Slashdot Mirror
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."
It might, however, be just what movie studios and record labels need to market and distribute their own content efficiently on the Web.
Well, at least someone realizes this, instead of tacitly - or overtly - arguing that it's okay for them to be unabashedly ripped off, coupled with myriad ridiculous justifications and semantic acrobatics about how it's not really "stealing".
Frankly, the content industry convincing major ISPs to enable multicast on their networks may go a lot further toward efficiently distributing non-"on demand" content than something like BitTorrent.
But backing up a bit:
One reason for this change of heart may be 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.
Not that I don't recognize that BitTorrent is currently used for many legitimate applications (whereas that was extremely difficult to argue with a straight face with P2P), but I think this statement is a little overboard. I'd say that, currently, "legitimate" use of BitTorrent is a "token minority" of its use. The vast, vast majority is pirated software, pirated movies, and pirated TV shows (and, to a lesser extent, music, just because of the nature of BitTorrent being more conveniently applicable to small amounts of large files, rather than large amounts of small files).
Anyone not admitting that at this particular point in time is lying to themselves.
Note that I agree wholeheartedly that BitTorrent isn't going to go away. Neither did P2P. But the content owners will continue to rightfully go after people and sites who distribute copyrighted content unlawfully, no matter the mechanism (please, no fringe examples of 83 year old grandmothers and dead people). But yes, I get the point - and agree with it - that BitTorrent could potentially have much more legitimate use than traditional P2P.
The point is valid: the fundamental distribution mechanism of BitTorrent is a novel and good one; there is no reason that BitTorrent couldn't, for example, be made even more robust and further "protocolized", and integrated into browsers and other download clients, allowing content distributors of any stripe to take advantage of its clear benefits. And in order for it to be a compelling solution for real content providers, that's exactly what will have to happen.
The MPAA will still want to charge about the same price for a download as a store-bought movie.
Unless they prove me wrong, their torrent distribution model is not viable.
One of the things for which I love BitTorrent is the ability to get movies and television programs not available in the 'States. I'm studying Japanese, and don't like most of the Japanese media that is available in the US, as it is marketed, by and large, for the otaku crowd. I mean, yeah, there's some good stuff in there, but most of it is crap.
Having access to BitTorrent means that I can download regular TV shows, dramas, historical programs, and recorded news broadcasts, all of which would be completely unavailable in the U.S. I can download anime that I like, but which isn't popular enough to make it into the U.S. market. These are all very effective study tools, and have helped me improve my listening comprehension markedly.
--
I Hit the Karma Cap, and All I Got Was This Lousy
It's increasingly likely that in the years to come it will be possible to rent videos by having a set-top box coupled to a DSL or Cable broadband pipe, which downloads DRM-enabled video files from a central server.
What better way to save bandwidth - the single killer cost when each film might sum a gigabyte - than by having the box download the film using a restricted version of bittorrent, and use a proportion of the available upstream bandwidth on the local connection to supply other people renting the same film? As the file's encrypted piracy wouldn't be a concern as the key to play it would only be issued by the central server, over an encrypted channel.
This would have the effect - exactly opposite to a DVD-rental shop - that popular videos would be available more quickly than rarely demanded ones. The system has the same priorities as the company behind it.
I have been a user for about 10 years. This ends Feb 2014. The site's been ruined. I'm off. Dice, FU
BitTorrent is a really big change, because with it we can finally upload data directly to "the network". The physical location of the data is immaterial. It's a really distributed database, where the schema is determined by the content, unlike the previous top-down schema designs. And it works - especially well on large media objects.
It's just getting started. A few changes will make it the global distributed computing system we've each been coming at like blind men at a seeming menagerie that's really just one elephant. Distributing the catalog, so any centralization is redundant. Ensuring that any bit is always replicated at least once. Implicit hyperlinks among data chunks for content-specified traversal of the infospace (like HTTP/HTML/URLs). Search engines full of metadata. Asynchronous, realtime streaming protocols layered atop the application - including multicasting.
Maybe it won't be "BitTorrent" that gets these revs - after them, it would hardly be recognizable as BT. But BT has gotten us across a major watershed, the way the CERN HTTPd v1.0 did in 1990. Like anything else that hundreds of millions of people are doing simultaneously, throughout the day and night, it's too late to stop.
--
make install -not war
if the bittorrent protocol would be updated to look like HTTP or FTP or something else, to make it impossible for ISP's to filter it.
That's the fundamental problem of BitTorrent: no incentive for seeds to stay. This isn't really a *problem* at all. Sure, it means that your BT download might not go as fast as if they seeds stuck around. However, in the worst case, BitTorrent speeds simply break down to FTP levels (i.e. everyone is getting their chunks directly from one central copy.) Anyway, it's their bandwidth, they don't have to seed if they don't want to. To review, worst case: as good as FTP best case: WAY better than FTP