Blog Torrent: Downhill Battle Interview

scubacuda writes "In this GrepLaw interview, Downhill Battle's Nicholas Reville describes the success (and takedown) of SP2Torrent.com, alternative ways to buy music, what indie musicians think about filesharing, and real ways to counter threats to creativity and an open culture. Those excited about the possibilities of Bittorrent will especially appreciate Downhill Battle's Blog Torrent, an easy-to-install program that will dramatically simplify the creation, posting, and seeding of new torrents."

Comments

Music and movies aside...

[tcopeland]

...BitTorrent is a boon for open source projects with large files. PostgreSQL, for example, publishes torrents of their releases and the the "PG Live" ISOs. On a much smaller scale, we've put up a torrent for the Ruby windows installer on RubyForge - it's only 11 MB, but even a small file like that is worth torrenting.

PLUG: Here's the beginnings of a Ruby BT library. Just parses the metainfo file for now, but it's a start...

BitTorrent is nice.

[London Bus]

It's an established technology. That's good. What I'm looking for now is a push-based P2P system; one which allows you to subscribe for content and will then automatically download new content as it's propagated through the network. We've had stories on Slashdot before about sites' popular RSS feeds saturating bandwidth - well, this would be a perfect solution. Are there any plans to retrofit push functionality into BitTorrent to help alleviate the stress of releasing new content? BitTorrent doesn't gel with RSS at the moment because there's no way to automate serving and/or obtaining RSS files. It all has to be done manually, which is no better than just refreshing a web page.

Example Bitorrent/RSS Feed

[sleeeper]

I wanted to mess around with Bittorrent and RSS, so I added a feed (or whatever the officail lingo is) for my Air America Radio Ogg Vorbis Archive.

It has saved me a lot of bandwidth, because now people are leaving their bittorrent clients open longer (due to the automated downloads leading them to passively leave their downloader open).

Here is a link: http://bigelow-springs.net/airamerica/

my suggestion -from a musician

[peculiarmethod]

umm.. okay, here's my two pence.

We should start a govt run program, much like Social Security, only one that isn't a joke. It would work like this:

You're a musician- you get paid by the Artist Living Payment Option. A nationwide program that uses taxes and donations in order to merely pay for distribution, and pay royalties to the artists. Payments from ALPO would be contingent upon number of releases, how current last release, and popularity (based on distribution systems numbers). An algorithm would use these variables to give a somehwat fair distribution of monies alloted/gathered. Distribution? Anywhere wifi can be set up. Which is everywhere, now. Keyosks are set up to have a digital display of songs list.. you pick and choose like a juke box.. create your login name and password.. and log your computer, or wifi IPOD, or whatever to the system and download the songs for free. You want a CD or dont have a computer type thingy? Pay 5 bucks for the hard copy.

Kinda like shareware.. only I think the govt funding the arts a bit more would benefit the creativity of its future citizens (think children).

anyway..

it will never happen. All we'll get as musicians is alpo. Not ALPO.

pm

Re:People

[IgnoramusMaximus]

.. guess what, the people that sold the corporations that copyright willingly did so. So appearently the people who actually create this culture don't care about it. If you don't like it, then instead of copying works of others, create something yourself.

Except that none of them had any right to do so. There is no such thing as "creating" anything from scratch, all of the jerks who believe in copyrights build upon the works of others. Scientists needs thousads of workers in the field who went before them to get to the point where they can formulate their theory. Musicians rip everything off from the ones who came before and thrive on small variations on those themes. Ditto for movies. Etc etc. I dont know when people will get it through their thick skulls that in order to "create" something, one draws upon of millennia of progress of human race and efforts of countless generations who went before. Those who claim they "own" their ideas are just selfish jerks, akin to bandits who go out and take over some land and then claim it to be "owned" by them. It wasnt theirs in the first place, they just happened to wander onto it and then proceeded to shoot anyone who came near.

Re:Forget p2p and torrents

[TheRealMindChild]

This is where things need to progress in a different fasion. Rather then making money explicitly by allowing you to listen to music, they will need to/should offer services that make me WANT to purchase a CD or whatever, rather then downloading it.

I think Bon Jovi and his people had the idea with their last album that came out, you could use the unique code that came with it to get a discount on the current tour and merchandise... and something completely exclusive, but I cant remember what that was.