Bittorrent Implements Cache Discovery Protocol

An anonymous reader writes "CacheLogic and BitTorrent introduce an open-source Cache Discovery Protocol (CDP) that allows ISP's to cache and seed Bittorrent traffic. Currently, Bittorrent traffic is suffering from bandwidth throttling ISP's that claim that Bittorrent traffic is cluttering their pipes. This motivated the developers of the most popular Bittorrent clients implement protocol encryption to protect bittorrent users from being slowed down by their ISP's. However, Bram Cohen, the founder of Bittorrent doubted that encryption was the solution, and found (together with CacheLogic) a more ISP friendly alternative."

Comments

Re:Off the cuff thought

[zhouray]

I assumed you didn't read the article. It says "only for commercially licensed content".

Re:Possible legal problems

[Bogtha]

Given that a lot of torrents are copyrighted content, are ISPs really going to want to do this? The moment they start caching these files on their servers, they become a huge target for lawsuits.

They already do it with HTTP proxies and Usenet servers without getting sued. So long as they are simply complying with a content-neutral communications protocol - which is basically the whole point of an ISP, I don't see how they could be held accountable. Their business is to transport bits in a particular fashion. It's not up to them to decide which bits are "good" bits and which bits are "naughty" bits.