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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."
Over at Empornium...
150k member max, and still beating them away with a stick!
No leechers rocks!
Just as long as admins remember to lose those logs... I just *hate* hardware failures...
dont you?
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order- Ed Howdershelt Via Tass
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.
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.
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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.
BIYC Records
BitTorrent is a very powerful protocol. It's a shame that so many businesses automatically associate it with illegitimate filesharing. They miss out on a nearly-free way of distributing large files. Not to mention that most corporate networks block BT traffic making it impossible for employees to take advantage of legitimate torrents that are available.
...You think a protocol that contributes a third of all internet traffic is being found useful? Hmmm... yeah I think so.
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.
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.
Am I the only one here who has a problem with bittorrent being used as a distribution medium for legally sold movies & albums?
Don't get me wrong, I LOVE bittorrent and don't mind using it for isos or distros. The problem I have is with someone makeing a big profit out of me AND using my upstream to limit their bandwidth costs.
Am I the only one who has a problem with this?
For the MPAA and the RIAA to demand the entire Internet be taken down to "protect their property". I mean, if you take the entire net down, then that stops the flow of illegal downloads! Sure, why not.
Also, demand that anything "digital" be destroyed as it can be copied and copied without loss of quality like the old days of analog recording. Hell, while they're at it demand that all recording devices be banned from the world! Why not?!?! They're crazy I tells ya! CRAZY!
"Leo Fender was in a 'state of grace' when he designed the Stratocaster." -- Paul Reed Smith
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Do you like German cars?
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
There is no "the BitTorrent"- no single point of failure. If you have a copy of the tracker, you can torrent anything you want and only what you want. Set up a complete torrent infrastructure on your own site and use it to serve only your (legitimate) content. It's just another type of server that anyone can use independent of anyone else on the net. They may as well try to kill FTP.
Sources are all over. Just do a google search for torrent, and you have pages and pages of results. I use
m y fav: http://www.btefnet.org t =8690
http://isohunt.com/
http://www.novatina.com/
or a shit load here:
http://www.slyck.com/forums/viewtopic.php?
"I cannot think of any need in childhood as strong as the need for a father's protection." -- Sigmund Freud
This is a good starting point, even if it isn't entirely up-to-date.
suprnova.org was used mostly for illegal content, this is about LEGAL uses for bittorrent.
Check out legaltorrents.com
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
The irony of bittorrent is that while the technology is designed to be somewhat decentralized, from a piracy standpoint it actually works better when everyone goes to one site. In order for a file to remain healthy for an extended period of time, a minimum number of people have to be always downloading/uploading that file. So if you want to download a ten week old episode of The OC, the only way you're going to find that is if the 8 other people in the entire country are looking for it in the same place. A real replacement for suprnova has yet to emerge, indicating that the lawsuits are working.
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 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.
You're only jealous cos the little penguins are talking to me.
I'm surprised that the MPAA hasn't learned from the RIAA's lessons. We have the iTunes Music Store, the Napster store, and others, all proving that people will pay for downloads. Would they be better without DRM and if they also offered Lossless music? Sure - but there are some third party independents that are doing that, so perhaps they'll pressure the other "major" stores to do so.
So why hasn't the MPAA tried it? Open up an online store with a bittorrent back end much like Valve's Steam: able to distribute data to the hard drive that uses Bittorrent like technology to speed up the downloads, encrypt as it writes to the hard drive and let people watch it from there on their computers or portable devices or stream media (like Tivo, for example). Charge more for higher bit downloads, so if you order the HD quality movie you'll pay more for the download (but you should be able to have that compressed down onto your portable devices without having to buy again), or if you just buy the portable device only version you can pay less (but will look crappy as hell on your TV, so you get what you pay for).
There's no good technological reason why someone hasn't done this - only fear of loss of control and fear that someone will replace their distribution model from production companies -> theaters -> DVDs -> TV. But if they don't replace their production models themselves to production companies -> theaters/home use downloads (expensive, spending more for "just released" movies) -> DVD/home downloads (less expensive), someone else will do it for them, and they'll be worse off for it.
