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Do they have applied a discount for all the P2P users getting legit content from :

http://www.jamendo.com/
or
http://www.archive.org/audio/collection.php?collec tion=opensource_audio
or
http://www.legaltorrents.com/
or
http://bt.etree.org/
or
http://torrents.gentoo.org/
or
http://www.debian.org/CD/torrent-cd/
or ....

See a list of legitimate content at the end of this page :
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BitTorrent

find / \( -iname "*.mp3" -or -iname "*.avi" -or -iname "*.mov" -or -iname "*.wmv" -or -iname "*.rm" -or -iname "*.ogg" \) -delete

If I'm not mistaken ibiblo has been in the torrent business for some time, they host the artist approved live recording trade site http://bt.etree.org/, which provides safe downloads of live performances.

Couple that with the fact that Inkscape is 23 and available on Sourceforge (lots of bandwidth, not a very big file), Scribus is 7 mb (not a big file so torrents don't make much sense), and Audacity is even smaller, and I'm not entirely surprised that you didn't find torrents for those apps. They're far more useful, by design, for large filetypes.

That doesn't preclude the use for smaller files, mind, but there is a reason why it's quite common to now find Linux ISOs. A more stable download, too, thanks to how it's set up.

But if you look at SolidZ, you'll see that some major apps and pretty much every distro has a torrent. If you look at etree, you'll find lots of live recordings of concerts in high quality formats -- files that would be restrictive for direct downloads.

Either way, the point still stands that had you found a link for those apps, it would've been as easy as simply clicking the torrent and having it open in Azureus. The fact that there's less support for files that are easily downloadable through direct HTTP or FTP connections doesn't mean that Bittorrent is useless or nonexistent for those apps. It just means that apps that are not available through direct HTTP or FTP connections are more likely to exist on nebulous p2p applications. Nothing new there.

Like the Grateful Dead? And all the bands that followed their lead, giving us over 1000 different bands with music on the Internet Archive's Live Music Archive, and thousands more that allow their music to be legally traded on the Etree Torrent server?

Ok, so you may say that's just live music, but if you want studio music, there's the Internet Archive (again) with Netlabels and Open Source Audio. I'm sorry, but I'm not seeing the news here.

> Yeah, but 99% of it is Grateful Dead and Phish live shows

Really? 99%? I mean, I have the page with both bands filtered in my bookmarks (that's http://bt.etree.org/index.php?filter=nophgd), but even when I go right to the main site, I only see 10 phish/dead shows out of the first 50. That seems a little more like 20% than 99% to me. Maybe you're using some special sort of mathematics here? :)

I will say that 99% of the stuff there is completely uninteresting to me, but that still leaves enough stuff that I check the site on a regular basis.

the article was about how many legal downloads there were, which they do know.

Do they? There's plenty of music that's not under the purview of the RIAA. If they're measuring by sales, then their methods are about as reliable as those who measure software popularity by sales in a world where open source is growing by leaps and bounds. Anyone who has installed a dozen or more legal copies of Fedora or Debian from a single CD knows how silly that notion is. And the amount of legally redistributable music out there is many orders of magnitude larger than the amount of free/open source software. The fully legal Etree torrent site is reportedly moving Petabytes on a regular basis.

(But your point that the article was not about illegal downloads remains valid.)

Like bands don't exist unless they have massive media hype, a video on MTV, and a shamelessly promoted 'world tour'.

Most bands don't exist w/o that -- at least they don't in the eyes of most people. Most people sit at home glued to their major media shows, force fed conglomorate TV, and listening to their conglomorate owned/sponsored radio.

God forbid you have to search around for some different stuff to listen to! God forbid they might have to leave their comfort of their own homes to see a show and support an artist that might not be 100% favorable in the eyes of the conglomorates!

Makes me want to start my own music distribution just to show it can be done without the RIAA.

It's called the Internet. Ever been there? I have and it's *FULL* of new and interesting bands right next to old and interesting bands! There they are for the world to listen to. Try it some time. etree and dimeadozen should get you started.

