Legal Torrent Sites Help Legitimize BitTorrent

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."

Comments

Legal torrent sites?

[bigtallmofo]

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.

Fighting this same battle now.

[Ph33r th3 g(O)at]

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.

3D Gamers use .torrents too

[Jugalator]

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.