Slashdot Mirror
BitTorrent Partners with TV and Movie Companies
An anonymous reader writes "BitTorrent Inc just announced that they teamed up with several TV and Movie companies. The new list of partners includes 20th Century Fox, Paramount PicturesG4, Kadokawa Pictures USA, Lionsgate, MTV Networks (Comedy Central, MTV and more), Palm Pictures and Starz Media.
These deals will add a great deal of content to the BitTorrent video store, including popular movies like Mission: Impossible III and X-Men The Last Stand and popular TV-show such as "Prison Break" and "South Park""
i for one, aint seeding SHIT that i gotta pay for...
oh how they carry on about peer to peer distributing priated content, but the greedy dogs soon rub there hands together when they realise they can use the same network to distribute their own content for free. Fuck em I say...
I know absolutely next to nothing about its technical details, but since the service is MPAA sanctioned, I can guarantee that it will not be DRM-free. There's no possible way.
I've been thinking though about how you could do DRM on bittorrent-delivered files, and it seems like a problem. Bittorrent only works because you have many people distributing the same file; if each client's copy is encrypted with a personal key (which is the only way to keep people from redistributing them) then P2P won't work.
I suspect that they try to dodge this problem by using a client program that's really, really ugly -- lots of obfuscation, use of keys stored on remote servers, encryption of everything that's written to disk, etc. I assume that all peer nodes are authenticated against a central database as well, and that their communication is encrypted or at least obfuscated (and naturally, the whole thing will be a 'Trade Secret').
There's really not going to be anything good about this service, except as a technical challenge to hackers. Maybe there are some recently-unemployed programmers in Russia who'd like to give it a go?
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
> The MPAA are working with BitTorrent Inc (a US company) to move their content away from illegal copies to a commercial business
> case.
They'll profit from selling movies.
> The RIAA are working against AllofMP3 (a RU company) to move their business away from legally selling material to a non-existant
> case.
They're not profiting from someone else selling their IP.
I have only one question:
Will I be able to play the files?
I'm deliberately not saying what platform I'm on or which media player I'm using, because, if I need a specific media player or platform, the answer to the question is "no".
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
... more convenient (= quicker and cheaper) for me to go to the local video store and buy or rent the DVD.
So where's the incentive for me for downloading it via bitorrent and letting MPAA profit from using my bandwidth ?
----------------------------------- My Other Sig Is Hilarious -----------------------------------
If I'm buying a movie why do I also have to buy bandwidth to distribute it to other purchasers? These movies had best be very cheap or the ordeal won't be worth all the trouble. I very much resented Blizzard for forcing its paying customers to VERY SLOWLY distribute patches over a totally non-configurable proprietary BT client while other games provide max downrate HTTP/FTP distribution.
I don't think of reading an eBook like a normal book (i.e. on paper or something like paper) It is, after all, an ELECTRONIC BOOK.
When I think of an eBook reader being perfected, this is what I envision.
Something the size of those old apple PDA's...roughly about the size of a small paperback. 512mb of internal flash memory with a CF card port. Adjustable brightness and contrast on the screen, adjustable font size, standard times new roman font, the ability to read the major ebook formats.
Why is that so difficult?
Living With a Nerd
They'll also save money by distributing said movies using your bandwidth, instead of theirs. They're capitalizing on the idea that "torrents are cool" and hope that by simply inserting the words "download using bittorrent" that the geek side of you will be more willing to buy.
It's a shame that in some bid to legitimize itself to the media companies, BitTorrent has quite literally been used like a cheap whore. MPAA gets to save money on bandwidth and distribution costs, and your computer gets to run what I can only imagine will be a constantly-running, branded bittorrent client in the background, using up your bandwidth to save the MPAA money.
BT sold out, or were really stupid - one or the other.
Excuse my speling.
Making The Bar Project
The reason ebooks have not caught on, and never will, is that nobody wants them.
Oh wait, that's not it. Turns out tons of people want them. What nobody wants is to pay $350 for the reader, $30 for a book (a higher cost than the dead tree version), and then get told when, where, and how many times they can and can't read the book they would own if they bought the dead tree version, but only have a very limited license to with the ebook version.
They distribute an encrypted version of the file. This file is what's transferred and seeded, etc.
Upon downloading the file, you use a program to unlock it. The program would interact with a web-service. It would charge your credit card, give you a username/password, and it would decrypt the file and merge in your unique signature. You'd never see the key that's used to decrypt the file. It's never stored on your PC and it's encrypted itself with SSL during the key-retrieval.
I'm not suggesting this is how it would work, but I *am* a software developer and this would be how I would probably approach the problem. Loading a file with "thousands of keys" doesn't really jive with how encryption actually works. An encrypted file doesn't store ANY keys, let alone thousands of them.
The client app decrypts the file...
And THAT'S where you strike. The only catch is that not only do you have a free-and-clear copy, but so does anybody else (the key is easier to distribute than the now-un-DRM movie itself). In a non P2P model, the content provider can limit the spread of a key that breaks an official file by using seperate per-file encrpytion keys for each registered user.
No amount of mucking about with SSL or PKI will fix that problem.
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON