Today in P2P

Hylton Jolliffe writes "I wanted to alert you to an article by research Marc Eisenstadt that digs deep into BitTorrent, its potential and limitations and its implications for podcasting, filesharing and more."

Comments

Legal uses

[jacobcaz]

Just a few days ago I used BT for the first time to download a Knoppix 3.7 ISO. I was trying to download from the various mirrors, but the speed I was getting was terrible - around 2.9KBps.

I grabbed BT for Win2000 and installed it in about 7 minutes, then I hit the torrent link for Knoppix. I was downloading the ISO at around 36KBps (about the limit of my DSL connection).

Since I was heading to bed while it downloaded, I left BT up that night and the next day while I was at work to help other people out.

I had seen BT as a place to snag nothing but rips of movies, and I've stayed away. The legal-usese BT community needs to do a better job of promoting the positive and allowable uses of BT and P2P sharing tools. They have a way to negative stigma right now.

Re:Legal uses

[bennomatic]

Totally agree. However, even the non-legit uses will probably eventually become legit. Like VCRs did after Sony was vindicated by the court decision against the MPAA which found that there were more legal uses for video tapes than illegal uses, or at least enough to justify their existence in the consumer market. Once the MPAA had to embrace it, they stopped fighting the VCR, and--miracle of miracles--the rental market padded their wallets quite nicely.

I think we'll eventually see something similar here. A distributed distribution network which (i.e. Blockbuster) subscribers can use to download movies to their set-top boxes. And the network would be made up of those set-top boxes, so BB (or whoever) could cheaply distribute the movies that subscribers are requesting.

The success of services like Netflix show that people want delivery. Storefront rental operations have stopped growing except in niche markets. The sooner that the industry in general, and companies like Blockbuster in particular give up their attachment to the physical disk/tape, the better they'll do.

Of course, I like to root for the little guy. Maybe the moment that there's too much competition in the DVD mailer business, Netflix will unveil some secret deal they've worked out with the MPAA and a box they've developed and ship it out to all their customers for free, and it'll contain an embedded BT client for downloading and distributing all the latest cool films...