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BitTorrent Gets $8.75M From Venture-Capital Firm
funny-jack writes "BitTorrent's drive to legitimize itself as a tool for distributing legal content appears to be gaining steam, as evidenced by the $8.75 million venture capital they recently secured. 'The piracy business is not something anyone can make money on,' says Ashwin Navin, who co-founded BitTorrent with Bram Cohen. 'We want to distribute paid and ad-supported content, using this technology.'"
Soon they'll have the resources to add DRM filters and redesign the GUI so that that they can show ever more ads on it....
Why would a movie studio use BitTorrent instead of just allowing someone to download from their site or from, let's say, iMovies by someone like Apple?
Evil people don't think they're evil. - George Lucas, Making of Ep III
To raise the funding, they ask that everyone send in a couple bucks each to help seed the system. As they receive cash, the money will be invested, and a map of generous investors will be created. The more money you contribute, the higher rate of return you'll see, and so on.
...
The investment will continue until they hit the $8.75 million mark, then they'll keep the fund the same size and just feed the profits back into the investment group as other people join and leave.
A constant threat will be a type of invester known as a 'leech' who makes minimal contributions but attempts to collect large returns and-
Gosh... I'm really trying hard to make this a funny bittorrent joke, but I find that I've just described actual commerce. How depressing.
For example: Just because Apple makes money on iTunes (ie: legitimate music sales) they make far, far more on sales of the iPod -- which are prediated on the availability of free pirated music. iTunes keeps Apple's music initiatives legitimate, but to say that Apple hasn't benefited from piracy would be wrong.
And let's talk about storage media: How much will Seagate, iOmega, yada yada yada, benefit from storing pirated digital movies? Tons!
Piracy is huge business.
Hell, I pull out my wallet for storage and playback media far, far more than I do for music. And I don't think I'm unusual at all -- most people are the same.
------ The best brain training is now totally free : )
Bittorent was released under the MIT license, so pretty much anyone can take it, modify, make their own version (like the one Blizzard patches World of Warcraft with) and basically do as they please so long as they include credit to the original author. So really, anything particularly special that Bittorrent manages to do, can't anyone else just copy it?
What is this actually going to pay for? Their expenses and plane tickets to meet with execs while they try to push BT? Or is there some actual technical innovation that this is going to pay for?
O.o?
I've never had that problem and i run WoW on both mac and pc platforms.
After playing other MMOG's like Everquest and FFXI and having to go through the living HELL that is "Content Patch Day" and having to fight for bandwidth to get my updates, a torrent based patch solution makes more and more sense.
The only think i can think of is that some ISP's have filters in place to identify all torrent traffic and either block it, or report it to Anti-P2P networks so that they can DoS your IP.
To be on the safe side maybe you should get Peerguardian at http://peerguardian.sf.net/
Huh? Bittorrent is trackable - the person seeding/hosting the .torrent is not anonymous. It is also probably the most popular method for downloading Linux ISO images. The Gnutella network is used for piracy and little else, but Bittorrent is a pretty poor choice for such use.
I, for one, would be happy to download torrents of my favorite tv shows with commercials included. Sell the torrent ad space! At least the ads would be semi-targetted (as on slashdot) to thinks that I might actually care about. Hell, I'd even pay to subscribe to torrents of specific shows with ads. My purchasing power as an emerging late-20s demographic should be worth a pretty penny to corporations. So let them vie for my attention by supporting awesome shows.
First we get the coporate tv torrents; then we get torrent Neilson ratings; then they see the massive popularity of shows like Firefly and Battlestar Galactica and just how many people are watching; then we have more awesome shows to watch.
The downside? Oh no, I'll have to watch commercials again. What ever will I do?
Second point, BT is not that user friendly, since it often takes a long time to start up, and isn't always very fast. It's reliable, in the sense that things usually get to you *eventually*, but it's not an appropriate technology for mainstream downloads.
Another case of VCs dumping money at popularity rather than something that can actually make money.
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
I do boycott. I will continue to boycott. I don't try to rationalize copyright infringement. I have issues with it - the time frame, in particular - but that doesn't give me the right to dismiss it.
:)
With that said, however, P2P and piracy is a much more desireable scape goat for the industry than accepting the "I am evil and do evil things" point of view. Whether I NOT spend money because I'm pirating or because I'm boycotting, in the end, I may as well be pirating, for what it's worth to the record execs.
That isn't to say, however, I will be pirating. Character is what you're doing when no one else is looking. My character is "I'm too fucking lazy to bother".
Possible BitTorrent models:
1. Create a torrent search engine with Google Ads (already done)
2. Charge large companies for customized/secure trackers
3. Charge gaming companies for customized BT Clients (e.g. Blizzard)
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
Obviously the Slashdot crowd is not going to like how some business uses Bittorrent for money. However, this can really succeed if speeds are high. Example: just look at Apple and iTunes... DRM'ed, pricy, yet very successful. This is good news, IMHO.
Informative? For recommending that we justify the media organisations' protests about 'piracy'?
Prosperity is only an instrument to be used, not a deity to be worshipped. Calvin Coolidge
I don't see how, as those were donations (ie. gifts), not investments or loans. While it's custom to expect something in return for a gift in some parts of the USA, properly, a gift is given unconditionally, with no expectation of reciprocity -- otherwise, it's not technically a gift.
If your $0.02 was supposed to be an investment or loan, you should have put it in writing.
It's a better technology overall, and I'd pay for BT downloads for the sheer factor of supporting something better and smarter. Of course, given a choice between BT and a traditional download, BT ought to be a little cheaper because, as you said, you're paying for some of the distribution costs.
Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
'The piracy business is not something anyone can make money on,' is the most stupid thing I ever read. Are not The Pirate Bay making money? If you think they are not then look at their traffic http://www.alexa.com/data/details/traffic_details? q=&url=thepiratebay.org and ask yourself "Is there a website with that much traffic that is NOT making money?". Yeah, I realize that their sponsors, the advertisement companies they use, are among the worst in the industry. Why? Because more serious corporations like Google Adsense does not allow their advertisements to be placed on websites like that. But even though they are using the worst paying solutions in the industry, they ARE making money. Lots of money.
.mp3. Then the MPAA started their propaganda in the media against movie piracy and I rewrote the spider and the scripts and so they automatically removed all movies. Then were was only television shows left, and the MPAA did not indicate they minded that. But later they decided that too was bad and again pushed propaganda on the media, and then there was nothing left to filter away and I closed those sites, contacted the mainstream entertainment industry, tried to get legal deals and found that only the adult industry were willing to allow some content to be distributed by BitTorrent. Today I have several (legal) adult torrent sites.
.torrents make a lot of profit off piracy. That is the truth and we all know it, we just choose to support this and turn the blind eye because it suits us (and also because there IS NO LEGAL ALTERNATIVE that is equally good).
BitTorrent sites are generally not about "being kind" or "we are against copyright or have some other justification". Websites (including BitTorrent trackers) ARE ABOUT PROFIT. And there IS profit in it. I know. I once had sites who, then, had the same traffic as the pirate bay had. It was not a tracker, the sites merely indexed trackers and mirrored their torrents. So it was even "more innocent" than the pirate bay. And I could claim that "we are not hosting this content" and "we are not even tracking it" and therefore me, in fact, in reality, making money off piracy was therefore alright and justified. Then the RIAA started getting angry about music and even though the sites technically were not doing anything wrong it was obvious the money made was made because of piracy. So I choose to remove the music section and configure the spider to ignore
I honestly consider I did consider the alternative: Rent servers in a country like Sweden and engage i major copyright theft. I even made spreadsheets and so on. Even though I got quite pissed off when the MPAA stupidly claimed that sharing television shows is somehow piracy and bad and that alone, apart from the huge profit, made me want to do it, I at length decided that it would be morally wrong.
Why am I telling you all of this? To make a point. There IS a lot of money to be made off piracy. And that is why a lot of people are doing it. I never had a thousand-part of the traffic the pirate bay has today, and I still made a lot of advertisement money off mirroring torrents. Technically that money was not made from piracy, only by distributing hash codes and links as one may innocently claim, but in reality it was made off illegal distribution of copyrighted media files. No matter how much you claim "we are only tracking" or "only mirroring torrents" or whatever, torrent sties and torrent search engines and even normal search engines who pick up
The people who run BitTorrent sites and trackers, legal or not, sites do it because IT IS PROFITABLE.
9/11: Never forget it was a false-flag operation
One thing that I've thought is missing from BitTorrent for a long time that would give it a huge boost over regular download methods is "Updating Trackers".
With Updating Trackers, the host tracker would be updated to include more files. When this is done, the BT client would get a signal saying "Hey, there's more to download!" When this is done, certain things could happen depending on the tracker and the user settings. You could do one of three settings:
1) Ignore it
2) Prompt the user that there are updates; the user then chooses what, if any, of the new files to download
3) Automatically download all new material.
This feature may not be helpful for downloading, say, software, where you really don't want every version of a piece of software released, but it has many other uses.
First, fansubbing. Often times you'll have to visit a site/newsgroup/chatroom often to see if the latest episode is out (many fansub sites use torrents now,) but with Updating Trackers, you could just set it to download all new files, and receive the files as they are created, with no waiting. The legality of fansubs is always a hot debate, but most people agree that many companies wink at it, as fansubs help to create a large mass of fans in America (and other countries) before an Anime is even liscensed there. (For recent examples, see: Naruto.)
Second, "indie" authors. Authors that create large books, and release them a chapter at a time (regardless of the quality of their work,) generally use sites like FanFiction.net to upload to. While not a bad way, if they gather a growing number of fans, the fans can instantly receive new chapters as they are released, to read at their leisure.
I'm sure there are other uses for such a feature that others will come up with. The only downside to Updating Trackers would be that the hits to the parent site would likely decrease somewhat, because people no longer have to go there to download the latest file. This could be useful to some and detremental to others, depending on how they use advertising.
(I hope I'm not talking out my ass; I don't use BT that often, but I don't think that this feature exists.)
Actually, I did.
I'm not saying that what they give you (cash) is worthless - far from it, but many people get excited by the idea that because they've got a VC on-board means they must have a good idea; it's not that easy.
VC's generally know only one thing: what other investments other VCs have made that paid off. Consequently they chase the "next big thing". That's what made the .com bubble: VC's chasing the few success stories and pumping huge amounts of cash into things because they looked good. Anyone with any sense wouldn't have touched many of these ideas with a barge-pole.
VC's are gamblers, pure and simple. They study the odds and the conditions, sure, but at the end of the day, it's not their money and they really don't care as long as the odd gamble comes home big, which is why they always want such a huge slice of the companies they back.
As to taking risks, no. VC's never risk anything. They generally use other people's money. Very very few VC's I met were risking even their own money on their office space. They are usually spending pension-fund money. Which, sadly, is another reason they really don't need to know anything about what they're doing.
As I said: getting a VC on-board means you're good at talking to VCs, nothing more. The money they give you may well get you over hurdles that you would have floundered at before but their expertise and the people they put on your board to "guide" you basically are just ballast and ideally you want to get them off to a golf-course somewhere rather than interfering with your company. They generally do know about golf, so if your company is related to golf or golf supplies, you might find them of some help, but otherwise take the money and ignore everything else they say. If they knew anything about business, they'd be in business.
TWW
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