Slashdot Mirror
BitTorrent Gains Corporate Support
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?"
Bram Cohen, author of Bittorrent, and Adrian Paul, star of Highlander the Series.
Will the recent acceptance by such reputable companies open the possibility to Universities that not all P2P distribution is inherently bad?"
Some of us are hoping that Lionshare will help a little with that also.
Finkployd
Its good to see that someone sees the legal side of file-sharing comunities. Im getting fed up by people who say things like "Direct Connect/Kazaa/many other things is illegal!". No... it depends on what you use it for. This may open people's eyes, and make them see the posibilities of filesharing networks. In my opinion, using it for distributing demos and such is a great way to take advantages of such technologies.
this is probably the most boring sig in the world
I think p2p is here to stay, and there are still features that need to be put in place univerally before it's mature, and all the various p2p flavors are comparable. Acceptance by corporations will only speed the spread.
The various bits are there scattered across different p2p networks. IMNSHO, all p2p networks/clients ought to have:
-Swarming (as defined/used in BitTorrent)
-Privacy/anonymity (perhaps as much as in Freenet)
-Good searching (Kazaa, Napster, those types. With room for improvement all around)
-Open-source clients with no ads/spyware
-Decentralized/self-organizing networks (no central point of failure, or at least minimal)
-Browser/web server hooks to autoswarm web content (there ought to be bittorrent:// links)
All these features should someday be pushed into numerous language libraries, so that they become ubiquitous.
When is /. going to learn that you can't flood sites, steal music, or copy DVDs without repercussion?
The day that Linus Torvalds joins the board of directors at SCO.
john/john
Information wants to be free.
Would be nice if they made the .torrent file available, so you can download it with any BitTorrent client, instead of their proprietary downloader. Not that Blizzard isn't a reliable company, but I just don't trust downloaders in general.
That being said, I wonder how long it'll take for someone to back-engineer the Blizzard downloader and turn it into a regular BitTorrent client =)
Look, defenseless babies!
Bit Torrent's a lifesaver for companies that need help in distributing their content. Game downloads are a perfect example, as game publishers release huge files that everybody wants at the same moment. In order to have bandwidth that can burst up to that kind of speed, the costs would be huge. Bit Torrent is a way for fans who were lucky enough to get their copies first to help out the company by lending their most of their upstream bandwidth, which generally goes unused for the day to the company.
But universities still fell a bit awkward about this. See, in the university's opinion, a student's dormroom bandwidth isn't really their property, it's an educational tool. So, even though the copyright concern is waived off on this kind of P2P sharing, they've still got a problem with it.
When it comes down to it, a student's dormroom Internet conection leads to the big fat Internet pipe that is being paid for by the school, and in the case of a state school that's mostly government money. Every school has a rarely enforced clause in their terms of service for their Internet access that says its intended for educational use. There's defintely a clause that says that commercial use is strictly prohibited. Students can't run a a for-profit web hosting service out of their doomroom computers for example.
So, actually, the commerical embrace of Bit Torrent is going to clear up one complaint universities have about P2P, but it's going to drive them straight into another. Now, instead of hurting a company's copyrights, it's going to be used to help a for-profit company avoid costs. That's another thing that gives universities that "maybe we should block this..." feeling.
But torrents do inherently suck lots of bandwidth and that is expensive. Hence why they (and P2P) will continue to be blacklisted even if it is legitimate usage.
"...you can't flood sites, steal music, or copy DVDs without repercussion"
Funny, but I seem to recall some torrents being placed here to lessen the load on some Slashdotted sites, so people could view the videos, docs, etc from those buried sites - without adding to the source's pain.
As an attorney, perhaps you should read up on the benefits before opening your yap. Perhaps this will make sense: There are other uses for it than just piracy, just as there's more use for electricity than executing murderers.
When the day comes that the RIAA / MPAA try to kill off BitTorrent legally, all these valid commercial examples of use will provide a good counterargument.
... you get the idea.
