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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."
There's an old saying, "the squeaky wheel gets the grease". The big copyright holders will always go after the highest-profile "choke points" first, and in general (i.e. when solving problems of any kind, regardless of how you feel about the studios' motives ion solving this particular "problem"), it can be a perfectly appropriate, effective strategy.
Techies often have a bad habit of adopting a sort of slippery-slope, sky-is-falling, all-or-nothing approach to problem solving (especially if it's a problem they don't really want to solve). "This proposed solution has a hole in it and is not guaranteed to be 100% effective, therefore it is no solution at all and is foolish to pursue." Not necessarily true. You don't always need to find a perfect solution; sometimes a 90% solution is good enough, especially if the alternative is sitting on your hands doing nothing wishing you had a 100% perfect solution.
(Off-topic, but to rescue my karma before I'm accused of siding with the studios here: the same thought processcan act in all sorts of other situations, not just copy protection. For example, if you suggest that a great way of reducing the threat of e-mail vuruses would be to redesign mail clients so that they don't make it easy to click on executable attachments and run them, while still allowing users to click on data attachments and view them, you'll receive all sorts of "objections" from techies who think they know better, pointing out that your solution "won't work" because of the possibility of e.g. JPEG and Word viruses.)