THE PIRATE KING

He's clean-shaved, bright-eyed. Only his orange jumpsuit and the handcuffs around his wrists givee away his status as an inmate at the Yankton Federal Prison Camp.

"Despite the reports," he tells me, "I didn't technically steal every film ever made. Only most of them."

I WAS IN HIGH SCHOOL when I started really getting into piracy. I was drawn to the philosophical debates happening around it. You know, "Information wants to be free." That shit.

I had this idea I was convinced of, which was that online piracy was the natural culmination of a centuries-long arc that began with the invention of the first printing press. Believing that felt good. It felt high-minded. Enlightened.

Of course, even the most high-minded pirate could admit that at least part of the appeal was the ability to get free shit and get away with it, too. So I did rip a ton of hip-hop albums that I was too white to understand and classic movies that I was too uncultured to appreciate.

At some point, pirating things with as little effort as possible became an obsession for me. I started optimizing and automating my torrents. I learned how to write scripts that would automatically download new episodes of my favorite TV shows the moment one of the biggest uploaders seeded the file.

I joined a private piracy site and started making a name for myself by uploading rare albums. The torrent index I was using kept track of the total unique downloads of each seed, and that was what really got me hooked. I'd see that 10,000 people had downloaded a 300mb FLAC album I'd uploaded, then do the math in my head. Like, 300mb times 10,000 is three million megabytes. That's three terabytes! This was like 2009, 2010. A terabyte was almost inconceivably massive back then. I got off on that, man.

One weird side effect of all my piracy was that I learned a lot about digital encoding practices. Like, for instance, there's a right way and a wrong way to rip a CD, or screen capture a movie from a streaming service. You want to make sure that your version of the file—the one you're uploading to all the other pirates in the world—is as close to "lossless" as possible. That means you don't do anything to the file that would alter the source material. Converting it to a different format, stretching the dimensions of the picture, running it on a weird setting that filters some of the sound or some of the colors. You just don't do that.

A good pirate has to understand the nuances of the files they're pirating. You've gotta know what codecs are being used, which encoding standards, all that sort of thing. This is why my uploads became highly respected: I knew how to rip clean files.

I remember when my ISP first forwarded a "Notice of Alleged Copyright Infringement" letter to my house. It had the DMCA seal at the top and everything. Looked very official.

My dad read the letter, but couldn't make any sense of the message. It never occurred to him that his dorky, computer-obsessed son could be doing something that would attract the attention of a federal agency. So I managed to get away with it.

After that, I got a lot smarter. I started shelling out a little every month for a premium-tier VPN. Never did get another DMCA letter after that. Somehow, the protection that the VPN afforded sort of stripped away some of the thrill of the steal. I kept pirating shit all through college, but it wasn't as cool to me as it used to be.

Piracy also stopped making sense because the paid services got almost exponentially better and more convenient—much better than what you could get through file-sharing sites, in fact. A lot of the friends I'd made in the piracy community starting dropping out. They all made the same argument: paying for content, when you can afford it, is a way to reward good service. Like tipping. Sure, you could keep downloading the movies, books, games, and music for free. But you're willing to open your wallet a little bit to reward the middlemen for all the hard work they did to deliver the files to you in a quick and easy way.

The music streaming services in particular got so good that you'd have to be some kind of nutjob to keep pirating songs. That said, there were rare cases where the music wasn't available on Spotify or Apple Music. Or maybe an album was exclusive to just one platform or the other. In those cases, I actually would dust off my old accounts and go pirate the FLAC for the album. But that was rare.

It went from something I'd do once a month to a "twice a year" kind of thing. By the time I finally got a job in software engineering, I was making so much money that piracy wasn't really worth the effort anymore.

The big irony of all this is that one of my first jobs out of college was with a major video streaming service. (Laughs.)

Yeah, I sold my soul. My job was basically to manage and upkeep the backend systems that organize and tag all the content. I'd edit metadata, make sure it all fit the same standard, that sort of thing.

Metadata means information that's used to identify files in the service.

Exactly. And all that hacker-knowledge I'd built up helped me climb quickly at the company.

I came in as basically a paid intern, manually digging through files and fixing typos or tagging errors. A few weeks into the job, I realized that most of the errors were predictable in nature. I wrote a script that could automatically fix all of the most common issues. Probably 90% of the ones we regularly ran into.

I showed my boss the script, and he was blown away. He had me draft a whitepaper for the upper brass. They approved the script for use on the service, and within about six months I'd been promoted to Software Engineer II. Big pay bump. I was still fresh out of college, and my pre-tax total comp package was close to four hundred grand a year, including all the stock options.

With the pay bump came more responsibility. They asked me to look at their encoding methods on all their video files, to see if there wasn't anything they could be doing better. I spotted a few big errors right away—things they were doing wrong with compression that meant files took up too much space and sacrificed too much visual fidelity.

I clued the brass into an innovative near-lossless compression codec that I had co-written with a friend of mine.

Would you mind defining some of these terms?

