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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.)
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
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
Open Source Drum Kit, LPLC deve board - mjhdesigns.com
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
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.
Don't give the mpaa any more ideas. I get all my warez from his site
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.
Bram Cohen has in fact condoned piracy, at least until mid-2003. Check out this little piece, now removed from his website, but still accessible via wayback: http://web.archive.org/web/20030602145959/bitconju rer.org/a_technological_activists_agenda.html
"I build systems to disseminate information, commit digital piracy, synthesize drugs, maintain untrusted contacts, purchase anonymously, and secure machines and homes...I refuse to work on technology to track users, analyze usage patterns, watermark information, censor, detect drug use, or eavesdrop. I am not naive enough to think any of those technologies could enable a 'compromise'."
He was the last person I'd have expected to deal with the MPAA, given what his rhetoric used to be.
The plural of 'anecdote' is not 'data'. --Dan Kaminsky