Slashdot Mirror
Bram Cohen to Release BitTorrent Search Engine
AI Playground writes "Within two weeks, a BitTorrent search engine will be available at BitTorrent.com. From the Wired News article: 'Bram Cohen and a small cadre of developers and entrepreneurs are in the final stage of launching an advertising-supported search engine dedicated to cataloging and indexing the thousands of movies, music tracks, software programs and other files for download over Cohen's popular BitTorrent protocol.'"
This is not sufficient. I totally agree, release a search engine!
-Palal
...BigTarget, sorry I meant BitTarget.
... should give them enough time.
I don't read your sig. Why are you reading mine?
Doesn't Bram Cohen see this coming?
Bram Cohen found beaten to a bloody pulp.
The mysterious letters 'RIAA' An 'MPAA' were found branded on his still quivering bottom.
In two weeks we'll have an updated article on Slashdot informing us that the MPAA have shutdown a new BitTorrent search engine. This sounds like Napster all over again except with legal precedents in place it'll happen much quicker.
The only reason he hasn't been sued yet is because BitTorrent is a protocol. Now that this guy has a search engine going, he has painted a huge target on his head. Only a matter of time now...
As nice as this might be, to be able to simply search various torrents, I have a feeling that this will not do anything to enhance Bittorrent's image with the media. If anything, they will use it as a tool to show that people "pirate" tons of stuff over BT. (As mentioned in the article - when the "reporter" requests a search done for The Interpeter.)
It's a good idea, and probably going to be a nice piece of software... but right now is probably about the worst time you can release something like this.
There is always a frontier where there is an open and willing mind
"...dedicated to cataloging and indexing the thousands of movies, music tracks, software programs and other files for download..."
Wow, way to troll, Wired "News".
Second: Torrentsearch.us
this site already indexes torrents and even has an option to search multiple torrent sites @ once. (beware the enormous java ad)
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
Right now I use ISOhunt and Bitoogle.
Any other good ones out there?
if the RIAA & the MPAA would be interested in buy ad space?
GETPKG - Package Management for Slackware
What's brought down the other Bittorrent torrent providing sites is the lawsuits challenging their legality - will Mr. Cohen be filtering out such movies/music/books/etc which violate someone's intellectual property (such as "Star Wars"), or does he have some legal angle that will make him immune?
IANAL (which for years I thought means "I am ANAL", but that's neither here nor there), but Usenet folks can get away with downloading since downloading copyrighted material is not technically illegal - but uploading, or, probably more accurately, distributing copyrighted material without the consent of the intellectual property owner is. So Usenet folks can download Episode III (though why they would is beyond my ken) without fear of lawsuits, but Bittorrent folks, from the second they activate the torrent and upload a packet to someone else, can be considered a distributer under the eyes of the law.
Which is why web sites such as Suprnova.org are now out of business - MPAA came a callin' with their trucks full o' lawyers claiming that giving people access and hosting torrent files is itself a violation of copyright distribution. I guess if Mr. Cohen doesn't host the files himself but merely links to where the files may be found, he could wiggle through that legal loophole.
Either way, good luck - I see a lot of good use for Bittorrent as a method of distributing large files for the masses such as Podcasts or the eventual Video Podcasts that are now popping up, perhaps even as a way to protect against slashdotting (just build bittorrent into web servers and form "unions" to spread the bandwidth or something like this), but I'm not so confident that such as business venture will work out without some legal challenges (whether appropriate or merely standard M/R/IAA "death by lawsuit" tactics).
52 Weeks, 52 Religions with John Hummel
So is this going to search the distributed DB or just a bunch of different trackers? I should hope its not the first since that would give the RIAA/MPAA/etc a door into finding "illegal" file swappers.
I like things how they are, ask you friends, or try torrentsearch.us...
Is the author of that article the same Kevin Poulsen as the Pac-Bell phreaker in the Watchman book?
Has anybody tried/implemented distributing .torrents (not the payload, the .torrent file itself) over Usenet? It seems that with trackerless torrents, Usenet would be the perfect distribution medium for the torrents themselves, just as decentralized as BitTorrent itelf... TorreNTSP so to speak...
I don't know how it will be justified yet, but it seems like this is exactly what needs to be done to get the lawsuit ball rolling.
I am Leviathant and I approve this message.
Can someone explain how this will differ from sites such as suprnova (etc)?
