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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.
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).
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.
(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.