The author makes some good points about how currently MPAA/RIAA fights are to keep technologies down or even products off the marketplace (see the mobile carriers and the Motorola iTunes phone as an example), rather than embracing the technology and being the service company that makes it work for you.
Maybe that's the problem. The MPAA/RIAA/mobile carriers see themselves as seller of widgets, instead of services. They can make a lot more money by providing services with less costs of widgets (cost of pressing DVD and shipping is probably greater than bandwidth and creating once, in the long run), but it's that fear of "new" that keeps them from seeing that they're killing the goose that keeps wandering around their yard looking for food - without realizing that it keeps squirting out golden eggs.
Of course, this is just my opinion. I could be wrong.
52 Weeks, 52 Religions with John Hummel
its here to stay if the internet stays true to its roots, but i can think of a few ways the labels can stop it (or at least marginalise it). Its all a mattter of $ and strength-of-will...something the 'labels' appear to have in abundance.
1. Make it illegal. Sponsor bills over and over and over again until something sticks. This may or may not work. It at least can pollute the atmosphere enough to slow bittorrent adoption...a 'chilling' effect among users.
2. Buy up as many ISPs and digital communication carriers as possible. Or merge. Or become acquired by these networking/communications companies and prove the merit (e.g. profit) of your media rights. After that you customise service offerings to filter bittorrent traffic. Bittorrent isn't very useful if you can't get out of your subnet. Nothing illegal here, just users can't use the tool.
3. Continue the strategy of pummeling bittorent portals into oblivion with legal paperwork. Yes there will always be distribution lists, usenet, etc...but you can kill off 50-75% of the mainstream traffic pretty easily by eliminating the main portals of entry into bittorrent trading.
4. Buy anti-virus vendors, spyware vendors. Offer the product for free, but identify any bittorrent code as malware and remove it. This is the 'trojan horse' method... market to parents, OEMs for ready made systems, try to get Microsoft onboard.
5. Buy or sponsor bios code for retail/consumer highspeed modems, wireless cards, routers, etc. Get filters put in place on these devices.
Yes, all of these techniques aren't 100% effective and some are more reasonable than others...my point is a creative RIAA/MPAA lobby focusing their efforts on a multi-tier strategy can really reduce the availability and adoption of bittorrent in the future. Uber-geeks will always have backdoors, hacks, etc, but this is a much smaller portion of their potential market. I think they can live with the slashdotters trading warez...its the other 95% that they want to cripple.
PS Note that I never suggest the labels will be smart enough to discount their products to improve uptake/sales.
John Maynard Keynes: "When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do?"
With the new version, 4.0, now available
. as p
http://www.bittorrent.com/index.html
for both Windows and Linux (MacOS real soon now), it's a lot easier for both users and network administrators to manage the protocol's bandwidth hungry ways. It's so much easier now that I think that you'll be able to talk organizations, which have banned its use, on the grounds that it eats up too much bandwidth, into rethinking their positions.
Heck, for that matter, I think that since BitTorrent bandwidth use is now mindlessly simple to manage, it will become a popular tool for businesses that need to move large data files back and forth between offices.
For more on all this see:
http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1759,1775223,00
Steven
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.
Next week on /.
Your Rights Online : Google and BitTorrent apply for new patent on using RFID to mirror Wikipedia
Ha! And I didn't even need to subscribe!
The enemies of Democracy are
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.
I'm not wrong. You haven't thought about it hard enough.
Unless these files are locked up in some with (in)effective DRM, one person can download it and start up an alternative torrent.
This is a good point.
If I'm sharing videos with the world of my cat performing tricks, I don't care who else starts a torrent of it. Go ahead, it doesn't matter to me, and might actually save me bandwidth if it becomes as popular as the dancing baby or the StarWars kid.
But if I'm running a website where I'm selling videos for money, then I care very much if someone starts an alternative torrent with my content.
I figure a good sign that BitTorrent isn't suitable for licensed media is that the porn industry isn't using it.
Chip H.
And yes, someone could have cracked the encryption, but they've cracked dvd anyway. Point is that this could be used by the common person who just wants to download a movie, and doesn't want to have to get out of his chair. Because heaven forbid we actually get out of our houses, or have to actually go *get* something. People pull back muscles doing that sort of stuff, right?
as long as that's reflected in the pricing. Is it xandros where you can buy an FTP download iso for $30 or a bittorrent one for $15? That's the way it should be.