This should provide a good show to watch. I'm all in favor of Bram Cohen winning but he will definately face some fierce resistance and he knows. I'm sure they've had meetings about how they're gonna beat this. From TFA
This creates something that BitTorrent has until now lacked, which is a centralized node to target....But Navin isn't worried -- because the new search engine indexes every torrent it can find without human intervention, the company can't be held liable for results that happen to point to infringing content, he says. Lemley says that's probably right, at least as a matter of law: The Digital Millennium Copyright Act provides safe harbor for "information location tools" if administrators promptly remove links to infringing content upon notice by the copyright holder."
Also doe anyone have any technical details on how this works. I mean how do you index a torrent automatically. i.e. If I start a torrent how will the search enginer know?
You can wait two weeks for them to link it on the homepage or you can search now at search.bittorrent.com
If you know what torrent you are looking for, and the torrent is legally redistributable, you should probably also know where to download the torrent file from. Although one might say that a torrent search engine has legal uses, that argument is somewhat specious, IMO.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
The MPAA has maneuvered to get some torrent sites pulled offline, almost all of the sites are places where users publish content to the site manually.(PUSH) A search engine pulling content from existing locations (PULL) is a completely different type of system.
I predict.
I wonder if they are going to make it super easy for the FBI, and just let them type in "Illegal Downloads". The only saving grace is that the list will be so long it will probably freeze up the FBIs network.
A search engine is a decent idea, but if you can't find your files already, you aren't doing something right. I'm not sure BitTorrent is the kind of thing that should be catering to the dumb computer user. Part of the reason it hasn't been locked down totally is because the masses haven't figured it out. Make it as easy to use as Napster, and it will be shutdown as fast as possible.
/. ++
From the article...The MPAA slammed BitTorrent last week for accelerating the spread of a pirated copy of Revenge of the Sith -- a leaked studio workprint of the third Star Wars prequel debuted online even as fans queued up for Thursday's theatrical release. The organization had no immediate comment on the upcoming search service Friday.
I don't think anybody feels sorry for the MPAA. The fact that they had the balls to use "Sith" as an example was both moronic and ironic. I mean, Sith went on to have the 2nd most profitable opening EVER. How do they have the balls to keep making these claims that bittorrent is hurting them?
if said engine displayed the torrents with the highest amount of seeds that it was tracking... i have a feeling they wouldn't all be linux iso images but you'd be more likely to have the mpaa interested if joe sixpack can get the new starwars movie without too much difficulty, and with loads of help from the creator of the protocol...
if this is a quick cash grab on brams part i hope he's considered how quickly legal fees can kill even the most profitable business...
Get your torrents...
Won't this also make it easier for MPAA/RIAA to write custom programs to hunt down torrents and trackers ? Make it easier to send their armies of lawyers behind those pillagers and rapists on the high seas?
Or instead they could invest in good stories, believable plots, decent actors, cheaper popcorn, to attract people in cinemas.
Who am I kidding.
I just saw XXX-2 and my brain is still recuperating.
RIAA and MPAA jointly going apeshit in 5 ... 4 ... 3 ... 2 ...
As contradictory to the "Cause" as this may seem, doesn't anyone see that Bram is probably doing this because the RIAA/MPAA and other major industries are blaming his project, a project that produces a protocol, for the rampant copyright infringement on the Internet?
The irony here in recent news is that the RIAA/MPAA are directly blaming BitTorrent for the Star Wars EP3 leak, but its been repeatedly shown that the leaked copy came from inside, and was released before the movie hit the public.
...and somehow BitTorrent is to blame?
Are we blaming Boeing for the 9/11 tragedy too? Or blaming Kabar for making high-quality blades, because someone killed with one?
This is ridiculous, and I personally applaud Bram's efforts here to absolutely saturate the mainstream media and dark corners of the Internet with as much media as possible, using his legitimate tool. I personally don't care for any of the copyrighted dreck on television or the radio these days, but others might.
Also, whenever you can, please keep correcting people who regard this as "piracy", "stealing" or "theft". It is nothing of the sort. It is "copyright infringement", plain and simple. If I "steal" your bicycle, I have deprived you of something you previously owned, which I now posess. Making digitally-perfect copies of a work is not "stealing" or "theft", though it is very much illegal in most countries.
You can't steal profits that weren't already earned. You can't steal "projected" profits. Keep up the pressure on these companies who continue to misunderstand the terms they're spewing in public. There's a certain Heinekin commercial that is grossly misrepresenting the nature of copyright infringement.
