LegalTorrents Launches Copyright-Compliant Tracker

drDugan writes "Many legitimate media providers are using Bittorrent to distribute content, but the recent Pirate Bay legal verdict and closures left many content downloads unavailable. Along with the ongoing legal issues at Mininova and other sites, options have been scarce for legitimate Bittorrent tracking service. Once a torrent is created with a tracker URL, that tracker has to stay running for normal distribution to continue. LegalTorrents.com has quietly launched a solution with three open Bittorent trackers for its members, including a fully automated, community-based flagging system to blacklist and immediately remove copyright-infringing content. Users submit SHA1 hash values for content with infringing materials. Site members can include and track their own published materials regardless of flagging."

Comments

Re:Still, it validates the technology

[Interoperable]

Exactly, a site and set of trackers dedicated to legal material will facilitate the argument that there are, in fact, legal uses for torrents. This fact is utterly lost on many legislators thanks to the lobbying of Big Content. They need all the help they can get to see beyond the lobbyists and this is a step in the right direction. If the LegalTorrents community can demonstrate that a community can self-regulate to avoid infringement it will make the arguments of the RIAA more transparently false.

Big Content will eventually die off simply because they aren't needed anymore. Artists no longer need big labels to publish their content and the more tools that artists have to avoid Big Content the better.

Hashing

[b1ng0]

Their SHA1 hashing method will not be sufficient to detect most copyright infringements. Even one bit change in a file will result in a completely different SHA1 hash. I am the creator of pHash, which is well suited for this type of similarity search. The hashes do not need to be identical in order to detect duplicate or similar files, and similar files will have hashes that are "close" to one another. This is really what they should be using.