Bram Cohen, the founder of BitTorrent just signed a pact with the MPAA (Motion Picture Association of America) to cooperate with them in their imbecile tactics against piracy. I expect this will curb online piracy just as much as zombifying Napster did, which is zilch. The torrent technology is already out in the hands of users and since it’s been open-source, even when an MPAA-aproved version of BitTorrent is released on the official website there will still be dozens of other versions that will allow filesharing of copyrighted content. The main concern of the MPAA seems to be that the official BitTorrent site also offers a tracker -trackers coordinate torrent filesharers- that points copyrighted content. Cohen has agreed to remove all links to copyrighted content from his site. However, since the BitTorrent tracker isn’t a very popular tracker the MPAA should really go after many other more popular trackers to even dent the amount of filesharing.
Plenty of developers are working on new versions of Torrent software that won’t rely on centralized trackers and when this happens there won’t be any remaining middlemen to bully and the MPAA will have no remedy but to embrace torrent technology as an opportunity or go the moronic way and intensify its efforts in sueing movielovers and developers.
The RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America) made many enemies and no progress by treating the music-lover as criminal. Not until Apple showed them a reasonable business model have they been able to profit, and now that Apple became the undisputed leader in online music retail and showed them the way to profit, the record labels are applying pressure on Apple-God Steve Jobs to raise prices on iTunes. Luckily Steve Jobs has expressed that the labels are getting “greedy” and that he will resist their pressure. Now that broadband and BitTorrent have brought movies and tv shows into the revolution, it’s the MPAA’s turn to prove that they can take advantage of new technologies that empower the consumer and shed some light on this seemingly pointless deal with Bram Cohen.
Who will eventually offer a viable peer2peer business model for audiovisual content? Reportedly with this deal Bram Cohen expects to be able to offer licensed copyrighted content with BitTorrent. We’ll see, but elsewhere, NBC Universal signed a deal with Peer Impact and will start offering a couple of movies and tv specials which will be viewable for 24 hours after the download. Presently iTunes is selling music videos, primetime series from ABC and short animated films, although they’re not using p2p technology.
To get a feel for the opportunities that tv networks are missing out on try out TVTAD. This little program will automatically download all of the newest episodes of all the series on your Favorites list by combining torrents with RSS feeds from several tracker sites.
Who’s the MPAA ?
Buena Vista Pictures Distribution, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios, Paramount Pictures, Sony Pictures Entertainment, Twentieth Century Fox, Universal City Studios and Warner Bros. Entertainment.
How does BitTorrent work ?
Torrent peer2peer technology speeds up filesharing considerably from the previous generations of p2p software programs. Instead of downloading a file from one user at a time like it happens on the Gnutella and Fasttracks networks (with such popular programs like Limewire, Kazaa, iMesh, BearShare, Morpheus and Grokster), BitTorrent breaks up a file into many smaller torrent files so that pieces can be downloaded simultaneously and in any order with multiple users. When all the pieces have been completely downloaded BitTorrent stitches the file back up for your enjoyment and makes you a Seeder, i.e. it keeps sharing the torrent files with the community. Even when you haven’t got all of the torrent files completed, other users can download the fragments that you do have. BitTorrent will also download the fragments that are least diffused throughout the swarm of Seeders and Peers so that when, say, seeders log off it might still be possible that all non-seeder peers (or leeches as they’re sometimes called) might all collectively have the whole file.
In a centralized system of distribution too many demands will overwhelm a server but BitTorrent uses the positive feedback mechanism I just tried to explain to turn a file’s popularity into its fuel. The improved model of distribution grows sturdier, more redundant and more efficient with every new file-sharer. CacheLogic, a British analysis firm, recently estimated that 35 percent of all internet traffic is BitTorrent traffic.
Comments, corrections or questions ?
