Peekvid and the future of America

you know you love it

Peekvid – Goddess, sing now of peekvid.com, murderous, doomed, that cost countless hours of time, hurling down to the house of death so many sturdy GPAs.
Apologies to those who missed the reference, but I felt that as the most epic distraction to hit my life in quite some time, peekvid.com rightfully deserves an epic introduction. For the uninitiated, peekvid is a repository of free, streaming, youtube style videos that include almost every film released in the past 2 years, every fill in theatres now, and every episode of much of the college canon (i.e. South Park, Seinfeld, Family Guy). Unlike its predecessors Kazaa, Limewire, or Bittorrent, peekvid requires no downloads and as a result carries far less legal risk to users (though, to be honest, Limewire was pretty risk free already). Finally, no fee of any sort is required, since apparently the site itself is supported by flashing ads for various low end internet schemes. In sum, peekvid is the consummate intellectual property nightmare; instant free versions of all of modern media without any need to download or pay.
But here’s where it gets interesting. Peekvid’s website leaves almost no details, mission statement, or content beyond the videos themselves. In the corner there is a link to a gmail web address, significant because it indicates that the entity that created peekvid decided not to link his email address to it. All of which suggests that the creator of the service is rightly concerned about being tracked down and sued (or killed in his sleep) by a Fox or Paramount. Yet while such tactics may have worked earlier in peekvid’s existence, it’s too big to stay hidden. After all, the internet is all about transparency, right? Eventually web news covers the story or wikipedia posts it, and then it enters common knowledge, gets a human interest story on CNN, and gets shut down.
To see where on the illicit website publicity ladder my beloved peekvid was, I went backwards. First, I checked Google news; after all, one would imagine that after 4 + months of use some college paper or tech journal would pick up the story. When searched, however, peekvid yielded only 2 new hits: a story from a site titled Cinema Blend titled “Crazy Site has Free Movies”, and a reference in a Russian blog called Eurasian Home Analytical Resource. Could it be that NO ONE ELSE has heard about this website? My next search was a straight up jaunt through Google itself, to see if perhaps others had heard of it. 6 pages in, however, all I got was the website itself and occasional myspace tags (of the “Dooood u need peekvidd yo!” variety). For a massive and potentially revolutionary web phenomenon, peekvid sure did a great job of hiding itself.
At this point, sensing something strange was afoot, I decided to pay a visit to wikipedia. Wikipedia is one of the most open and expansive collections of information in human history, containing articles on all sorts of sketchy things, from the Crips to Crystal meth to S and M to the APDA. More relevantly to our discussion, it has full pages on kazaa, limewire, bittorrent, and bearshare, all of which also allow for intellectual property theft. But when one searches for peekvid, he finds no page but instead a curt announcement that : This page has been deleted and protected to prevent recreation. With this, one can safely conclude that peekvid is, in essence, too hardcore for the internet.

too extreme for wikipedia
So what is the lesson of peekvid? How is it possible that I and the majority of my friends have heard of an used this website and that NO ONE ABOVE STUDENT LEVEL ACKNOWLEDGES IT? What is going on? While there are many possible conspiracy theories (e.g. Peekvid was set up by Hillary Clinton to ensure Obama’s Hollywood supporters had less money to contribute to his campaign), I think that peekvid’s unique status stems in large part from the existential threat it represents to the entertainment industry.
This isn't to say that peekvid will replace movies and television overnight. Just that it could replace movies and television in 5 or 10 years. Peekvid is qualitatively different from its predecessors insofar as it is untraceable on the part of the users, requires no downloads, and is free. As camera and recording and compression technologies improve, peekvid 2.0 or 3.0 could well close the quality gap and in doing so be a product equal to TV or movies but for less money. Additionally, somehow, Peekvid has found a legal strategy that has forestalled immediate shut down. My personal theory for this is that it is hosted in an Asian nation (see the preponderance of anime and Asian drama and movies) that is beyond US jurisdiction. This is crucial because Peekvid may have finally having a winning legal strategy against the US and others. One need look no further than the fact that it has chugged along for 4 months in order to see that maybe, just maybe, this is sustainable. And even if it is shut down, I can predict with almost perfect certainty that another such service will quickly fill the void.
So what does all this mean? As a college student, I heart peekvid. As a progressive, I must say there is something rather liberating about watching the democratization of the media continue apace. Yet as an American, I’m just a teeny bit terrified. Intellectual property is what we as a nation do best, and it is what gives us comparative advantage in the global marketplace. Whenever globalization expands its reach and pace, we are told to keep getting educated and to build an economy on ideas. When such ideas are stolen at an ever faster pace, however, such advice is hollow. Peekvid may seem harmless, but it is a harbinger of other things to come, ways in which the marketplace of ideas is distributed for free.
And in the long term, peekvid and the peekvids of the future actually reduces creativity and artistic expression. When all media becomes a commons then the incentive to create is reduced to a level approaching zero. What this means is that the media we will see, long-term, will be that which costs nothing to make. Of course, the internet also lowers the cost of creation, but this is not a sufficient response; I’d rather watch a Children of Men then any number of random youtube skits, but in the peekvid 2.0 era I may only be able to choose the latter. This isn't just limited to movies. As the Economist noted last month, Googlebooks is fast on its way to digitizing all works in the public domain which is today being interpreted as anything in a public library anywhere. Peekvid is small today, but the changes and challenges it poses to our economy and our creativity will some day be enormous.

the future of the media. ugh.
So what do we do? To be honest, I’m not sure. I could say some broad platitude about “problems without borders” or “working together to find a brighter tomorrow”, but lets be real here; intellectual property is in serious trouble and without a significant change in the way we use the internet, its on its way out. I actually don't believe theres a way to regulate such a change, however, and so I think if there is to be any solution, it needs to come from the marketplace. Today any media producing entity cannot compete on price unless they are free. Instead, they will need to continue toward customized content, creative advertisement placement and a newer, more fragmented customer base. Can they do it? Unclear as of now. In the meantime, however, I'm going to rewatch the South Park episode on intellectual property. On peekvid.