Go ahead, RIAA / MPAA . . . shut down BitTorrent. It doesn't matter, 'cuz in less than a week, a better, more efficient and more anonymous P2P tech will get adopted.

Repeat after me: You can't sue a protocol. Even if "they" (**AA) tried to shut down BT/Bram, they'd have a hard time in the courts because of substantial non-infringing uses of the BT protocol.

BT was designed (IIRC) to help distribute large (Linux) iso's. I just looked at the official BT page and there is really nothing there endorsing anything - it's more of a "hey...look at the geeky cool thing I made" page.

However, if you look in the FAQ, it points to two places for content to download:

http://bt.etree.org/ and http://smiler.no-ip.org/BT/BTlinks.php

The first one looks to be bootlegs of bands that allow bootlegging. The second, is a more of an all-things-BT clearninghouse, with links to more questionable sites among legit items.

So, how much infringing encouragement does BT have? What if I made my own client and billed it as the best video store next to Blockbuster? Is just that client liable, or is BT as a whole now advertising infringing uses?

I have a feeling that this won't be the last that SCOTUS will hear of this case.

Phish, Grateful Dead, Bela Fleck, Derek Trucks, etc. are not my favorite music to listen to, but they're pretty good.

http://bt.etree.org/

Spread of trade-friendly music.

the foil inside would actually rust over time.

Actually, I've never known Silver, Gold or Aluminum to rust...

The "flaking problem" is / was quite common with poorly manufactured CDRs. (The OLD cdrecordable.com's discs were notorious for this) IMHO, Always look for the big three (If you do any "tape-trading" you will start to see a trend of what people will and wont accept): Mitsui, Taiyo Yuden and Kodak. Stay away from CMC Magnetics for your archival stuff (Seems to be about every brand out there). CMC has improved over the years, but they are still at the bottom of the scale.

Get yourself an ATIP reader (Windows version "cdrecord -atip" for linux) and you will be able to tell your cheap CDRs from the good ones. For instance, Fuji brand (not FujiFilm) with the spin-on top-holder are Taiyo Yudens ;)

Hope that's useful to someone.

-FB

Bootlegging is not naughty if you see Ben Folds, Phish, String Cheese Incident, or any other band who says recording their live concerts is OK

I'm not sure if Bram Cohen would agree - he made BT to share software,

I'm going to go out on a limb here and say "IHBT, IHL, IWTTHAND". Apologies if you're not trolling.

Firstly, emule is open source.

I'm not quite sure what you mean by "Give me a valid use for bittorrent, apart for things like Distros?" Bittorrent has many legit uses... from your post it seems you realise this, but I'm not toally sure. However there are cases where there aren't official torrents, or the official torrents are being heavily hit after a release and so can't be accessed. I do agree that, sadly, the majority of usage is likely to be for copyright infringement, but I can still see it being useful for non-infringing purposes, and hopefully - unlike many other torrent sites - it won't be geared towards illegal content.

Such examples of sites publishing content legally, all while using BitTorrent:

http://bt.etree.org/ -- live records of bands who permit

http://www.legaltorrents.com/

http://www.commonbits.org/

Looks like there's even an older /. article about these:

http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/03/08/032821 4

The whole reason SHN ever became popular at all was because of Etree. At some point, FLAC became real good and all of us Etree people started using it instead of SHN. Shorten has really no benefits over FLAC. If Shorten was truly free (and not just open source), I have a feeling it would have done better.

Clipped n' saved at
http://wiki.etree.org/index.php?page=TradeFriendly

"Our view has always been if the copyright holder wants to give away their product, it's fine. The key issue is that it's their choice to give it away." -Hilary B. Rosen, then-chairman and CEO of the Recording Industry Association of America, quoted in "Two Labels Warm Up to MP3's" by Bill Werde, The New York Times, May 29, 2003, p. G7.

Can be found here and here.

http://bt.etree.org

Torrents for pretty much every band that allows free distribution of its shows.

