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BitTorrent Gives Hollywood a Headache
fudgefactor7 writes "Although the MPAA and the RIAA, and practically anyone else who has an interest in protecting their intellectual property rights online, are fighting against P2P programs like EDonkey, Morpheus, and Napster, BitTorrent is coming under even greater scrutiny, albeit with less actual success so far, and that is giving Hollywood a headache, since they really don't know what to do about it and they can't go to Cohen and moan. Once he let the genie out of the bottle there was no way to put it back in. And with the likes of PeerGuardian, et. al., it only gets harder for the corporations to put the virtual, and legal, smackdown on file sharing."
Are BitTorrent users more vulnerable legally (not practically) since they automatically upload? I'd think that makes them distributors, which presumably brings higher penalties than consumption.
The tracker is what facilitates the download, the person who runs the tracker has set it up with the intent to share the specific file being shared. The tracker site is typically also the root of all the sharing through being a base seeder as well. So, basicly this brings things back to the days of piracy over public FTP and HTTP download sites, just attack the one facilitating the downloads. While foreign hosting and such might make this trickier it sure is way simpler than trying to attack the typical P2P network where the users are also the ones bringing the content to the table.
I imagine the copyright holders will go after the people who index bittorrent seeds, rather than the people involved in the filesharing, for facilitating the crime. If they hit these people, BitTorrent will become less popular as it becomes increasingly difficult to find what you want. It probably won't even matter if this is dubious, legally, just look at the RIAA's actions. A few C&D letters will cool off most people who have neither the money or inclination to fight a protracted court battle.
Meine Schwester ist sehr, sehr reizvoll - Nietzsche
Kazaa:
BitTorrent:
(The effectiveness and ethics of this method are a different story.)
Perhaps the difficulty in battling BitTorrent is because it's harder to argue that its only purpose is to pirate material? We've seen plenty of good uses for it, such as alleviating the bandwidth pains of downloading Windows XP SP2, high demand game patches (Take THAT, Gamespy and your system of waiting behind 400 people in line!), etc.
It would be cool if it didn't suck.
of Bittorrent (e.g. downloading Linux distros), the RIAA and MPAA have no legal way of killing it off. Bittorrent is outstandingly useful for downloading all sorts of large files, and not all large files are copy-disallowed material.
As the article said, the genii is now out of the bottle, and there's no way it can be captured and contained again.
I'd be willing to pay for legal (non-DRM:ed) downloads of movies and tv-shows. Subscription or just per download, take you pick, I don't care.
I fail to see why Hollywood won't learn from RIAA's mistakes (and Apple's success) and start a service like this, the audience is global, there's tons of cash to make!
I live in a small nordic country (Sweden) where you have to wait 1-2 years for most "cool" shows (and even then they might get a timeslot around midnight) or get passed altogether (example, they just started running Angel Season 1, 01:00), so downloading series and buying them in DVD formats is more of a norm for me and many of my friends.
Now, a legal torrent.. that I'd pay for (and they'd even get my upload bandwidth for free).
How many government snafu's will be revealed by file sharing? Look at some of the things published on P2P networks already, concerning prisoner abuse by the U.S. military. Some of the information was originally made public by more traditional means, but many hot stories have broke because of pics or videos from Iraq on P2P networks. Of course there is the flip side of beheading videos being published by terrorists or a meere "gore loving freak". I wonder how long until we hear about "those terrorist P2Pers". Don't think it can't happen...
When you find a BitTorrent user participating in a big swarm, you can only sue them for that single infringement, not for sharing hundreds of movies or music files via programs like Kazaa. In order to make it cost effective they would have to keep track of your online BitTorrent activity for quite a while to collect multiple infringements.
The answer is that the MPAA and RIAA are all being lazy.
.02.
Think about what happens when you download music, I'd say 40% of the time. You find that there's a click or a pop or an early cutoff in the song. Not 100% recording studio quality, or maybe even the encoding rate is less than 128k.
Also, anyone who has ever seen a bootleg knows that even TELESYNCS are of worse quality than that old TV that used to be in the garage with the aluminum foil on the antenna, and whose antenna was actually a coathanger.
The answer is to make reasonable quality movies available easily to people. TiVO has the right idea, and this idea may just bury the whole theatre industry (or set it back hundreds of paces).
I've bought bootlegs on every corner of NYC, and they all SUCK, and I'm not just talking about quality. Same has been said about the quality of the music that is being released these days. The RIAA is mad that we're downloading music that isn't worth even a legit 0.99 cent download. The answer? GET MORE TALENT ON THE LABELS!
Same is true for movies. Let's do a brief history of movies that have come out recently, shall we?
Lady Killers - I fell aasleep, personally. Horrible.
Van Helsing - PUH-LEESE. Should have ended 45 minutes before it did.
White Chicks - umm...right. White Chicks.
So one could argue that buying/downloading bootlegs is really just saving us from having to spend $10 now on a crappy movie. 10 BUCKS! Maybe there wouldn't be so much downloading if tickets were still reasonable. $10!
When I buy/download a good movie, I go to the thetre and see it.
SAW is a perfect example. GREAT MOVIE, new, fresh, original. Bought a bootleg, watched 15 minutes, and went to the theatre. They DESERVED the price of the ticket.
Spiderman 2 also....downloaded it, watched it, and went ot see it 3 times in the theatre.