Sorry, I don't mean to get too far into the weeds. The basic idea is that when you transfer files online, there are ways to make the files smaller and more easily transferable. A codec is a sort of small program installed on both the machine sending the file and the one receiving it. Codecs make the file smaller, and then use an algorithm to restore as much of the original quality as possible for the viewer. My buddy and I had basically written a codec that was much better at this than what my company had been using. Movies compressed using this codec were a little under one tenth of the file size compared to what the company had considered to be the standard before.

So this was a big deal. Thanks to this codec, the company was saving huge on data transfer costs. Customers were able to load movies much more quickly than before, and reviews were coming in saying that movies looked and sounded better than ever.

The company promoted me again, all the way up to Principal Software Architect.

This was all in my first year there. These people barely knew me, but I'd done so much good for them that they put me in charge of the entire data management service for their video division. This, mind you, was a company with almost every single movie ever filmed in their library. And I had full, unrestricted access to all of it. Raw files. Original quality.

I got my second promotion only about a month or so before the Kobek demonstration. We watched that live in the office.

Everybody had a different reaction to it.

Mostly, people talked about it in very surface-level terms.

"It can copy anything!" Like, "Now I can eat steak every night!"

I mean, that's not wrong, but it's also not really the point. These people were highly-paid engineers. They could already eat steak every night, if they wanted to. And they wouldn't even have to press a button to get it. They could just tell a waiter what they wanted.

Even the "smart" guys around the office couldn't stop babbling a bunch of shit about how reps would "destroy global capitalism." God, people loved using that word: capitalism. Almost nobody really knows what the word means, but damn if they don't feel smart when they use it.

A lot changed for me when I realized that people were just using "capitalism" as a modernized, woke replacement for "the system."

You know, like: It's the system, man! You say that, you sound like a tinfoil hat-wearing nutjob. Say "capitalism" and suddenly you're a Rhodes scholar.

To me, the reps were bigger than economics. This was about the next phase for information. Reps can scan atomic structures and save them to memory as digital information. As soon as I realized that, and all the old crank pirate philosophy from my high school years came flooding back into my brain. Information wants to be free.

I thought, holy shit, it's true. And somehow we skipped several stages in the process. Like, these fucking digital movie files that we were selling were still not free, but suddenly all physical objects in the world were about to become free.

All that week, I was in a daze. I kept coming into work, sort of on autopilot.

The company was rapidly re-organizing itself to survive in the new economy. And it was pretty clear that we would make it. Overnight, we'd become a near-100% services economy, and since well over half of our revenue came from services already, my company would be mostly fine. I remember barely paying attention during the company all-hands meeting where our CEO announced quadrupled salaries and huge quarterly bonuses for anyone who stayed.

Everybody around me was fuckin' yoked about that—they wanted the cash so they could afford land and houses.

I couldn't focus on any of that shit. I felt unmoored. Sticking around for the cash payouts seemed like a rational plan, but nothing else in the world felt rational anymore. Our sales were actually going up. So many people had quit their jobs and started staying home from work. And all they wanted to do was watch movies.

I was looking at our account data, and I could see that literally millions of people were paying to stream six, seven movies a day. Usually $7.99 per movie. I started having a visceral, nervous reaction to this. Any time I thought about the fact that people were paying for our movies, I'd get itchy. It just felt wrong. The more I thought about it, the more I became convinced of the truth inherent in that old pirate slogan: the information wants to be free.

The week after the Kobek thing, I made my decision. I had access to more movies than anyone else in history. I was gonna pirate all of them at once and make it my mission to give free movies to the world. The question was, how to do it?

I started doing the napkin math at my desk. It wasn't hard to figure out. The first thing to do was calculate the total size of the haul. I had to figure out how big the total catalogue was.

I wrote a quick script to fly through our archives and calculate the combined filesize of only the highest resolution "master" files. For many of the newer films, I was looking at the 8k version, but most older movies were stuck at much lower resolutions.

It was an insane number of files, because the company kept master copies of every single movie and TV show they'd ever gotten their hands on, even the ones they'd lost the license to stream. Basically keeping it around, "just in case."

Taken as a whole, the entire catalogue was about five petabytes, but only half a PB if I only grabbed the masters. I rewrote my script and analyzed all the TV shows on the service too. That brought it up to just under 1.2PB total.

Is that… a lot?

A petabyte is fucking huge. Before the reps, it cost about $8,000 to get that level of storage, if you were buying commercially. Moore's law had brought that down from $100,000 just ten years prior.

In your mind, you're probably picturing one big hard drive. It's not like that. To get a petabyte of storage, you had to buy a rack and then fill it with a ton of individual 3.5-inch 32 terabyte and 64 terabyte solid state drives. The 64TB SSDs were just coming into use on the market back then, so most of the company's server racks were built out of 32TB drives. If you slotted 40 of those bad boys into a rack, you could just barely fit 1.28PB of storage into one bigass box.

I realized that, if I wanted to steal all the master files from the catalogue, I'd basically need to get one filled-up rack. I decided that the first thing to do would be to make sure I was using the same sort of hardware as the company.

