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BitTorrent Gains Corporate Support

Posted by timothy on from the morally-neutral dept.

BitWarrior writes "Recently today it was revealed that Blizzard, the creator of many legendary games such as the Diablo, Starcraft and Warcraft franchises, will be using BitTorrent to distribute their Beta release of their latest game, World of Warcraft. BitTorrent is becoming a hit among companies required to distribute large quantities of data to their customers. Valve also jumped on the BitTorrent bandwagon last month(NYTimes, first born required, blah blah), hiring its creator, Bram Cohen. The one downside to Blizzards move is that BitTorrent has been added to many Universities black lists of clients to allow through their networks. Will the recent acceptance by such reputable companies open the possibility to Universities that not all P2P distribution is inherently bad?"

2 of 437 comments (clear)

  1. NYTimes Login by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    john/john

    Information wants to be free.

  2. As a network engineer... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    Let me just say that you are totally mistaken - BitTorrent is nothing but a file distributing tool that is especially well suited for large files. I'm not sure how you think this is in any way comparable to a Denial of Service attack. It actually prevents bottlenecks by distributing content cleverly among peers.
    For a company that chooses to distribute files that way, it means that (after an initial period until there are a few seeds) an immense amount of load will be taken off their servers. Furthermore none of this has to do with someone intentionally trying to flood a server with packets. If you choose to download or seed a torrent this is entirely your choice.
    As for the copyright issue, even though BitTorrent is quite commonly used to shade DVD rips, many people like yours truly use it in a legal fashion to download Linux ISOs or the like.

    Instead of condemning this I would actually encourage the legal use of such a great tool as it is being displayed here.