I corrected a Wall Street Journal reporter for a front-page article in the Marketplace section of the dead-tree version for promoting the "sharing of music" by burning copies of music and handing it out.
He wrote a story that included how some woman (which he named), was bored with the looping music playing in her resort in the Caribbean islands and decided to use her laptop, complete with burner, to burn several CDs of her favorite music to give to the resort to play instead. He was promoting the "advance of technology" for "enabling" people to do these things. This is disgusting.
THIS is where we need to start directing our angst... at the mainstream media misrepresenting these technologies.
will the search engine be open source???
if the source is released under an open source license it would make it nearly impossible for a "gold standard" bittorrent search engine to emerge...
getting the community to help with the development would spread out not only the work, but the blame if it ever comes down to litigation...
Get your torrents...
according to the wired article, the search engine will allow "RIAA and friends" to target the uploaders directly and sue them.
So the search engine will actually become a benefit for the RIAA. Which I'm perfectly OK with, since Cohen never intended BT to be a pirate tool.
The storage industry is going to have a second coming. I just placed an order for 2 more 300GB drives for my home media server. :)
'Be always mindful, even when ditch-digging.' --D. T. Suzuki
You have two choices when it comes to torrents. Either disown the sharing of copyrighted material "Piracy is Bad. We don't support piracy at all. Torrents can be used for GOOD!".
Or, you can try to legitimize "piracy" itself. Ie. Make the downloading of copyright material, so widespread, and so common, that the content providers have NO CHOICE but change their business models. Essentially force a revolution.
I'd guess, thats what Mr. Cohen is up to. The MPAA and RIAA aren't going to be convinced that Torrenting is "good" or "just a protocol". So rather than try in vain, he's gonna play by their rules, open the gates wide open, and legitimize piracy.
Remember, content providers are not gonna change by choice, they are not going to do the right thing because we ask nicely. The only way they will smarten up is if they are given no choice "change, or die".
So the plan isn't to deny piracy. It's to embrace it, make it so big it's unstoppable, to induce a paradigm shift in the industry. To bring on the revolution.
Heck, it might even work.
Aggies
While you can just access it already by going here you can, in the meantime, use Bitoogle it has been around for quite some time now. It is okay I suppose, personally I just prefer Torrentspy. It has a much larger contribution and a large userbase.
- Teja
Actually.....
You would'nt have to distribute the torrent file. A one liner with a Magnet URI address of a torrent swarm managed by the distributed hash schemes networks now in use would be all you would need in the Usenet post.
In fact, I'm rather surprised since the latest version of Azureus supports it (and it's easy to find out what the URI address is of the torrent you are part of..there is an option to copy it to your clipboard in Azureus) that I have'nt seen Magnet URI addresses on websites on web sites to hosting torrent files. It would definitely cut back on the bandwidth a site would have manage.
By listing only the illegal things that appear on the P2P networks, you help perpetuate the notion that they are inherently bad, and become a willing stooge for the MPAA and its lackeys. It wasn't germane to your post, anymore than mentioning
advertising-supported piracy. Sounds sweet. Don't get me wrong; I'm not saying that P2P is in itself bad or anything. I'm not saying that P2P *is* piracy. What I'm saying, though, is that probably 90% of all users will be searching for pirated stuff (software, movies...). And if the searching is advertising-supported, it all becomes extremely rotten - that's what it seems to me.
In extreme scenarii, we could even envision people looking for a pirated Photoshop version while looking at an Adobe advertisement banner. Pretty funky if you ask me. ;-)
1st RULE: You do not talk about TORRENT CLUB.
2nd RULE: You DO NOT talk about TORRENT CLUB.
3rd RULE: If some tracker says "unreachable", goes offline, or cannot scrape, the torrent is over.
4th RULE: Many seeders to a torrent.
5th RULE: Many torrents at a time.
6th RULE: Shirts and Shoes optional.
7th RULE: Torrents will go on as long as they can.
8th RULE: If this is your first night at TORRENT CLUB, you HAVE to download.
If this helps create a situation where unlawful content drops into the noise in comparison with all of the lawful content, BT will be seen less and less as a tool for pirates, and it will be more obvious the value that (practically all of us here know) it provides.
I would say that if everyone just decided to start posting torrent links everywhere -- especially now that it can be done trackerless -- this is exactly what will happen.
So, my recommendation: post appropriate, well classified, well keyworded torrent links, and download only legal content, so that any of the usual poisoning attacks will fail.