A Torrent or a Trickle?]

[David Farber <dave () farber net>]

-------- Original Message --------
Subject:        [Dewayne-Net] A Torrent or a Trickle?
Date:   Thu, 24 Nov 2005 08:57:37 -0800
From:   Dewayne Hendricks <dewayne () warpspeed com>
Reply-To:       dewayne () warpspeed com
To:     Dewayne-Net Technology List <dewayne-net () warpspeed com>



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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