the web right now. When you set up a Facebook fan page, if you're the person who sets it up, you get all the free data. It's all there.
If you look on any YouTube video and look beside the views, click on the down arrows and you will see nothing but data, free.
Most people say that's not monetizable. It absolutely is, and if we had an Internet connection I could show you right now all the free data that's out there, that we use all the time. And BitTorrent is the same way.
People say that people haven't been paying for their content. No, they haven't been paying for it with money, but they've been paying for it with something that's better than money—it's their data. I'm always a bit shocked when people say, “Well, that's not really money.” I'm like, “Yes, it is.”
We talk with lots of music people all the time, and there are a lot of indies.... The music business is in disarray, and anyone who comes in here is going to be upset: their entire business model has collapsed, and they've been trying to preserve it. And I don't blame them, but there are all these indies that are changing the way it's done now. I meet them all the time. These young guys are making....
I mean, how much money do you really need to make, as an artist, if you're doing it yourself? If you make a couple hundred thousand dollars a year and you live out in Fergus, Ontario....