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."

Comments

Legally

[Omkar]

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.

Re:Legally

[ichimunki]

Copyright law does not have any language regarding intent that I'm aware of. Anyway, if you are using BitTorrent to download copyright restricted works, I can't imagine how that's going to engender any sympathy on the part of your local judge or jury. There is already a prevailing feeling (among the people I talk to, anyway) that even downloading is not morally acceptable.

In this case, it would be wise to simply not use BitTorrent for sharing copyright restricted works without permission from the person or organization that has the copyright for the work. BT was never intended to anonymize users or be a one-way stream. The BT application works best when users share data and client and tracker software can accurately detect which IP is doing what. If no one shared while using BT, the whole process would be no more efficient than a simple HTTP or FTP transfer. Anonymity would interfere with the tit-for-tat algorithm that throttles upload and download to different clients depending on their own sharing practices.

Personally I'm done using BT for "sharing" copyrighted works. Too bad for the MPAA and RIAA, really. My latest discovery via P2P was "Penn and Teller's Bullshit!" After viewing several episodes downloaded via BT, I went out and bought the DVD set of the first season. A $45 purchase I would have never made otherwise. Oh well, there's still USENET. :)

Or for the same price I could just get cable and subscribe to a few premium channels and record all this stuff directly to digital (for now). You'd think the MPAA would learn from the RIAA and move quickly to get direct digital distribution going. I'd pay $2 for a commercial-free 1/2 hour show and $4 for hour shows. $5 or $6 for a movie. Skip all the useless DVD packaging. Of course, the files will need to be at least as good quality as the rips out there, and playable on GNU/Linux.

What's the problem?

[tesmako]

I really don't see the problem here, other P2P apps are tricky since the users themselves make the content available, but with BitTorrent it should be very clear-cut who to complain to if content you own show up as a download; the tracker.

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.

So many legit uses

[Zorilla]

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.

Why don't they use it instead

[tero]

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).

I think BitTorrent users are harder to sue

[swilver]

"Anyone who uses BitTorrent and is under the illusion that they are anonymous are sorely mistaken," Malcolm said. "There is no reason why those lawsuits wouldn't include BitTorrent" users.

Actually, there is a reason why the lawsuits wouldn't include BitTorrent users. It is much harder to sue BitTorrent users for multiple infringements at once, which (I think) is what makes the current lawsuit approach cost effective.

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.

Wrong

[Q2Serpent]

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.