BSA Reacts to 'New' BitTorrent

An anonymous reader writes "It seems the Business Software Alliance isn't afraid of the new, tracker-less BitTorrent beta. While it concedes it will have to 'regroup', Tarun Sawney, BSA Asia anti-piracy director, said BitTorrent files could still be identified. 'BSA has traditionally sought the assistance of those hosting the actual pirated files. With or without the tracker sites, someone still hosts the infringing files.'"

Comments

Shared responsibility

[arikb]

The question is, can they prove someone has the infringing file, if they only transmit PART of the file?

What bittorrent is about is being able to send very small but verifiably authentic parts of the file - but is that enough for them to prove the person has the infringing content?

My guess is that this is going to be made into law in the US in the near future - that if they get a single BitTorrent packet from you that belongs to an infringing file, it's enough to convict you of a crime and haul your behind in jail.

-- Arik

Re:Shared responsibility

[Qzukk]

can they prove someone has the infringing file, if they only transmit PART of the file?

Yes, because the clients broadcast how much of the file they have.

If you don't think thats enough for a warrant, go down to the local police station and start shouting that you're carrying a pound of crack.

Two dilemmas

[KrunZ]

But what if you and your 500,000 friends stand in line and each hold a letter and each will show it to people for $12/500,000 per letter. Are you infringing on the copyright?

What if you and your 10,000 friends each stand a in line and each of you are holding a paper citing a line from the book. Are each of you just using your citation rights?

Blocks

[DickBreath]

Suppose you downloaded a bunch of Blocks.
Each block is, say, 128 KB.
Each block contains bits that are indistinguishable from random noise.
Each block has a number, which is its hash. Block numbers are much longer than in the example below.
Each block may have come from a different IP address, indeed, even through a different network protocol (Gnutella, OpenNap, Mute, Http, etc.)

You obtain a list of reassembly instructions through another network and reassemble the blocks as follows. (Each block you downloaded is labeled with a B, and the content blocks of the reassembled result are labeled with a C.)
C1 = B224 xor B166
C2 = B287 xor B948
C3 = B569 xor B982
C4 = ...
C5 = ...
etc....

Blocks C1, C2, C3, etc. taken together form a copyright infringement.

Which IP address sent you the infringing work? Each block may have come from a different address? Each block is not infringing content.

Which block is infringing? The first block of the infringing reassembled file C1, was formed from B224 and B166. So was B224 infringing? Or was B166 infringing?

B224, when combined with a different block in the network results in a portion of The Declaration of Independence. B166 when combined with yet some other block from the network results in a portion of The Bible.

Maybe the infringer is who gave you the list of reassembly instructions that told you which blocks to obtain and how to reassemble them? But this information is not directly a copyright infringement. In fact, it may be a fairly short text file.

Note that I did use double the download bandwidth to obtain my copyright infringing material. But for that cost, I raised a whole bunch of questions about who to blame. And I did not suffer the horrible performance of Freenet. (I have not tried Mute.)

(This is an idea I read somewhere.)

Such a hypothetical Blocks p2p system could potentially be designed with the swarming advantages of BitTorrent. Each block could be available from multiple sources -- even multiple network protocols.