[IP] A Torrent or a Trickle?]
-------- Original Message --------
Subject: [Dewayne-Net] A Torrent or a Trickle?
Date: Thu, 24 Nov 2005 08:57:37 -0800
From: Dewayne Hendricks <dewayne@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Reply-To: dewayne@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
To: Dewayne-Net Technology List <dewayne-net@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
A Torrent or a Trickle?
By Xeni Jardin
Story location: <http://www.wired.com/news/business/
0,1367,69663,00.html>
11:09 AM Nov. 23, 2005 PT
HOLLYWOOD -- Hollywood's copyright police and the maker of the most
potent movie piracy software of all time took the stage here Tuesday
and solemnly declared détente.
It's all but certain the deal between the Motion Picture Association
of America and BitTorrent creator Bram Cohen won't dent the file-
swapping epidemic, let alone stop it.
No. As pronouncements droned on of an epoch-making moment in the
history of digital media, the most important outcome could well turn
out to be something much less significant, though equally priceless:
The picture of MPAA chief Dan Glickman in a BitTorrent T-shirt.
"We don't anticipate any major effects from this announcement,"
declared Mark Ishikawa of file-sharing traffic-analysis firm BayTSP,
one of the deal's numerous skeptics. "Pirates are transport-agnostic.
They move wherever they can get and transmit content with the least
interference.
"Unless you eradicate the current BitTorrent protocol and make it
stop working, you can't stop people from using it for both legal and
illegal purposes," he added.
The MPAA and Cohen announced Tuesday that they had reached a deal
under which unlicensed copyright movies will be expeditiously nixed
from BitTorrent.com's recently launched search engine. As first
reported by Wired News, BitTorrent developed a search engine this
spring as an initial step in building a more potent business around
its technology.
In a comical moment sealing the deal, Cohen gave Glickman and the
heads of seven supporting studios an offering of BitTorrent T-shirts
-- one the few sources of BitTorrent's revenues to date.
Not that the freebies could make them even. BitTorrent is widely seen
as the most virulent source of movie piracy on the web, thanks to its
ingenious method of spreading the work of moving enormous video files
among dozens or even hundreds of users at once.
A report from network-monitoring vendor CacheLogic last year found
that BitTorrent was by far the most popular file-sharing tool,
accounting for 53 percent of all peer-to-peer traffic.
Tuesday's agreement essentially promises that the BitTorrent search
engine won't be allowed to develop into a significant piracy tool.
But experts said the deal will have little practical impact on movie
piracy in general.
For one thing, the takedown requirement isn't new. It's already
specified under the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act (.pdf).
Peer-to-peer services including Napster and Grokster have either
offered or been asked by industry groups to enforce it. But according
to Cohen, requests that previously had to be issued in writing can
now be issued in "an expedited manner."
Searches for video or music files on other torrent-specific search
engines -- and via all-purpose giants such as Google -- are not
affected, because BitTorrent.com does not control them. While Cohen
said the BitTorrent.com engine sees nearly all publicly available
torrents online, an unlimited number of pockets can exist unseen if
publishers take steps to avoid detection.
Since BitTorrent.com does not host content, but rather provides a
publishing mechanism through which users effectively host and serve
files themselves, Tuesday's announcement doesn't ensure that a single
infringing file will be removed from circulation.
"Bram Cohen has no ability to keep people from using BitTorrent,"
said Electronic Frontier Foundation senior staff attorney Fred von
Lohmann. "There is no central database to monitor who's offering or
searching for what -- and anybody, including Google or Yahoo, can
build engines specifically for the purpose of searching the web for
torrents."
Cohen says BitTorrent was first contacted by the MPAA in mid-2005,
around the time of the unanimous Supreme Court decision that resulted
in the death of Grokster.
"Some of those other companies were directly involved in encouraging
copyright infringement, and BitTorrent expressed willingness to avoid
copyright infringement," said Glickman. "We were very pleased that
they were so cooperative."
Cohen said music industry representatives were also in talks with
BitTorrent.
Putting peer-to-peer technology to at least some legitimate use is
easy, and BitTorrent has already been used as a distribution platform
by Red Hat Linux, for one. But driving out illegal users in numbers
large enough to please copyright holders -- without destroying the
efficiency of the underlying network at the same time -- is not.
[snip]
Weblog at: <http://weblog.warpspeed.com>
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