Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Legal Torrent Sites Help Legitimize BitTorrent

Posted by timothy on from the salvation-for-the-buzzword-deficient dept.

Jeff writes "In today's Seattle Times, technology columnist Paul Andrews highlights how legal torrent sites such as CommonBits may lead to wider adoption and acceptance of BitTorrent. With reports that illegal torrent usage may be more than a third of Internet traffic, sites like LegalTorrents, Torrentocracy, Prodigem and bt.etree may offer a compelling defense to future legal attacks while simultaneously promoting fair use rights. Andrews goes on to argue that the future of television may be no further away than integration of podcasting, RSS, tagging and BlogTorrent."

3 of 257 comments (clear)

  1. What? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    With reports that illegal torrent usage may be more than a third of Internet traffic

    The reports state that BitTorrent use may be more than a third of Internet traffic. They don't state that illegal BitTorrent use may be more than a third of Internet traffic.

    You've just gone and assumed that BitTorrent is exclusively illegal, while moaning about the fact that others do it too. Way to go, dickhead.

  2. BitTorrent 4.0.0 Released by theoddbot · · Score: 5, Informative
    BitTorrent 4.0.0 was released today.

    Get it from http://www.bittorrent.com.

    The license has changed to the BitTorrent Open Source License

    Release Notes:
    All new queue-based user interface

    Many options are now modifiable from the interface

    Lots of other interface improvements

    Extra stats are visible, for those who like it

    Remembers what it was doing across restarts

    New .torrent maker "btmaketorrentgui" replaces "btcompletedir"

    Better performance, as always

    License has changed to the BitTorrent Open Source License

    Torrent fields are correctly created and interpreted as utf8

    Too many little things to list

    Single port: launchmany can seed and client can download many files from a single port and thread

    Interface now uses GTK instead of wxWidgets

    BitTorrent packets are marked as bulk data to make traffic shaping easier
  3. Re:Legal torrent sites? by Heisenbug · · Score: 5, Informative

    Therefore, a single knife can be used both legally and illegally, but downloading from a single torrent can only be legal or illegal. Therefore, your analogy does not work.

    Incidentally, I'm pretty sure that's not true. Depending on the jurisdiction, there are knives that are legal to possess, and knives that are illegal to possess -- switchblades, pocket knives over a certain length, etc. The act of acquiring the knife, like the act of acquiring the file, is itself illegal.

    I don't have the patience to figure out whether either of you is making sense otherwise. Please continue.