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Hollywood Buddies up with Bram Cohen
brajesh writes "According to an AP story at Yahoo News, Hollywood studios announced an agreement with Bram Cohen, the creator of the popular BitTorrent file-swapping technology, that will keep him from helping users find pirated copies of movies online. The agreement requires BitTorrent to remove Web links leading to illegal content owned by the seven studios that are members of the MPAA. The agreement is a major breakthrough in MPAA's anti-piracy efforts. BitTorrent has been one of the major targets[.doc] of MPAA's anti-piracy tirade. However, Cohen's engine is far from the only tool used to find pirated BitTorrent files online. A handful of other online engines can search BitTorrent-specific sites, and ordinary search engines can also be used to find BitTorrent files."
Considering that bittorrent.com is not the first site you'd think of when searching for torrents, and that bittorrent itself is Open Source, how is this relevant to anyone other than Cohen?
Call me when Vivid Videos start complaining about swapping their stuff, then I'll be worried!
If thou see a fair woman pay court to her, for thus thou wilt obtain love
..... for the MPAA. It's a great headline in a press release, but one has to wonder how many people haven't already moved on to something else...... It's sort of like closing the barn doors after all the horses have left.
This is my opinion. To make sure you don't steal it, it's covered by the DMCA.
If he were to be resistant to this kind of thing then it would come off as supportive of piracy and whether or not he really condoned it he would probably get shut down in court. One of the 'joys' of getting big is you have to worry about things like due diligence.
... talking to the inventor of FTP and telling him to not let you download movies from his site ?
EMail: 0110001101100010010000000110001101110010 0110000101111010011011100110000101110010 0010111001100011011011110110
I would just LOVE to see google offering a *.torrent search. Then i would love to see the MPAA or whatever they are called take them on...
- http://www.milkme.co.uk
Heck, I had no idea that there was even a torrent search engine at Bram's site until this news.
I figured the news was going to be a partnership where bittorrent technology would be used for a paid distribution system backed by the major studios. Instead, it's just Bram agreeing to prevent his site's search engine from looking up pirated movies -- something I would have figured he might have done on his own long ago, and without the encouragement (strongarming?) of the MPAA.
I also think the MPAA are becomming smarter. This quote FTA shows that they are learning from the mistakes of and bad publicity of the RIAA:
Glickman said his staff had been holding talks with Cohen even before that ruling to see "how we can work collaboratively and not be at each other's throats."
Sony, RIAA: Attack paying customers (Rootkit), sue single mothers and children with little (which was probably obtained illegally) or no evidence. MPAA: Gain cooperation of P2P network to block actual pirates. At least it's a step in the right direction.
....move along, move along...
What does it mean to wake out of a dream
and be wearing someone else's shorts?
BNL, Born on a Pirate Ship (1998)
So what? I'm not sure, but I don't think that he's doing this because he's personally worried about Holly wood movies being shared on BitTorrent - he's doing it to cover his own rear. He's quite obviously making money with BitTorrent, enough to be able to afford a life for himself and his family, and I think he wants to preserve that, which is perfectly understandable.
Adding a torrent search engine is a good first step to make BitTorrent even more widespread and ubiquitious as it already is. Striking a deal with the *AA is a logical next step, if only to prevent them from suing him. Nothing wrong with that, and everyone who wants to download a movie can still get it from the Pirate Bay.
quidquid latine dictum sit altum videtur.
Cool, someone actually READ the article.
I see this as a good thing. All along the *AA has been after torrent for being a pircay tool. Now Bram has entered the good graces of the *AA, and has made it known as a legitimate protocol with the powers that be.
Now people can stop pissing and moaning about the protocol and start pointing fingers at the websites that post copyrighted torrents, such and piratebay and suprnova. Meanwhile, downloading linux and other legal software will hopefully continue unencumbered. This is a big win for users of torrent.
There is no reasonable defense against an idiot with an agenda
:wq
The highest profile 'choke points' are Pirate Bay, Torrentspy, and Mininova. Everyone I know uses these. The www.bittorrent.com search engine was never very good and I've only heard of people using it after failing to find what they wanted at one of the aforementioned sites. They're going after it not because it's a high profile choke point but because it's the only one Bram can personally control.
sometimes a 90% solution is good enough ...