So, during my lunch break, I simply walked into one of the server rooms, opened up a low-traffic server rack, and ejected one of the drives. I slipped it into my jacket pocket and took it to my car. When I got home that night I used my rep to print out 41 copies of it. Enough to fill a standard rack (which I happened to have laying around) and one extra to replace the drive I'd stolen. Then–

Where did you get your rep, by the way?

Oh, some guy who worked in IT had one. He set up shop in the parking lot of the office a couple of days after the Kobek demonstration and printed out reps for anybody who wanted one.

The company almost fired him for that. But in the end, cooler heads prevailed. Everybody wanted a rep—why punish people for helping along the inevitable?

Anyway, a delivery guy showed up around 10pm and handed me my server rack. I filled it with reformatted drives and plopped the whole thing into the trunk of my car, along with a little hand truck to carry it.

The next day, I got into the office early, wheeling my 1.2PB rack into the elevator and straight to my desk. Nobody said anything, because it's just not that uncommon at that company to see people with server racks. After I snuck into the server room and replaced the hard drive I'd stolen, I set up the rack and ran a script to start the file transfer.

This was the part that had me the most nervous. I knew from some tests I'd run the night before that the transfer speed on these hard drives topped out at around 480 gigabits per second, but with network congestion I figured I could probably count on about 320 gigabits per second on average.

Without going too far into the difference between bits and bytes, I was basically looking at 40 gigabytes per second of transfer time, and I needed to transfer 1.2 million total gigabytes to get all the master files. That'd take 30,000 seconds, or roughly eight and half hours, to transfer the whole thing.

Nonstop file transfer. One complete workday. And the movies would be mine.

Weren't you worried someone would notice? Someone looking at the internal web traffic, I mean.

Of course. But my status as a senior engineer gave me a lot of leeway.

Still, I was sitting at my desk sweating bullets the whole day. A couple of people walked by and commented on the giant server rack I had set up next to my desk, but nobody really suspected anything. I think my reputation was such that everyone assumed I must have a good reason for downloading most of the entire catalogue. (Laughs.)

Once I made it home with the downloaded files in tow, I realized that it just wouldn't be practical to upload the whole seed to a piracy site. It'd take ages to upload the files, and even longer for most people with an average internet connection to download.

So, instead, I settled on doing it physically.

You mean, handing out hard drives with the files on them, instead of distributing files through the internet.

Yeah. For one thing, online piracy was starting to get a lot harder in the wake of the Kobek demonstration, what with the government finally cracking down in a more authoritarian way on web traffic. People were already referring to the online restrictions that were being put in place as "The Great American Firewall." Just like the Chinese model of internet control and censorship.

But, besides the legal difficulties of pirating movies online, it just wasn't practical to expect people to download 1.2 petabytes. I mean, how would you even begin to host that much data?

It's funny how little some things change. Way back in 2007, the CEO of Sun Microsystems wrote this blog post arguing that, if you wanted to transfer a petabyte of data from London to Hong Kong, it'd be faster to do it via sailboat than it would be to do it over the internet.

The internet has gotten a lot faster since 2007, but it still takes ages to transfer a petabyte.

However, if you're copying one massive hard drive in a rep… that takes 30 seconds for the scan and 30 seconds for every hard drive you print. It's not just faster, it's exponentially faster.

The server rack I'd put together was too big to fit into a rep, so first I asked around my friend group and found somebody with a custom-built, top-of-the-line home server box. About 300TB of storage, barely small enough to fit inside a rep. By spreading my stolen library across four of those boxes, I was able to make it all work. Then I just started passing out the boxes to my friends. You could daisy-chain the boxes together to create basically the world's greatest movie server. They started repping the boxes too, and handing them out to their friends.

I remember the first time I saw the box mentioned on social media. People had started referring to it as "the movie cubes." Begging strangers to rep a copy for them. People were arranging to meet up in parking lots to exchange their own unique shit for the movie cubes. I guess it went viral.

Of course, at some point my bosses at the company saw the word about the movie cubes and managed to get their hands on the boxes. Shortly after that they figured out where the files must have come from. I hadn't bothered to scrub the files of any of the metadata or identifying qualities.

Forgive me for saying so, but isn't that sort of a rookie mistake?

Yeah, absolutely. What can I say? I didn't think it through. Maybe a part of me wanted to get caught. I don't fuckin' know.

Within two or three days, the cops came and I was led out of the office in handcuffs.

THE PIRATE KING lifts his hands up, jingling the chains around his wrists.

By the way… don't you think it's strange that the jailors are letting me speak with you? I mean, they've gotten so much more censorious in the last couple of years. Why do you think they let us talk?

I don't know. Got a theory?

Yeah. I think it's because there's almost no chance that what I've said in this interview will get noticed by anybody.

Nobody knows who the fuck I am. And even if they did, they aren't going to read an interview with a guy who pirated some shit. People have better things to do… like watching every movie ever made.

THE PIRATE KING grins.

Maybe too much information is free?