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Hollywood Buddies up with Bram Cohen

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the he's-so-cuddly dept.

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."

3 of 205 comments (clear)

  1. Isn't this like... by craznar · · Score: 5, Insightful

    ... talking to the inventor of FTP and telling him to not let you download movies from his site ?

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    EMail: 0110001101100010010000000110001101110010 0110000101111010011011100110000101110010 0010111001100011011011110110
  2. Re:total perfection not always needed by Liquorman · · Score: 5, Insightful
    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.

    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."

  3. Re:total perfection not always needed by bombshelter13 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.