You maybe right but isn't this more like a 10% solution falling to a 0% solution after people realize the movies they want aren't listed on bittorrent.com?
Most people know to use google (movie title filetype:tor) to find torrents.
Plus bittorrent is released under an open source license so Cohen's no longer in control of the code.
Perhaps he's duping the studios -- gimme so money and I'll help you fight movie sharing, knowing full well removing links from his site won't do much in the long run but he can get some cash in the meantime.
It looks like Bittorrent the tool won't be attacked. They'll go after infringers instead of the protocol/tool (I hope).
I've used BT to get Linux distributions. It works well. I'd hate to lose that because something thinks BT is for illegal stuff only.
Kudos to all involved.
I heard yesterday that the MPAA and Bram were going to announce something, and truthfully, I got a bit excited hoping that we would see some sort of Bittorrent related legal movie download service.
Gimme a break, this announcement it total BS. So Bram announces that he will censor his site, a site which is a search engine and doesn't even really have content of its own. The only reason that it's newsworthy is that it's because the little guy bowed to the big guy and gave in to their censorship requests. Bittorrent.com doesn't do anything illegal by offering search results, it's sites like thepiratebay that are doing the illegal stuff.
Wake me up when the MPAA and Bram actually have something interesting to announce.
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"at eachother's throats"
They say this is an agreement, but I'm failing to see what Cohen is getting, other than a promise to not be sued. I RTFA, but I didn't see where in exchange for blocking illegal downloads, Cohen was going to help develop video distribution software or anything.
Was this good for anyone other than the MPAA?
Excuse my speling.
Making The Bar Project
Why GNUnet is better?
Not saying it is or isn't, I'd just like to know why you think so. A GNUnet canononical website has a comparison chart with some other file-sharing apps but BitTorrent isn't on it.
I think Cohen's reacting in part to the Grokster decision. There and in Betamax it came down to two points: whether legal uses existed and whether the maker encouraged illegal uses or not. For a while, if the RIAA tried to come after the BitTorrent protocol itself on the first point they'd've had to overcome the use of BitTorrent to distribute things like Linux distributions (which is a perfectly legal use). Now if they try to use the same arguments against Cohen that they used against Grokster, arguing he's encouraging illegal uses himself, they're going to have to overcome this contract with the MPAA that binds him to doing exactly the opposite. I think he's being a very smart cookie, looking at the legal arguments people like the RIAA might use to attack him as creator of the protocol and reference implementation and making sure he's got as many legal obstacles in any attacker's way as possible.
Agree. In my business, we frequently have to rely on the 80-20 rule - solve 80% of the problem that you can with the least effort and then worry about the other 20%. This seems like what they are trying to do.
How is your business doing? I ask because either you're not using the 80/20 rule most business apply or you're doing it incorrectly. The 80/20 rule is defined as for many phenomena 80% of consequences stem from 20% of the causes. Most management apply this by focusing on the 20% of their business that drive 80% of their profits. It says nothing of effort, only value. Also, the principle does not infer 80 + 20 = 100. It could very well be the 80/10 rule and have the same meaning. Check out the slashdot research project for more information.
Speak truth to power.
He gets:
1: No lawsuits from the MPAA.
2: Good press to encourage his investors who don't like legal uncertainity.
Since neither of these things appear to have forced him to do things he didn't want to do otherwise, he did alright by this.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
Dude...
He's not helping the other sites. He's protecting himself. I'm sure he probably couldn't care less about the 'other' sites.
If they want that same protection, they can go the same route and filter.
This is really a good thing. Now it can be claimed that Bittorrent has introduced legitimising technologies at it's core the media will probably report it as such. To the average P2Per, there is no difference and people can continue to get what they want from their original sources. This hopefully will boost BT's image as a legitimate content delivery system whilst not touching P2P. Infact, the clueless xxAA might even step down their assault on Bittorrent now that they have got controls in. (Although admittedly they would have to be very stupid to do that.)
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