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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."

6 of 257 comments (clear)

  1. Legal torrent sites? by bigtallmofo · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Doesn't that imply that the mere (former) existence of sites like Lokitorrent and Suprnova was illegal?

    I'm not sure if that was ever decided by a court - rather it appears that scare tactics caused them to be shut down. For that reason, I personally don't feel comfortable declaring linking to content hosted on other systems illegal.

    --
    I'm a big tall mofo.
  2. Fighting this same battle now. by Ph33r+th3+g(O)at · · Score: 5, Interesting
    TPTB at my school have unilaterally blocked BitTorrent, characterizing it as a rogue protocol. The argument the admins make is that any legitimate product will have plenty of bandwidth to be downloadable via http. The administration supports the sysadmins, because they don't like getting C&D's from the *AA, so the power of the technical folks is unchecked--the faculty, traditionally the guardians of freedom on campus, don't even have the issue on their radar.

    Examples like this can only help the cause, though I'm not sure by how much.

    --
    I too have felt the cold finger of injustice.
  3. My legal bittorrent experience from yesterday by A+beautiful+mind · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Everyone remembers that article about privateer 1.0 remake?

    My university sits on 2.5gbyte/s pipe, i have control over around 500mbyte/s.

    I decided it would be cool to help share the wealth and let around --max_upload_rate 20000 for a few hours. It was maxed out ;)

    --
    It takes a man to suffer ignorance and smile
    Be yourself no matter what they say
  4. 3D Gamers use .torrents too by Jugalator · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I downloaded the fairly recent Unreal Tournament patch yesterday from 3D Gamers here and their "World" download is a .torrent. When download sites like these start using BitTorrent, I really think it has become a mainstream technology.

    I also downloaded the Linux version of the same patch.

    Needless to say, the Windows version downloaded at 200+ KB / sec, and the Linux version was restricted by their slightly loaded server at ~80 KB / sec.

    --
    Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
  5. Maybe Google will buy it by hooded1 · · Score: 3, Interesting

    I know this is a bit far off but it would be interesting ot see google run a tracker for legal files. If anyone they make bit torrent legit. Two years ago i never would have considered it, but given google's expansionist policies recently it sounds plausible if still unlikely

    --
    A rabbit in the hand is worth 4 in the cage
  6. Jamendo ... by lkratz · · Score: 3, Interesting

    *** Disclaimer : I'm one of the founder of Jamendo ***

    Reading this /. thread, sorry about this, I can't resist explaining what we're doing here in Luxembourg.

    We started jamendo beginning of 2005. The aim of Jamendo is to help artists use P2P technologies and particulary BitTorrent to get to a larger audience. We combine Creative Commons Licence with BitTorrent to have artists publish their work, and promote a legal use of BitTorrent or eMule or Shareaza or ...

    Thanks to our jamloader , artists put their demo CD in their PC/Mac/Linux and automagically their work get published as a torrent on jamendo and accessible with eMule. The software rips the CD to FLAC, ask to choose one of the 6 creative commons licenses and uploads the datas to our servers. On our servers we do the rip in other various formats, Ogg, MP3, AAC, and do the creative commons watermarking. We also do some kind of community moderation, in order to avoid the ones that upload the latest Britney Spears or the ones that upload the latest neo-nazy band. Bands have to link back to our website from their official website as a control ( see godon for exemple )

    Finally we use iRate as our core technology to do the rating of the music, and do intelligent propositions to our audience. Our XMLRPC-iRate server ( http://irate.jamendo.com/ ) supports the latest features of the iRate protocol but today, there's not enough client software, but we have the project to write our jamplayer that will combine iRate and BitTorrent and foxytunes.

    What about the money ? Our business model differs from the one of magnatune for instance ( I quote magnatune because John Buckman made a very nice and cool entry in his blog, thanks again to him). We have a more ad-centric model were the service is free for the artists, is free for the audience, but the web pages are ad supported (no popup), the streamed music may be ad-supported up to 1 audio ad every 3 songs, the published archive in P2P networks are high quality archives with no ads. The idea is : bandwidth heavy is ad-supported, bandwidth friendly (i.e. BitTorrent) is ad-free ! We are not a label but rather a "community driven music hosting company" , we allow the bands to put their paypal button to receive donation on their jamendo page, jamendo takes no margin.

    Sorry again /. crowd to present our project in this thread, but I really felt it was on topic ! So if you want to listen to indy music coming from Luxembourg, Belgium and North of France point your favorite BitTorrent client to jamendo.

    Laurent.