I don't know if easytree had the same policy as "etree" (http://bt.etree.org) - but etree clearly states (and seems to enforce) that you should only post live shows from "trade friendly" artists.

Many artists don't just "not mind" but actually encourage live recordings be spread. Much as I detest the way they handled the whole napster thing, Metallica is one of those artists that made its name that way.

There is lots of great stuff on bt.etree.org and as far as I know it's all trade friendly artists. I can say for certain that many of the bands whose names I've seen on there are "trade friendly" (otherwise also called "taper friendly").

Was easytree.org the same sort of thing, or did they not keep it to trade friendly artists?

Does this mean sites like Archive.org's Live Music Archive and bt.etree.org have to be shut down as well? I was under the impression that if the artist permitted taping and redistribution of live shows, it was all legit. Of course, I am aware that there were some instances of trade-unfriendly tapings being distributed through easytree (e.g. Bob Dylan), but all they'd have to do is implement a stricter policy of what can and cannot be seeded.

No, recording devices are not outlawed from all concerts, and the rights belong to the artist. Downloading live shows for free is perfectly legal as long as the band agrees to allow thier show to be recorded and distributed. http://wiki2.etree.org/index.php?page=TradeFriendl y . For example, you can find over 20,000 live, perfectly legal audience recordings at http://www.archive.org/audio/etree.php

I don't know if the concerts EZtree were swapping were from okay-to-boot bands or not...but I will note that Archive.org, in conjunction with etree.org, are still making available literally thousands of live concert recordingsin lossless formatsfrom bands that allow concert taping and trading. If you take a look at their collection, you might just be surprised by some of the bands there. Gin Blossom, Guster, Toad the Wet Sprocket, Rusted Root, Butthole Surfers, Cowboy Junkies, etc. etc.

I'd just like to plug a favorite band of mine, the Ozark bluegrass band Big Smith, to whose members I am distantly related (and with whose family mine used to have a blood feud going about 80 years or so back). If you're not into bluegrass/folk/gospel, then you're not into it...but if you are, check 'em out.

Here ya go

etree.org is like EZtree, except that etree is completely legal. Unfortunately because of this, you won't find very many artists, but there are a few big names. Specifically Phish, the Grateful Dead, Primus, Ben Folds, 311, the Spin Doctors, Jack Johnson, and others.

Allow fans to record your live shows! This can create a pretty strong fan base, and allow your music to be posted on popular sites such as http://bt.etree.org/.

It's free, damn good, and legal:

http://bt.etree.org/
http://www.archive.org/audio/etree.php

Cluster Knoppix has been around for a while, i think i have some releases dating 2001-2002, and i noticed that the torrent tracker the poster linked to hosts the .torrent for the current release of Cnoppix. 12-04 IIRC.
A side note: being that the poster was smart enough to link to a torrent tracker in the story, I'm interested to see just how big this torrent will get, as i speak, the tracker lists over 800 hosts, 200+ seeds and over 600 leechers. The largest torrent i've ever seen was on bt.etree.org with something like 400 seeds and 700 or so leechers. That was last year. Any other /.ers able to recall some larger torrents?

A lot of that music is also illegeal.

I normally don't respond to an AC, but this is incorrect.

From http://www.easytree.org/extras-faq.php#faq6

What kind of torrents are allowed with this tracker?

- All torrents must have music related content.

- No torrent may distribute any official material. This includes, of course, OOP material and the separated audio part of VHS videos, Laserdisc videos, and DVD videos, too -- even if the recording is from a different source than the officially available material. Also not allowed are remixes/remasters of any officially available material and so called "bastard" mixes. One exception: The recording represents a complete show of which only minor parts are (or have been) officially available. In this case it's ok to keep those minor parts included to the recording. This applies not to compilations. No compilation may contain any officially available material!

- No torrent may distribute any material of artists respectively bands who do not agree to the electronic distribution of their inofficially recorded live shows. For a list of bands/artists see here.

