Slashdot Mirror
A Bit of Bittorrent Bother
Lave writes "A journalist at the BBC is replying to complaints about its recent Newsnight show, where it stated that using Bittorrent to download copyrighted material is theft. It's a very frank and honest account about the perceived realities of the internet and how traditional media represents it. From the article: '[One] answer is that we're totally scared of new media, because new media is railways and we're canals, and you all just know how that's going to end. So we seek to equate the internet with all bad things to scare you off it. At some corporate Freudian level, there's some truth to that accusation.'"
The talk of encryption is what worries me. Given that it's regularly used for secure remote access (SSH), used for secure communications (S/MIME and PGP), and essential to commerce over the internet (SSL), I'd expect there's quite a bit of legitimate encrypted traffic flying around already.
Sure, it's buried amid the flood of email (80% or more of which is spam), web traffic, and P2P traffic. But encryption isn't a rare thing mostly used by bad guys, as the article suggests.
The attitude reminds me of one of the five or so episodes of Enterprise I saw, in which T'Pol got an letter from home and the crew spent the whole episode trying to decrypt it. The theme was very anti-privacy, with one of the characters actually saying to her, "Do you know how suspicious that looked?" It made as much sense as claiming that closed curtains were a challenge to look inside.
I'd guess that even without encrypted torrents, most encrypted traffic on the net is business traffic of one sort or another. So the bad guys using encryption are already lost in the noise.
Why attack bittorrent for supposedly encouraging piracy when it has decidedly legitimate user as well, and there are many, many technologies out there being developed that are solely for the purposes of piracy, spam & exploitation. These technophobes should do a little more homework before selecting their targets, in my humble opinion.
"If you ask the security services and the police why they monitor the internet, [pedophiles and terrorists] are the bogeymen they claim to be chasing.
In a four minute piece, we're sort of obliged to take that at face value"
No. As a journalist, you're obliged to think critically.
However, most of what I use bittorrent for is for downloading copyrighted material that the copyright holder has already given permission for other people to distribute.
So here I am, using bittorrent to download copyrighted material... not only am I not stealing, but I'm not even doing anything remotely illegal.
Putting the misuse of the word theft aside for the moment, I think what they really outta be doing is putting some effort into qualifying statements such as these with the provision that it is being distributed without the copyright holder's consent. Because there's plenty of freely available material out there that has copyrights on it that are just as binding as the copyrights found on works that are not so free.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
Theft, the dishonest taking of property belonging to another person with the intention of depriving the owner permanently of its possession
Collins Concise English Dictionary, Third Edition
Yes it's illegal but please don't drink the **AA Kool Aid and conflate it with theft, theft is nicking some old dears purse, shoplifting etc etc. Rather more serious in my opinion, that's why the **AA like to confuse the two. Got to go, dinner is served.