BitTorrent May Prove Too Good to Quash

gollum123 writes "There is an article on washignton post on bittorrent where the author discusses why BitTorrent is here to stay. According to the author it is being increasingly used to distribute software and entertainment legally. It also mentions that in BitTorrent, unlike many other file-sharing programs, legitimate use doesn't amount to a token minority. It's central to this program's existence. It concludes by saying that the MPAA may be able to drive BitTorrent movie downloads into what Green called "the dark corners of the Internet," but this program isn't going to go away. It might, however, be just what movie studios and record labels need to market and distribute their own content efficiently on the Web."

Comments

Not a brilliant article...

[tabkey12]

as it doesn't mention the plethora of brilliant '3rd party' clients like Azureusand BitTornado which have been offering a variety of these features for a very long time.

Speed

[giginger]

I've noticed a distinct speed decrease in torrents lately. Surely the only person who's had a decrease in torrent speed when they upgrade to 2meg. Seriously though, I don't know if my ISP is catching on to torrent use but I've gone from 100k+ to 20/30 average.... Not good.

Of course they aren't, it's different!

[garcia]

But the Washington-based lobby hasn't sued BitTorrent's developer, Bram Cohen of Bellevue, Wash., nor has it gone after individual BitTorrent users.

How could they go after him? The software is open-source and its intentions are nothing less than noble. If Cohen was looking to *directly* make money on BitTorrent he wouldn't have released the source to it.

As far as going after individual users... They rarely did anyway. BitTorrent isn't as easy as Kazaa for finding "mass sharers". Most people are maxing their upstream on a single torrent instead of offering up their entire personal library in one place. That is why they are going after the sites linking to the trackers.

Independent musicians can also use BitTorrent to provide free samples. The Web site of the South by Southwest music festival (2005.sxsw.com/
geekout/sxsw4pod/) uses BitTorrent to offer a 2.6-gigabyte compilation of songs by artists playing at this Austin event. (In an unplanned demonstration of how BitTorrent doesn't always function at top speed, that torrent was more of a glacier Tuesday night, with too few users to serve up bits of the file.)

And the author of this article just proved how posting links to torrents on a highly trafficked site will get him his music faster. ;-)

The MPAA may be able to drive BitTorrent movie downloads into what Green called "the dark corners of the Internet," but this program isn't going to go away. It might, however, be just what movie studios and record labels need to market and distribute their own content efficiently on the Web.

And what? Put all those popcorn salesmen and ticket rippers out of their after-school jobs? Nope, at least not for now.

Rubbish!

[aug24]

If Debian and others are putting their ISOs out on BT and I and others are relying on them, then it's hardly 'token'.

BT is becoming the distribution method of choice for plenty of legitimate stuff. Sure there's vastly more illegal stuff, but the legal stuff is definitely not 'token'.

Justin.

I call bullshit

[Deep Fried Geekboy]

I don't think 'token minority' means what you think it means.

Legitimate users may be a minority -- maybe even a tiny minority -- but they are not a 'token minority' by any means, in the sense of only there for symbolic purposes to legitimize the non-legitimate use.

I use BitTorrent *all the time* legitimately. Whether it's for some student movie or a big whopping disc image (like X-Plane). I might be in the minority but my uses are not token.