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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.'"
BitTorrent was never designed to anonymize. It was designed to distribute the load of hosting a file. A lot of hoopla about a non-issue.
Are but the torrent files do they actually in fringe copyright??
It isn't the .torrent files they're talking about, it's the actual torrent data. They're probably just joining a tracker, and see which ip addresses try to contact their host... not sure if it is enough proof in court, but I can still see they're not scared of this indeed.
- Leon Mergen
http://www.solatis.com
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
Shiver me timbers!We can just bury the torrent files and make a map!BSA's having the Davies now! Arrrgh!
Yeah, but note whom would have to try them for treason... uhm, isn't that the politicians themselves?
Democracy would fix this just fine. Except for the fact that neither communism nor corporationism don't have anything in common with democracy.
The creatures outside looked from Alt-Right to Antifa; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
Today the released a statement saying : Why should it bother us? We manufacture classic motorcycles.
Athletic Scholarships to universities make as much sense as academic scholarships to sports teams.
Lighten up, Francis.
Software and other content developers trying to protect themselves from pirates is hardly Feudal serfdom.
It's more possible than ever to collect movies, music, and software (that you never paid for) than ever before. Expect corporations to overreact to that theft as much as possible and for equity imbalances to result.
If you were as vocal about protecting the rights of content producers as you are about protecting the rights of "the people", maybe there would be more balance in the situation.
Those of us in the middle are willing to pay for what we use and ask to be paid for what we create. As usual, you warring factions at the extremes make it difficult for the more reasonable people to just live their lives in peace. Nice job.
Why are you letting these clowns ruin our country?
The BSA, Microsoft and the definition of Extortion
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?
Oolite: Elite-like game. For Mac, Linux and Windows
Sure you can blame BitTorrent for piracy problems you can probably even go and make it illegal to use in most countries. But it wont stop the piracy. They will make an other program that does it differently. Technology moves a lot faster then the legal system. If they really want to cut down on piracy they should figure out why people pirate materials.
Things like Price. $100 and up is a lot of money for the average home user. Money that can be used for car payments, paying Rent/Mortgage. And paying $100 on a product you don't even know you really want or will use for only a couple of months can be a big waist. $25-$85 is the normal sweet spot for what people are willing to pay for most software.
Things like convenience. Going to the store and finding the product that you need now. Or going online and filling out all your personal information and getting placed on the stupid mailing lists and then paying for the product. Or go and get a pirated version with no questions asked.
Finally no real good reason to buy. When you buy the programs at the store you no longer get useful documentations like the good old day you just get the media and sales stuff on other programs the company makes or install directions in 1000 languages. I wish every program came with a manual the explains all the features in it, and a real paper manual not a PDF or html documentation where it is more difficult to flip to some page and find a cool feature.
Stop blaiming people who make the tools that make our lives easier the companies to think about making our lives easer,
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Most people either download music, and/or see nothing wrong with it. The "extreme" that you mention is the norm.
It is not possible for every activity to result in somebody getting paid. Neither is this a reasonable goal.
There were no "content producers" for most of human history, yet people made music, works of art, and so on. It will be different, neither better nor worse, if the world returns to a state where people are not paid for making digital recordings.
So I suspect that you're wrong. By making publishing easier still, more will be able to put stuff up on their site that they couldn't before. True, most people lacking in resources will in this context be pirates, so the proportion of illegal use will go up, but that is a side-effect of enabling your average Joe to publish where they couldn't before, meaning that the quantity of legitimate use will also go up.
Wikileaks, no DNS
Mod: -1, Hungarian notation and ugly brace style.
- chrish
"Stop making moves $10 to go to, stop making someone pay $1/song, stop over-charging and blaming increasing charges on piracy when that is a complete lie."
I remember when the excuse was that paying $18 for an album or $3 for a single was too much and unfair, but if only, (IF ONLY!) some benevolent content distribution god were to swoop down from the Heavens and offer music for a reasonable price like, say, $1 a song, it would grind piracy to a halt because everyone downloading illegal songs is doing it in protest of outrageous prices.
I also remember 20 years ago when we would make bootleg copies of G.I. Joe cartoons (2 20 minute episodes to a tape if I remember correctly) from the VHS rental place because official copies started at $58, roughly the price nowdays of DVD season set (and in some cases, 2 seasons and up.)
$20 too much to pay if you want to see a movie in the theatre? Then wait 6 months and the DVD will be available in Walmart for that much and on Amazon for less. VHS tapes used to start with a street date of over $100 so Blockbuster and others could have a safe rental window before the general public could purchase the movie at an affordable price but DVD (which is easier to pirate. No fancy TV capture cards or miles of coaxial to worry about, just software you can get from download.com) shattered that creating a $20 street price the day it's released.
No matter what the cost is, someone is going to come along and say that's too much, I won't pay! Someone else is going to say why would I pay that when I could get it for free. A third someone else is going to say that price is fair for what I get, I have no problem paying.
I haven't made any elaborate spreadsheets of movie prices throughout the years, but but over-all, we're talking about a 60 percent decrease in product price (lets not get into the math of accumulating season sets back then... $58 for 2 episodes times 10 or 20...) and that is without factoring in inflation. How much is a 1985 $20 worth in 2005?
So I guess with all that said I agree with you that "increasing charges" is a lie, just not in the way you seem to feel.
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.
I'll see your senator, and I'll raise you two judges.
What are these guys smoking? The concept of the trackerless torrents wasn't created because of the need for protection of tracker servers, but for the ease of distribution... this is not about making it harder to identify trackers. The whole torrent system isn't about circumventing identification or about being completelly anonymous, and the BT author has mentioned this several times.