I wasn’t home last night which meant missing Lost.

This isn’t usually a problem as most TV shows are readily available online the next day in a plethora of forms, both legal and not, but this is Lost. A bit of insomnia and a lack of patience led me yet again to a search which has been regularly frustrating over the last few weeks. I was eventually able to find a copy of not-so-great quality with unusual difficulty.

ABC has, at least for Lost, successfully impeded piracy, but not through the expected measures of DRM or any sort of technological barrier, instead opting for inadvertent manipulation of social dynamics on the Internet. If this was on purpose, it’d be a rather ingenious use of mass manipulation in the digital age.

The bulk of piracy seems to be perpetrated by prepubescent boys who engage in technological turf war – a competition for digital bragging rights – releasing pirated media faster and at better quality than their rival preteen pirate posses.

A digital release is nuked if there are even minor inconsistencies such as audio-video sync problems. This is a result of either a hasty release by one group or the nitpicking of a rival group who wants to release a proper. For the piracy market this is an ideal state of affairs most of the time. The providers of this content are falling over themselves to get it out as quickly as possible while struggling to ensure quality, and since the currency is macho reputations, there is absolutely no incentive to withhold any of the content: someone else will inevitably release it and the value of your essentially identical product all but vanishes the moment the other goes public.

Lost, however, is a bit of an anomaly. Its popularity is significant in the general population but more importantly, it is significant in the sci-fi-loving geekdom of scene piracy and the geeks who use it. As such, there is a higher demand for its piracy than most shows, though popularity is rarely a prerequisite for piracy – cult programs and movies are often popular with the digital underground.

Under normal circumstances, a show with Lost’s popularity and geek appeal will be online in a high-quality format within an hour (and that’s being very generous) of its airing. This, however, is not the case.

What did ABC do to thwart this? Well, the rumours circulating the Internets are that ABC is dropping frames here and there to fit in more commercials; speeding up a panning shot or zoom, for example. This goes unnoticed by someone watching ABCs HD source of the show on, say, a TV, but when it gets transferred to a computer and compressed to a standard file size, problems can arise because the compression algorithm eliminates duplicate frames – sync issues, skipping – the sorts of problems that are grounds for nuking. Since the problem is intrinsic to the source file, significant delays arise while the piracy groups search for a perfect source, all the while refusing to post imperfect versions, not because they are unwatchable (the logical basis for nuking), but out of fear of the inevitable nuke and the resultant black spot on their group’s reputation.

For a group were to release an imperfect version but simply fail to label it as being their own is also problematic. First, the channels they use for release would be unavailable to them. Their group affiliation grants them access to certain channels higher up the stream; stripping the release of that affiliation strips them of their access. Furthermore, a rival group would more than likely discover the source of the imperfect files and attribute it accordingly, leaving the releasing group with an tarnished reputation either way.

So, the major groups either acknowledge that they can’t get ‘em all or they end up waiting for the perfect source file from which to work with. The latter is, in practice, the same in the end. Legal (and often free) means to watch the episodes are available usually 24 hours after air-time. Again, there is no incentive to delay releases on the digital black market.

Personally, I’m curious as to the legitimacy of the time compression/frame-dropping claims directed at ABC. I can’t seem to find official word on this, just a string of rumours, and even if they are true, it seems much more likely that the time compression was done with the intent of cramming in more advertising than it was in making piracy more difficult.