- No torrent may distribute any lossy compressed music, i.e. MP3, VQF, OGG, so long as the material is known or expected to be available to the trading community in better quality.

- No torrent may contain compressed archive files, i.e. RAR, ZIP, GZ. For content allowed with this tracker it doesn't make much sense to pack it in compressed archives. Thus, we assume that the torrent uploader wants to hide impermissible content in case a torrent contains such files.

- No torrent may contain losseless compressed but platform dependent files like MKW. It's contra bonos mores of live music trading to exclude users of other platforms from the download!

- No torrent may contain uncompressed PCM audio files like WAV, AIFF. Including such files to a torrent is a huge waste of bandwidth -- both, on seeder's side and downloader's side.

- Microsoft Windows executables like EXE, COM are not allowed in a torrent because of the risk of carrying viruses.

- Torrents without a self-explanatory title or detailed description indicating the contents, as well as torrented data not containing an info-file in plain text format (file extensions .txt or .asc) with a content's description will be considered as contra bonos mores of live music trading and are not allowed on EZT.

If you are not sure if your torrent will adhere to these rules, please ask the moderators first. Torrents violating the rules or contra bonos mores of live music trading will be banned without further notice.

And similarly for bt.etree.org:

From http://etree.org/legal.html

Etree.org welcomes lovers of all types of music. We support the discussion and trading of the highest quality recordings of:
live performances;

by bands/performers that allow taping and trading;

in a lossless compression format.

Many bands are very clear in their support of taping and trading: Grateful Dead, Phish and Dave Matthews Band, for example, all have written policies on taping and trading. http://www.etree.org/thebands.html has information on many other taper-friendly bands. There are also links on that page to other information on bands that allow taping and trading. You may use the appropriate etree.org mailing list to discuss any band or performer that allows taping and trading.

Conversely, there are performers who are notoriously against taping and trading (Bob Dylan and Live, to name only two). You may not use the etree.org mailing lists to discuss such artists. Solicitations to exchange music by these artists are prohibited and will not be tolerated.

There will always be performers whose views on taping and trading are unknown, or unclear. If you would like to trade music by such a performer,

Do you really want this web site down? (or maybe this one?)

Not that I don't recognize that BitTorrent is currently used for many legitimate applications (whereas that was extremely difficult to argue with a straight face with P2P), but I think this statement is a little overboard. I'd say that, currently, "legitimate" use of BitTorrent is a "token minority" of its use. The vast, vast majority is pirated software, pirated movies, and pirated TV shows (and, to a lesser extent, music, just because of the nature of BitTorrent being more conveniently applicable to small amounts of large files, rather than large amounts of small files).

Anyone not admitting that at this particular point in time is lying to themselves.

Maybe that was true when SuperNova and LokiTorrent were around. We are sorta heading back into the "time before torrents" when stuff wasn't easily available on a huge online database available on the web.

Have you take a split second to look at the legitimate uses of torrents recently? easytree, Etree, etc? HUGE repositories of legal music for download?

It's obvious to me that you haven't.

Interesting to see what happens if some of these cases come to court with someone like EFF taking the defence brief and standing the financial risk of losing. There is a significant public interest in knowing and understanding what the laws are. Meanwhile, BPI should quit saying they can enforce the law ; that's intimidation which is criminal ; only the courts can enforce the law. The BPI can bring evidence and representation before the courts, same as anyone else can.

It would be fun to role-play this. In principle, the laws are set up by the Queen (as constitutional leader). I wonder if she had this outcome in mind for her loyal subjects. If not, I wonder if she'll change the laws. Copyright is a 'choice' thing.

Music 'libre' at http://www.etree.org/ . They like it if you share. They won't sue their customers. Better model.

I'll identify the legal live music tracker at Etree for ya. Sure, some of the bands (a little over 800 of 'em) have their music available at The Internet Archive, but the Archive requires explicit permission from the bands to host their material there. A lot of bands that allow taping/trading haven't (for whatever reason) opted in to the Archive. So the Etree site has tons of taper-friendly bands like They Might Be Giants, Primus/Les Claypool, Parliament/Funkadelic, Los Lobos, and GWAR, who aren't on the Archive, but who still allow (some of) their music to be traded.