I am trolling
It might, however, be just what movie studios and record labels need to market and distribute their own content efficiently on the Web
Now why would it be in their best interest to distribute movies and music so that everyone else could get it without compensating them for it? Is this more of the silly "free advertising" argument? Seriously, how would you expect them to get paid if they did that? I guess a recording artist is expected to spend three months renting out a studio and equipment, just to have the music blasted onto Bittorrent where he won't get paid for his work.
Are you telling me the Bittorrent system has DRM or some other way of preventing people from getting the material without paying for it? If not, is there a way to graft on such a system? Only then would studios even consider using it. Otherwise, it's silly wishful thinking on the part of people who are, shall we say, used to the convenience of downloading whatever they want and so invent reasons for everything to be on P2P.
You might want to forward and use a set of 10 consecutive ports starting from an arbitrary number between 50000 and 60000. Some ISPs use packet shaping or throttling on the standard ports. A number of Other people I know have noticed a marked increase after following this advice.
It may also be the lever ISP's use to raise rates. Face it 3 mb/s down is cool and easy to over commit when the end users are surfing the web and readin email.
Central to Bit Torrent is maxing our your pipe, then leaving it up long enough to let others have what you've got. That kind of allocation wasn't planned for when broadband was originally mapped out.
"Draco dormiens nunquam titillandus."
Actually this is not at all how it works, BitTorrent downloads chunks of the file in any order. The 90% you reffer to isn't the first 90% of the file it's just 90% of the file, the reason this happens is the seeder may disconnect before giving out a complete copy of the file and the sum of the stuff the connected peers have is only 90% of the file.
Who the hell modded you up?
I do not believe this is true at all. I'm pretty sure that bittorrent preferentially seeks out the least common "bits" among those downloading the file in order to ensure that there is a complete copy available, sometimes allowing a complete file to be downloaded even though there are no seeds. I've completed downloading (legal) unseeded files quite frequently. They do NOT load "from the beginning of the file to the end of the file," IIRC.
http://sailes.co.uk/sy22/bittorrent.htm
What you said is completely false. BitTorrent uses either Random First, i.e. selects a random chunk to download, or Rarest First, i.e. downloads the chunk that the fewest clients have. It definitely does NOT go linearly from beginning to end of file. If it stalls around 90%, this is only because there are some chunks which are much more rare than others.
"Was it a millionaire who said 'Imagine No Posessions?'" -- Elvis Costello
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
Your upstream has no value to you when it idle.
Putting it to use to distribute content you like means the content you like can be distributed to you without the vendor having to bundle in the cost to you of building a distribution infrastructure that duplicates resources you are already paying for in the form of your idle upstream capacity.
The article mentions that media folks (riaa/mpaa) take down sites hosting the torrents. Assuming the seeds themselves are hosted in countries disinterested in riaa and mpaa takedown notices or spread out across many individuals, what stops people from using p2p networks like kazaa to distribute the torrent files. It seems that this would be the next logical step. I'm not condoning this, I'm just curious why it isn't happening... yet.
-- john
It's only a problem if you're looking at it from a piracy point of view. As a legitimate user, the server that in a pre-BT world would have been an FTP or HTTP server is now always seeding that torrent. The incentive to keep seeding is to ensure that your customers can always get the content at full speed via BT, so that they don't demand money back or switch to an alternative download method.
I appear to have a blog. Odd.
How are you going to bulletproof the 1s and 0s
There are many ways; it doesn't even need to be encrypted securely, just mangled reversibly in a way that the firewalls aren't smart enough to deal with.
A bandwidth-eating encryption scheme
I'm not sure where you get the idea that encryption is bandwidth-heavy. It is CPU heavy. Your secret-key ciphers have almost no bandwidth overhead except for having to round up to the nearest block (which are usually small - Blowfish, for example, is only 8 bytes), storage of the data length, and the initial transmission of the key. Public key encryption systems have a lot more overhead - often a dozen or two bytes per 256 byte block, or something to that effect, plus the block roundoff and data length - but you generally only use them to establish a secret key session.
that will just be broken
Few encryption schemes are ever "broken". Nowadays, they're generally only "weakened" - the search space becomes a lot smaller. If you use excess bits, even a weakening will generally not put your data at risk. And most algorithms have never been dented, despite a strong mathematical interest in breaking them.