Yeah, a gun can be used to kill, but it is the user of the gun to blame for the crime. If a gun is allowed to be owned by law (a device designed to kill!), then a mere device to enable efficient publish/subscribe file distribution
- swarming a la BitTorrent - open source, check
- anonymity a la Freenet - open source, check
- browser support, Mozilla - open source, check
- server-side support (setting correct content type for bittorrent links), Apache - open source, check
It's all at our fingertips- now we just need to put it all together in an elegant way (do I smell a new sourceforge project!), and we will be in P2P heaven.--
Using GNU/Linux - Windows-free zone!
Ergo...if we would enable/promote p2p, it would rapidly increase our costs to supply Internet to our public.
Unfortunate, really, but when you have to pay for something, sometimes it changes how you look at it.
(the nerve of people to actually use the network connection!)
Let's get real, and drop the pretentious B.S. about progressivity.
I've worked in a college IT department. And I've grep'd the logs for data transfer stats. When you have a small group (~7) of students sending 6000GB (Yes, 6000 gigabytes) of data a week through P2P apps you have a problem.
I hardly think that stopping 0.25% of students from using 97% of the bandwidth is unreasonable. The small college I worked for had a 144 Mbps link to the world. At any given moment a huge percentage of that was in p2p traffic. Based on additional investigation we determined that a least 75% of that was out and out copyright infrigining data transfer - movies, games, porn, music, e-books - with another 15% or so being of questionable status (for example, game betas/samples that had license agreements prohibiting redistribution; we went easy on these people as a rule).
When you drop the B.S. at least 9 out of 10 bits transferred into and out of our campus was in legally dubious p2p sharing. Expecting the college to put up with this, actually facilitate it, and act as a shield to protect students from the reprecussions of their actions is obscenity.
It is a case of the bad apples spoiling it for the good, only in this real world case its the bad 90% spoiling it for the good 10%.
Add to that the VERY real threat that lawsuits pose to IT departments, and it's a no brainer.
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.
Block it on the way out, but *encourage* its use internally. Therefore, someone gets the file from a BT source off campus, but no external clients will ever find it- but local ones will! These local clients will then save bandwidth by taking much less costly LAN bandwidth rather than expensive WAN bandwidth to get what they need.
Remember that the most proximate reason for universities to ban p2p is the fact that it clogs their feed to the outside world.
Close that outward feed, and then all is better than it was before!
What we call folk wisdom is often no more than a kind of expedient stupidity.-Edward Abbey
While what you're saying is probably true, in many Otaku's defense I'd like to point out that most anime bit torrents out there are for fansub releases for series that are unlicensed in North America. These fansubbing groups obtain original Japanese versions of programs, write English subtitles themselves and release it to the community often with a message requesting that distribution be ceased when the title becomes licensed. This allows many anime fans around the world to appreciate and experience these shows almost as soon as they come out in Japan, as licensing can take quite some time. Furthermore, there are still many series that have never recieved licenses for any English format, and may never, and programs like Bit Torrent are may be the only way for the English speaking anime fan to enjoy a series without spending many years learning Japanese.
While many young people do indeed use Bit Torrent for piracy, I don't think it's fair to generalize that a lack of morality for intellectual property rights is at heart. But many of the arguments have already been presented by people far more eloquent than I am. My point is merely that Peer-To-Peer services like Bit Torrent have plenty of potential for good, and I think it's a great thing that Blizzard is demonstrating how it can be used legally and effectively. Peer to Peer file trading has been incorrectly stigmatized before it has been completely understood, it seems. Let's not forget the birth of the videocassette (and I know this has been mentioned countless times before). People still do use it for piracy, but I think the benefits that we've gotten out of it far outweigh the few bad seeds.
If someone points out that they can rate limit the upstream bittorrent into a bittrickle(sic) without user intervention and that this combined with the current choking algorithm should push clients towards other internal peers if they exist. So in the long run, it could save them bandwidth costs.
Of course, this does rely upon them also accepting that bittorrent is used for linux ISO's and other "educationally legitimate" purposes.
Q.
Insert Signature Here
No, they never will. Why?