I don't know why you say, "free software doesn't count." That seems pretty silly. Free software most certainly does count. Aside from updates to my Debian machines, I get most of my free software by BT. But there's probably more legal music trading going on on the Etree site every day than there is BT traffic in free software on the entire Internet in a month. So the argument is moot.

The point of BT is not to give you the fastest possible download. Its primary benefits are for the people offering files, who can offer those files to a lot more people than they would be able to if they had to use ftp/http. Those fast ftp/http sites you like? They're not fast because they use ftp/http. They're fast because they pay huge amounts of money for huge, fast pipes. I guarantee, if the guy offering the torrent that you're getting at 200kbps were using ftp or http, you'd be seeing speeds more like 2kbps.

But hey, if you don't like it, don't use it. Nobody's twisting your arm.

So what, who cares about the fucking RIAA. Their business model and their crappy monotonous brain-dead music sold by skimpy outfits and an airbrush will soon become obsolete as their business moves to free distribution with money comming from live shows and maybe some royalties from comercial use. All of the good bands already allow and 100% encourage free music sharing anyway. And they have kick ass seeds too! (If you like music go here, greatest site EVER!) Don't think it can work? look at the top grossing bands for the last 15 years, Avril and Nelly aren't even remoteley close. And very few of them are on MTV or radio much at all. They can't keep down music forever no matter how brainwashed people are or by how cool they can look in a video, its just a matter of time.

Music. See here for example: 100% legal, redistributable music from bands that have chosen to allow (some of) their music to be shared. Since the Etree BT server was set up a little over a year ago, it has seen several petabytes of legal data fly by. There are, at this point, several thousand bands that have followed the Grateful Dead's lead in allowing taping/trading of their concerts.

In fact, I would have to say that music is the probably the first and foremost legal use for bittorrent, with Linux distributions being a very distant second at best.

Yeah, 404ed, but interesting is that http://bt.etree.org/ did the same thing with the same error. I don't know if they are on the same server or not, but I thought I'd be wayyy offtopic as well.

The reason why the "extra long tail" is so amazingly long is because the authors are merging two different types of BitTorrent usage. BitTorrent was designed for legitimate content, and for content distributors to run their own trackers. For example, my tracker is used just to distribute my own projects. Distribution is off the main website, with only one torrent shown. This is an example of BT's legitimate use, and even the largest legitimate BitTorrent sites pale in comparison to the piracy sites. There, you'll see much higher numbers of torrents, and few servers that only distribute small numbers of torrents.

The legal test established in the Betamax case is not: what do the majority of users do? It is: are there substantial legitimate uses? And I think the answer for Bittorrent is clearly: yes. Or, rather, YES! It's not just Linux distros. The tracker at http://bt.etree.org sees TERABYTES of data flow past on a DAILY basis, all of it 100% legal music from taper-friendly bands. I'd say that's pre-e-e-etty substantial. And that's just one site! (Although it probably is the largest completely-legit BT site in the world. But they're also competing with Furthurnet, which is a more traditional P2P system, but also 100% legal music (but it requires java, so I don't use it - my motto about java is: "write once, run anywhere-but-here").)

"Apple has unlawfully bundled, tied, and/or leveraged its monopoly in the market for the sale of legal online digital music recordings to thwart competition in the separate market for portable hard drive digital music players, and vice-versa," the lawsuit said.

Mr Slattery called himself an iTunes customer who "was also forced to purchase an Apple iPod" if he wanted to take his music with him to listen to.

While I cannot comment on the legality of them bundling and tying the device to their store I can certainly say that the less tech savvy are forced to use an iPod if they would like to listen to their iTunes music on the go.