"Here's a fun fact: the moon has turned to blood!" -- Newscaster, "Jesus Christ Supercop"
This is basically what Steam does. ...and it's a crock, because it's basically paying the company to use YOUR resources.
On the general topic of media companies delivering content to you via Bittotrrent, and you using some of your upstream to distribute the file...
Yes, they are using some of your resources. However the way to look at it is not that you are paying them to use your bandwidth - instead realize that you are offering a mix of bandwidth and money for the services offered. To put it another way, they could also distribute the content via a standard means, but then you'd also have to pay more to support the far greater cost of bandwidth.
It's a win-win in another way - when content starts finally flying around in large qualities via a bittorrent like protocol, then said content companies and consumers will push for greater upstream caps instead of the measly 256k most of s with high-speed connections have now.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
>>It might, however, be just what movie studios and record labels need to market and distribute their own content efficiently on the Web
If advertisements are added into the movie, just like it would if you saw it on broadcast TV, they could easily make a profit.
Remember that until the advent of cabel, advertisement was the ONLY source of revenue for TV stations. The signal was just pumped out into the ether and hoped that someone would watch and bring up ratings.
Remember folks, slashdot doesn't have a -1 "disagree" moderation!
I agree that the legitimate use of bittorrent is probably a minority (although it's ~100% of my use), but saying that it's a token minority is a whole nuther story. In general, a "token minority" implies that it's just there for show ("look, we don't discriminate against blacks - we even hired one!"). The illegal uses of BT may be a vast, vast majority, but that doesn't contradict the claim that the legitimate uses go far, far beyond merely being token.
Argument doesn't hold very well. It is true that download performance in bittorrent-style scenarios has a much higher amount of variability. However, theoretically, the lower bound of the performance should be on par with the sustained performance of a single server http/ftp servicing the same load, and that should be a rare low. The reason why so many torrents don't deliver what users expect is that there are no providers involved with a really decent pipe. If the resources used for a traditional http/ftp download site were largely repurposed for bittorrent serving, then you see really good numbers to, worst case, maginally better than http/ftp for the site's content.
As you say, the clients are increasing downstream more and more without significant upstream increases, and while this unbalanced growth does negatively impact bittorrent behavior, it even more so impacts traditional single-server downloads such as http/ftp. Any resources spent to increase the provider pipe for http/ftp has an equal effect on bittorrent-style service level (in raw numbers, proportionally if the upstream on clients never improves, bittorrent's advantages become more marginal).
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
It's quite effective for large distribution of eclectic files, since everyone kind-of shares bandwidth.. but for truely mass distribution, BT is extremely INefficient. Since uploading is required at the same time as downloading, there is twice the traffic going over whatever backbone network is used for the bulk of internet transfers. This is not really significant now because BT is not being used as a broadcast standard and most people have asymmetric broadband anyway.
The most efficient way to send things to large amounts of people is to combine cashing with multicast. Cut down on duplicating the bits sent to the greatest extent possible. This is already occuring to a certain extent. My ISP (formerly Time-Warner (and it actually worked BETTER when it was.. go-figure)) has been cashing patches for many online games "locally" for some time now, and provides very good download speeds for things that are 'in-network.' The only thing they are missing is transparency: It would be nice if frequently accessed pages, and infrequently updated but high bandwidth (like patches or ISO's) were cashed more locally, rather than individually downloaded. Digital TV is a sort of multicast method as well.
Dividing up the bandwith among several users and then attempting to re-aggregate that bandwith is a waste of resources for high-volume, high-bandwidth applications. It does however appear to save bandwidth on the initial server, but only as the cost is (hidden) shared by the users.
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
Others have already pointed out Azureus' warning about not having seeded enough.
Also, Azureus is UPnP aware. This means if you have a relatively new router (everything I've used in the last year or so has been UPnP compliant) Azureus should go ahead and punch the holes it needs in the firewall for you. It's always worked well for me.