Ask my lab's sysadmin, who cut off BT's ports when we got a cease 'n desist order from a movie company. No, not the MPAA, a SPECIFIC MOVIE STUDIO. Not even a MAJOR one. Because someone was putting a 100k up pipe on a movie torrent. Because he/she was a SLOW human being.
University networks are tricky to control (what're you gonna do, place controlled profiles in the dorm room users' computers?!) and only seen as one entity. If P2P program X has ONE pirate, the whole app goes down on the network. This isn't like ftp where someone's password account can be traced, this is P2P where getting the IP of the one P2Ping is just a bit trickier, to the point where it's not worth the effort when you can just kill the ports and any enusing lawsuits that'd possibly follow.
What I'd like to know is will the recent acceptance by such reputable companies open the possibility that all companies will use our bandwidth to distribute their final product for them? Why should I have to offset the bandwidth costs of these companies just to play their game? I would expect some kind of incentive, for example giving me the option to download the game directly from their servers or download via BT and they slash a few dollars off the price. If the download is free, great, I won't complain. But with talk about Valve hiring the creator of BT (likely for Steam integration), it seems that BT is being steered towards capitalist purposes. I see little benefit for us, the consumers, to download via BT as opposed to the company's servers unless there is some compensation.
These days, your lucky if your college internet access doesn't have you running through an http proxy. It's really that bad. Most of the Universities I know of (in the dorms at least) block all incoming tcp/ip ports, and do not let UDP nor icmp traffic at all. Basically, all you can do is browse the web. At one College when students called to complain they couldn't play certain multiplayer games anymore they were basically told UDP and ICMP are depreceated protocols and they should call the game developers to have them change to tcp.
Forgive my anonymous posting, but I wish to speak my mind. The first hand experience I have with this presently is that those making the decisions have two and only two factors on their mind.
Legal damages/responsibilities/eccetera from users on their networks violating copyright. There's a bit of a catch 22 in terms of policing this, ironically. Basically it's let it all through and say, "Sorry, we aren't a *publisher* and therefore lack editorial whatever." or shut it down completely because one illegal download through a filter puts indemnity (?) on their heads. So, which has fewer headaches.. practically no net, or uncensored net?
Cost of bandwidth. Don't even bother being reasonable here. We have had a throttling system here, preventing the "long distance phonebill of doom". You go over your reasonable amount? No net for the week. Nonetheless, the disabling of network resources (er, the installation of a firewall) was touted as a fantastic way to reduce network traffic (and thus costs, in an increasingly underfunded arena).
Apparently noone has thought to the point of just whiting out all the text in the libriray, because it may save them from lawsuits...
The short of it is that universities are/will become useless as connectivity providers for their students, and one can only hope to be refunded the cost to acquire alternative service from an external provider.
Yes, this is all a bit off topic, but I've just recently been denied my beloved Bittorrent, so hopefully I'll get a little mod slack.
I don't think universities care if its legit use or not, they care about strain on their network. And since I was living in a dorm when Napster first became popular, I can attest that P2P is a *huge* strain on a campus network.
I have actually given a presentation on this at last summers Internet2 Joint Techs meeting.
At Carnegie Mellon, all students get globally routable IP addresses in the dorms. There are no filters on the traffic (except bogon filters that an respectable ISP should have to keep spoofed traffic from leaving a subnet).
We have a probe on our egress router that tracks daily inbound and outbound traffic sums per IP address. We have a policy that if a student exceeds more than 7.5 Gigabytes of traffic in either direction (calculated separately) over a 5 day period (1.5 GBs/day) they will get a warning message that reminds them of the policy. If after 3 days, they exceed 1.5GBs in one day, they get a warning, then 3 days later, if they keep on exceeding, we yank their machine off the network (block their ip on the router and take them out of the dhcp server config).
We used to do the message sending and yanking by hand. It would take about 2 hours per week of my time. Now it is all automated and takes no time.
Our rationale is that trying to do application policing is a losing strategy. It will not be long until the kazaas of the world are port hopping and encrypting their data, or encrypting the data and sending it over port 443. It is a losing game.
Here is a link to the presentation material:
http://www.net.cmu.edu/pres/jt0803/