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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.)
His search engine was far from the first place people looked for illegal content anyway.
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
As
BitTorrent: The Movie
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Wake me up when the MPAA has signed an agreement with each of the dozens of sites people actually use to find trackers. I've used bittorrent for about a year and a half now, and I didn't even know bittorrent.com had links to torrents. I guess I've been spoiled by Suprnova, IsoHunt, TorrentReactor, et al.
I support the separation of oil and state.
Yikes, the post above is almost incoherent, so here's a clip from the press release. Cohen has agreed to remove links to copyrighted content from the Bitorrent search:
The agreement negotiated Tuesday requires 30-year-old software designer Bram Cohen to remove Web links to pirated versions of movies from his Web site, bittorrent.com, effectively frustrating people who search for illegal copies of films.
The agreement involves connections to content owned by the seven studios that are members of the Motion Picture Association of America.
"BitTorrent Inc. discourages the use of its technology for distributing films without a license to do so," Cohen said in the statement. "As such, we are pleased to work with the film industry to remove unauthorized content from bittorrent.com's search engine."
The deal will not prevent all illegal copies from being swapped using the BitTorrent technology. Cohen said during a news conference that even after links to files are removed from his search engine, some files could still be found using other means such as google.com.
Three Squirrels
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
They'll do anything for publicity. His engine is nothing compared to the search engine God.
www.google.com
harry potter filetype:torrent
Until they shut down google their attempts are futile.
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.
Considering that Cohen is keen to keep clean as he has a company to maintain and that the MPAA is obviosly ill-informed about what bit-torrent is and does this really is a zero impact announcement.
...oh..shii...!
Still, it keeps Cohen in their good books (I'm not against someone making money!) and if it means the studios think they've made headway and so back off a bit it's a good thing all round.
So everyone just smile an nod, kay? Whatever you do, don't tell them most people now just burn copies of movies...
"...So I hung back and lurked. For 18 months. Can't beat a good old-fashioned lurking."
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.
at least they were. I remember watching an interview of the MPAA president on MSNBC, where they were specifically asked about BitTorrent. Unlike Grokster and some of the other P2P technologies, the MPAA was quite excited about BitTorrent and its potential use as a tool in the future. He mentioned that a lot of legitimate things are shared by BitTorrent, and it could present a distribution technology for the studio's in the future. I'm not surprised by this partnership -- as MPAA gets the founder of the technology onboard, and gets a good platform to legitimize this.
If you don't like the MPAA or the ideas of DRM and copyright, then you should act on those beliefs. You should finance and produce a great feature film that appeals to a large audience. Then, waive copyright and release the film without any DRM.
The current system of film distribution is voluntary. You, as a film producer, can choose to use it or not. The current situation is perfect.
....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)
i'm sure he's laughing all the way to the bank
...and then going home and using GNUnet
When the seagulls follow the trawler, it's because they think sardines will be thrown in to the sea
Don't give the mpaa any more ideas. I get all my warez from his site
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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This guy's raised 8.75 million in venture capital, and my copy of BitTorrent STILL hassles me for donations with a message about BitTorrent being Bram's "sole source of income"? Yeah, he's hurtin'.
I can't believe I'm eating IMITATION Kraft Dinner because I gave to this guy.
With this move, regardless of it's actual impact on pirating via BitTorrent, he is vastly increasing his chances of successfully slamming down any charge of intent. He is showing that his intended use of the network is not piracy, and that steps can be taken by tracker owners/aggregators to limit the use of this app to legitimate uses.
This is all to protect himself from future lawsuits. It will have no effect on other bittorrent search sites.
He done good....and did it without harming any users, legit or not.
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."
I have had a real hard time with Optimum Online interfering with BT traffic. The default 6881 port is almost unusable, and I notice that lately even if I switch to another port, it has been slow. It took me three DAYS to get an OpenSUSE DVD image last week via BitTorrent. This is nothing short of ridiculous, and is why I'm switching to Speakeasy DSL. I'm probably going to have to get IDSL just because I'm so far from the CO, which is going to cost me even more money, but screw Cablevision. As soon as my DSL gets hooked up, I'm dropping their internet and television. I'll get a satellite hookup for TV. It costs the same amount and they're not an evil monopoly like Cablevision. I can choose DirecTV or Dish network, whoever offers me a better deal. I had DirecTV in the past and liked it. I just wasn't going to pay someone $100 to re-install the dish after it fell off the side of my house.
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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