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Official BitTorrent Search Opens
starrsoft writes "The official BitTorrent search has debuted. The search engine was built by BT inventor Bram Cohen. The question? Will he get sued? The BT search seems to be down right now. (It'll really be down after this story is posted...) Spiegel has more (En): "Naturally other sites such as Bitoogle, Isohunt, SuprNova or Torrentspy have tried before, but either they became fast a goal of legal attacks on the part of the industry or they furnished rather durchwachsene [??] results. BitTorrent search however proves with first tests [that it is] as...Google...fast. The results come from a large number [of] more well-known and unknown... sites, and...permits sufficient restricting to the inquiry, in order to obtain really relevant results.""
I wonder why people haven't been using many of the other p2p applications out there, particularly the decentralized ones, to search for .torrent files. Or am I just crazy?
All that's left to do now is build a bittorrent-based webserver
I can't help but wonder if there's a provocation behind this - I guess techdirt thinks so. A legal examination and decision (through a lawsuit) might be just what's needed to clear the air of all the *AA FUD that's tossed around...ala SCO v. Linux case. ...or it may add to it, I suppose - lots of histrionics and propoganda while the wheels of justice grind. Is Grokster settled yet?
The opinion above is fiction. Any similarity to real opinions, including facts and logic, is purely coincidental.
so if i were to post a link to the DeCSS code a couple years ago. i wouldn't get sued, because i have only posted a "road sign" to the code?
i wish laws and our courts were more intelligent, but i don't think we can expect the correct judgement from our judiciary system.
Why does the "news" link send you to MySearch, a well-known spyware-related site? Is this why they're planning to be sued?
I am scientifically inaccurate.
Although BitTorrent is demonstrably usable for many non-infringing purposes, it would be naive to think that this search engine will have anything less than 50% (as a conservative estimate) legally dubious content indexed. To follow from that, however, I think my post from the previous discussion on this search engine is relevant:
I'm interested to see what is and isn't worthy of a lawsuit. This search engine is now three steps removed from the (assumed) copyright infringement.
Uploading music from within a country where that is outlawed seems to be fair game for legal action now (although countries where a fee is paid on blank media have a fairly strong case for to say they've already paid) and it's been that way for some time.
More recently sites like Suprnova and BTefnet, who provide no copyrighted content but do provide information on where to get it in the form of trackers, have been subject to successful legal action.
This search engine will now provide no copyrighted content. It will not tell users where to get copyrighted content. It will (presumably) tell users where to get information (.torrent files and their associated trackers) on where to get copyrighted content. Is this enough for a case? I'm really not sure it is.
Could I be taken to court for handing out [illegal item] - yes. Could I be taken to court for telling people that Joe Bloggs on the other side of town can put them in touch with someone who will give them [illegal item] - I wouldn't think so.
One thing that's nice to see in the ICE press release is this (emphasis added):
"ICE and the FBI have shut down a group of online criminals who were using legitimate technology to create one-stop shopping for the illegal sharing of movies, games, software and music."
(\(\
(^v^)
(")")
This is the cute vorpal bunny virus, copy to your sig or runaway, runaway in fear!
If they sue the bittorrent engine shouldn't they sue google since you can always use the 'filetype:torrent' search in the google engine?
"Plans are for fools! Oglethorpe, the plutonian (Aqua Teen Hunger Force)
Blizzard's World of Warcraft game uses a bittorrent-like p2p download system for all its large patches. ..which is why anyone with any sense waits for the fileplanet mirror.
BT is great if you're not behind a firewall or on a corporate network... for normal usage get used to downloading your 500MB file at 1k/second.
I have 20 machines behind this firewall.. there is no way in hell port forwarding is going to work, so WoW doesn't get updated for a couple of weeks while until the mirrors get up to speed.
Just tried searching for "Revenge of the Sith" on bittorrent's new search engine and "filetype:torrent Revenge of the Sith" on Google. Google wins hands down for number of hits. Two hits on BT's search and three pages on Google.
Democrat delenda est
"Could I be taken to court for telling people that Joe Bloggs on the other side of town can put them in touch with someone who will give them [illegal item] - I wouldn't think so"
They picked up several dozen people at my high school for doing exactly that.
In that case it was a drug sting operation, but the principle is the same. If you tell me about a friend of a friend that can get me weed/pills/blow, you go to jail for facillitation. Why would that not also be true of warez and music/movies?
Behold, this dreamer cometh. Come now, and let us slay him... and we shall see what will become of his dreams.
You may find it interesting that Metallica has a lakefront house near where I live. They are having constant hassles with people because they keep trying to close "their" beach even though the beach is public access up to high water mark. This is the same as their attitude on their music... greedy.
I don't read your sig. Why are you reading mine?
I'm surprised that in 150 odd posts, no one has bothered to check the page source.
o r="+searchstr;
from http://bittorrent.com
(emphasis mine)
function sendheader(searchtype) {
var searchstr = document.search.searchtxt.value;
if (document.search.rdfile.checked == true) {
--------> searchstr = searchstr+" filetype:torrent"; <--------
document.search.action = "http://ms128.mysearch.com/jsp/GGmain.jsp?searchf
document.search.submit();
}
So, BitTorrent search is using MySearch.com to perform 'filetype:torrent' searches. This also explains the presence of the MySearch news links.
Yet Socrates himself is particularly missed.
A lovely little thinker but a bugger when he's pissed.
The whole "no-reverse engineering" provision is pretty dang scary to me.. .. So I'd say it wasn't a good law by any stretch of the imagination, because it enforces vendor lock-in, which -may- have absolutely NOTHING to do with defending copyright. .. The prime example of this is the DVD region stuff. The main reason to do this, from a market perspective, is that you can sell to China at a lower price than in the U.S., and those people in the U.S. are prevented from playing those chinese discs on their american dvd players, regardless of whether or not those discs were legally purchased.
There are other problems.
Ah yes, the standard slashbot "WTF, The fbi/government isn't going after real criminals today! They must be devoting 100% of their resources on catching warzers! How dare they catch those who infringe copy rights, why don't they just do some *real work* and let us download all these movies/games/songs/etc for free?"
I've been playing Guild Wars recently, which like WoW is a MMORPG. The patching system they have implimented is quite remarkable in that you really don't even know it's there. The Guild Wars client, very unobtrusively, streams new content and patches while you are playing.
Monolithic patches are so 2004 :)
If you put the full text of a copyrighted book up on your website (and you don't have permission from the copyright holder), then you are infringing copyright.
If google then spiders your site and caches all that text, then *google* is also infringing copyright.
It's not willful infringement, but they'd still have to remove the content from their caches on request or they'd be fair game for a lawsuit.
IANAL, and if I'm wrong about this I'd love to hear a lawyerly explanation of why.