The Other Side of BitTorrent

ByteWoopy wrote to mention a Wired article giving more coverage to the upside of BitTorrent. From the article: "Film and television executives no doubt wish the increasingly popular BitTorrent peer-to-peer file-sharing system never saw the light of day. Thousands of consumers are using the software to download hundreds of movies and hours upon hours of television programming. But one industry's threat is another's opportunity. There's an upside to allowing viewers to transfer copyright material content over BitTorrent. As noted by Japanese entrepreneur Joi Ito, fans of the Japanese anime series Naruto regularly post translated episodes of the show to BitTorrent, which attracts more fans to the series. The relatively obscure program has spawned a global following in online forums, internet relay chat channels and fan sites."

Comments

WIPO wants your feedback

[Christian Engstrom]

The World Intellectual Property Organization WIPO is hosting an online discussion about "Intellectual Property in the Information Society" from June 1 to 15, 2005.The conclusions of the Online Forum will form part of WIPO's contribution to the WSIS Tunis Summit.

If you have any comments about file sharing, copyright enforcement, etc. (and who hasn't?), this may be a good place to post them.

There are 10 different themes for discussion, including "Public domain and open information: at odds with the IP system or enabled by it?" and "Enforcement of IP rights in the digital environment".

Although it doesn't explcitly say so in the invitation, I assume that Slashdot readers are welcome to take part as well. But keep it clean :-)

RSS + Bittorrent

[taskforce]

Bittorrent and RSS together actually make an excellent subscription broadcasting solution. An excellent example of which is Kedora.

Kedora lets you subscribe to a number of shows (including MS's Channel 9) and you're alerted by RSS whenever a new show comes out. You then click the link in the RSS and it downloads the show via bittorrent. If somebody could create a totally integrated solution with an iTunes style frontend (I'm thining in the playlists sidebar have all the subscribed shows) and then release good shows on it in decent quality without DRM then I would actually pay good money for a subscription to this service in the same was as people subscribe to cable and sattelite TV.