My advice to MPAA/RIAA...better product. Make it so that we're foolish to try and get a cheap copy of your product. Nobody is out there manufacturing BMW knockoffs, are they? THey'd be FOOLISH to.
Take a lesson, and stop complaining.
Just my
"And you haven't made the case yet that P2P is "large sections of the internet"."
If you wanted to do so, you could cite the percentage of internet traffic which bittorrent uses, some figures were even in the article.
Some people estimate 800,000 copies of bittorrent might be running at any one time. Download.com estimates that 1.5 million copies of the standard BitTorrent client have been downloaded from their site alone (more than firefox). I think the claim of "large sections of the internet being affected by someone trying to fuck-up BitTorrent" is justified.
"Copyright violations aren't a free speech issue"
Indeed. Wasn't suggesting they should be. But trying to shut-down whole systems of communication for fear that copyrighted stuff might be transmitted on them is a free-speech issue.
My analogy was with speaking in public. You can read a copyrighted book in public. You can sing a copyrighted song. But restricting the ability to speak in public is not a valid solution to either of those problems. Similarly, restricting the ability to use BitTorrent is not a valud solution to the problem of people using it to share other peoples' video.
Or to use a more specific example, I don't want MPAA-funded vandals interfering with my Debian and Mepis downloads, then claiming that what they're doing is legitimate.
(with a US bias ...) The file sharing backlash is, IMHO, an example of civil disobedience in response to the **AA organizations cheating the system. Copyright and Patent structures are a *temporary* monopoly granted to the author (and enforced thorough the legal system) in exchange for incentive to expend resources and take risks for the creative process. When the Copyright/Patent period expires, the work is supposed to fall into the public domain for the benefit of society. So, exactly when do the authors make good on their end of the deal? The Sonny Bono Copyright Extension-to-Infinity Act distills down to "effectively, never."
...
There are two paths to changing the law - pursue it through petition to representatives, or pursue it through civil disobedience. Since the congresscritters appear to be bought and paid for, disobedience seems to be the only reasonable choice that remains. The file sharing folks aren't making a buck doing so. In fact, it costs them time and resources (electricity, disk space, bandwidth, etc.) to participate in the activity. The pirates who sell the materials are a different matter
You aren't allowed to upload 1 second of the material, since you don't own the copyright!
Is it that hard to understand? They can distribute as much of it as they want, because they OWN IT. You, however, do NOT.
Here are some questions I wish the author of this article and some of the people he interviewed would address.
Why can't "Hollywood" adapt to technological change instead of fighting it ? Why can an unemployed programmer sitting in his apartment out-inovate a handful of multi-billion dollar corporations ?
Why do these wealthy CEO and entertainer types think they're immune from change ? I used to be a high paid COBOL guy, I had to adapt. Do any of these people expect me to feel any sympathy or support for them ?
Why would people want to download in the first place ? Is it because ticket prices are too high, and the cost of soda and popcorn is almost offensive ? Do people in one country want to see the movie as soon as people in another country ?
Is the loss of revenue real or imaginary ? Is their existence really threatened ? Are movie industry profits really sliding ? Are American high school kids really going to start staying home instead of going to the theatre ?
Sorry if this sounds like a bit of a rant. I'm really tired of the pro-CEO slant in the mainstream media. If any journalists are reading this I hope you address these questions in your future articles. It would really make me alot more interested in what you do for a living.
We can start by breaking down the original essay, to wit:
"Man, you're so wrong."
In my classroom this contraction would be inappropriate, but in an informal letter, it is acceptable.
"The tracker only hosts the .torrent files, if that!"
This is acceptable, since the suggested usage, "tracker hosts only..." implies that nothing else is on the server at all, whereas the original more correctly implies that the tracker does not host any other part of the specific transaction that interests us.
"It's primary roll is to just keep a database of..."
This is actually a mistake; "it's," is always a contraction for, "it is." What was meant here is ownership, so "its" is correct.
The use of primary is admittedly confusing, since it implies secondary roles. Perhaps our author includes maintaining DNS position and such in the server's secondary roles. Certainly, the actual error in this sentence is the incorrect use of, "roll," where, "role," was intended. Perhaps our self appointed grammar expert could expand to definitions of common words as well?
"...The information the bittorrent client's request from it"
Similar to another mistake made previously. The use of, "client's," is incorrect since it implies ownership. Perhaps if we reworded the sentence this way: "the bittorrent client's request is only for the database of who is sharing, so that is the tracker's role."
" ...Any copyright.."
As was pointed out, this ought to be in the past tense, since the copyright in question would have already been issued.
"...material, it just tracks those"
A travesty of modern education is the use of commas where semicolons are more desirable. This is a typical example, and is common worldwide. Even the highly educated tend not to use semicolons where such items technically ought to be used.
But again, our young grammar nazi^H^H^H^H expert failed to point out the most critical error here, which is the ending of the sentence.
Overall, the English usage here was excellent although obviously informal.
I am drawn to conclude that the original author's grasp of English is acceptable for a native speaker, whilst quite impressive in any other case. Whilst the individual writing the critique, in contrast, is simply an ignoramus with a giant lump of coal wedged up his sorry little ass.
Thank you for your time and consideration, I hope we have all learned something here today.
Changa hates change.