The second you download your first album and you realize that you can't play it on a portable device other than a CD player you wonder if you shouldn't just go out and get that iPod so that you can continue to get your music legally... Most people would think it really sucks to pay $10 for an album and then not be able to listen on the go without burning to a CD and then re-ripping to WAV>MP3.

It's not that I didn't expect this to happen with Apple though. They have always promoted lock-in. For now it is working as a benefit. Will they continue to be the leaders in the market though? Only time will tell if people begin to shy away from being forced into using their formats and their hardware. Sadly, in this day and age I have little faith in the consumer and their knowledge and desire to have freedom of choice.

I know it is bad form to go against Apple on Slashdot (especially with the editors apparently being paid off to put iPod on the front page at least once a day) but why can't we all be against them promoting a format that locks you into their hardware? Aren't we all for open standards that works across multiple platforms? Just because their device is sleek, sexy, and "the in thing" we should all just stop and pay homage? Maybe once MSFT opens the DOC format or switches it over to XML then Apple can open up AAC and we can all be happy?

Me? I'm going to stick to downloading and listening to my *free* and *legal* music from etree, FurthurNET, etc, and convert it over to MP3 to listen on the go. I just wish that everyone else would too. At least I know I am not supporting *multiple* monopolies when I listen to the freely distributable music that I do.

YMMV.

Here are some I found: http://www.legaltorrents.com/ http://www.filesoup.com/ http://bt.etree.org/

The best use of BT for me is getting recordings of live shows on etree: http://bt.etree.org/

bt.etree.org for distributing legally traded music via torrents? Along with various other P2P protocols for doing the same thing (FurthurNET, etc).

http://bt.etree.org/

We're 100% legal and we've been going strong for quite a while now. BT is just the same as any other p2p/transfer method. Good/evil, illegal/legal... it's just a method. I think we all get that whole thing by now, new ways to transfer data don't break the law, people break the law. BT is as legit as HTTP, if millions of people with fat pipes are breaking various laws via BT then it's their fault, not the protocol.

We at bt.etree.org have been torrenting legal music and thousands and thousands of people are enjoying the legal torrents available there.

bummer... wget's stopped and is awaiting response... I've only got 80% completed... :(

Wiki List which points to:

this

and that.

This is going to become more common. As a recent Pew survey of musicians showed, most artists think of the internet as a way of getting their word out. 99.99% of artists have no real chance of landing on the RIAA monopoly push money train, regardless of merit. For them, you and I enjoying their music is pure promotion and about the only chance they have of their recordings becoming something that gets lost in the attic. Performance is demanding and few people have the inclination to tour for 30 years. Music is still a get it today because it will be gone tomorrow kind of thing.

a person can have multiple torrent sessions going at once... also a BT server that's serving out hundreds or thousands of songs... they'll go after those people... i'm sure there's a way to do it.

and yes, i agree... kazaa and most p2p software has the sole pupose of piracy (whether it be music, movies, or software). if it was truly for sharing legit files, why wouldn't someone just make one without all the adware and spyware crap that comes along with it? and don't say "his name is bram cohen" because there's no way to open up BT and search for available torrents. ok, actually there is furthurnet which is used for trading live legal stuff (much in the same way etree works). it's all bands that allow taping and trading of their shows. it's pretty good too.

do you have a citation for RIAA claiming that file sharing is only used for evil?

Here's sort of the opposite from them, preserved at wiki.etree.org

"Our view has always been if the copyright holder wants to give away their product, it's fine. The key issue is that it's their choice to give it away." -Hilary B. Rosen, then-chairman and CEO of the Recording Industry Association of America, quoted in "Two Labels Warm Up to MP3's" by Bill Werde, The New York Times, May 29, 2003, p. G7.

Excellent point. It's also worth mentioning that Etree's got(SWAG) the largest legal BT portal on the 'net.

There is no controversy. Technology is not illegal. Uses of it are. People like etree make such a mockery of the RIAA's claims that filesharing is only used for evil that it's not even funny. Perhaps the RIAA is pissed off that so many bands are content with giving their music away for absolutely free.