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.

Re:Legal torrent sites?

[LiquidCoooled]

Saying that these sites are legal or illegal is like opening a legal knife shop.

The torrent protocol isn't illegal, the sites running them aren't illegal, the content distributed from different places however can be illegal in most countries.

Re:Legal torrent sites?

[huge colin]

I think the point is that these sites are unquestionably legal, even to boneheaded organizations like the MPAA. (It's necessary to make things very, very simple such that they can understand.)

Re:Legal torrent sites?

[Haeleth]

Saying that these sites are legal or illegal is like opening a legal knife shop.

Er... no, it isn't.

You can take any knife and commit a crime with it, and likewise you can take any knife and use it in a perfectly legal manner. However, you can't make downloading FreeBSD into copyright infringement whatever you do, and you can't stop downloading a cam of a Hollywood movie being copyright infringement whatever you do.

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.

The sites running [illegal torrents] aren't illegal...

Regardless of whether hosting links to illegal torrents, or running trackers for illegal torrents, is legal or not (given that the people who run these sites inevitably settle when sued, the implication is that THEY don't believe it's legal!), the concept of a "legal torrent site" - being one which hosts only torrents which it is legal for anyone to join - is a useful one.

Re:Legal torrent sites?

[Heisenbug]

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.

Not Really

[Anonymous Coward]

It only takes 1 illegal site to put BitTorrent in the crosshairs of the *AA groups. In fact, the fact that we are celebrating some legal sites speaks volumes to where BitTorrent currently stands.

Sure...

[Fyz]

But is be legal to download anything that I'm ever going to have any interest in?
I somehow doubt that the content of these sites, and by extension the sites themselves, are going to be popular in the long run.

Just to state the bleeding obvious, of course.

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.

What?

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

BitTorrent 4.0.0 Released

[theoddbot]

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

Pay Per View business model needed

[spoonyfork]

I missed last week's episode of Lost. None of my friends had recorded it so I found the torrent and downloaded it. Hurley's crazy. Anyway, I would rather have gone to the ABC site, paid like a $1 or something, and downloaded it from them. I want to support stuff I find interesting but there is no way to do that with TV episodes. What do I do, wait for the DVD next year? Please. ABC and the like could use BitTorrent to distribute Pay Per View content. I'd like that very much.

Bittorrent traffic makeup...

[WIAKywbfatw]

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

Sorry, but how the hell are the people who come up with the numbers able to differentiate between legal and illegal torrents?

First of all, how do you tell between traffic that's due to Linux ISOs and traffic that's due to the latest movie release? Secondly, how do you differentiate between copying of material that may be legal in one country and copying of the same material that may be illegal in another one?

I'm not saying that legal torrent usage is greater than illegal torrent usage (any more than I would say that more drivers stick to speed limits than break them) but it seems to me that there's no real way of differentiating between the two, so all those reports are arguably just speculation.

Lefty-bashing

[StrawberryFrog]

So any legal material that doesn't fit their leftist worldview will be censored... how nice...

No, you idiot, it will just fail to be promoted by this site. There is a big difference. You can do the same kind of thing with your right-wing attack site if you so wish. At the least you can agree that there is a market for news for leftists (whatever "leftist" means - in the USA it apparently means anyone who is not a rabid neocon)

What I want to see is for this to have no biases

So make your own. The existence of this site doesn't stop you doing that, and good luck; you'll need it in heaps. Unbiased news is very difficult, arguably impossible.

I want no political slanting of what gets in, I would far rather it be noted for the fairness of their coverage.

Try the BBC, it comes close.

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.