Wil Wheaton: BitTorrent Isn't Only For Piracy

itwbennett writes "Geek advocate Wil Wheaton has written a blog post on the (legal) usefulness of BitTorrent, saying that the speed of his recent download of Ubuntu 12.04 should serve as a reminder that BitTorrent fills an important niche. Wheaton compares blocking BitTorrent to closing freeways because bank robbers could get away."

Comments

Not quite

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't get me wrong, I think the actions of big media are way out of line and it angers me greatly to see the damage being done to law and society in general to protect a dying business model for a few more years..

That said, the analogy used in the summary isn't quite right. Yes, bittorrent has a lot of great legitimate uses, but we are deluding outselves if we think legal bittorrent usage is the majority of bittorrent traffic, or even a large portion of it. I get that extreme statements like this are necessary to balance out the extreme statements made by the other side (that song you downloaded cost us 500 million, etc..) .. but I still don't like it :(

Re:Not quite

[xstonedogx]

Legal uses are 100% of my bittorrent traffic. I can't speak for anyone else.

Re:Not quite

[scdeimos]

For a large percentage of internet (gaming) users I'd say you've probably used BitTorrent without even realising it. Ever played one of these games: World of Warcraft, StarCraft II, Diablo III? Blizzard's software update system uses BitTorrent by default with a fallback to HTTP, and they're not the only ones.

Re:Not quite

[DnaK]

A single user here, Using bittorrent since the beginning to download dead shows. But the majority of my usage is piracy.

Whether or not you want to believe me, thats all you, but my use is almost all illegal.

Re:Not quite

[Anonymous Coward]

Here's the problem... a lot of things that are technically illegal, people don't believe OUGHT to be illegal.

If I can watch, oh I don't know, Seinfeld reruns on TV over the air for free, why is it illegal for me to download the episode I missed last night? I use Usenet for time-shifting, the way that I used to use a DVR. I have no moral qualms whatsoever about doing so, and I don't think that there OUGHT to be any legal impediment to doing so.

Re:Not quite

[Kjella]

Citation needed.

Here.. 89% definitively illegal, 11% probably illegal, 0.3% confirmed legal. And since you want to play the wikipedia game, anything you say to make this article invalid is [citation needed], no arguments of your own only reliable third party sources.

Re:Not quite

[Anonymous Coward]

Your example leaves out how the show should get revenue if they aren't selling ads in the time-slot. When you download the show it bypasses the ads leaving the show with pissed off advertisers.

If the show were available for download 'legit' , they could throw a ad or two at the beginning and make $ that way. "Thanks for DLing this episode. Encoding/bandwidth/etc funding provided by: [insert commercial]"

Re:Not quite

[Anonymous Coward]

Remember when they said the MP3 format was illegal, and a majority was for illegal copying?
I do.

Re:Not quite

[MobileTatsu-NJG]

If I can watch, oh I don't know, Seinfeld reruns on TV over the air for free...

Actually, you're not watching them for free. Your eyeballs earn them money in the form of advertising.

A better example might be: "If I'm an HBO subscriber and I download the episode of Game of Thrones that I missed..."

That said, I actually do agree with you, it's just the whole advertising thing is a big speed-bump in your argument.

Re:Not quite

[Br00se]

I agree the analogy does not quite fit. He should have compared blocking BitTorrent to closing freeways because people might exceed the posted speed limit.

Sure a lot of people do it, but we only care about the ones that really abuse it.

Re:Not quite

[zill]

When you download the show it bypasses the ads leaving the show with pissed off advertisers.

By that logic TiVo is illegal. So is going to the bathroom during ads.

Re:Not quite

[Anthony Mouse]

And since you want to play the wikipedia game, anything you say to make this article invalid is [citation needed], no arguments of your own only reliable third party sources.

I guess you missed the link in your own article that debunks the study? Cliffs notes version: They only looked at the files with the most seeds, which already skews the results, and pirated stuff has a huge list of fake seeds to screw up lazy anti-piracy enforcers, which means that choosing the torrents with the most seeds invalidates the entire study because the ones with the most (fake) seeds are the pirated ones.

I would also add that relying on 'this one public BitTorrent tracker we found somewhere' is not statistically valid, because it's just one tracker. You have to get a statistically valid sample of all the trackers or you can't conclude anything. For example, if they included these these trackers instead, I would expect different results -- and by failing to consider them, they naturally get totally invalid numbers.

Re:Not quite

[Voyager529]

Streaming != download. Try using Hulu at an airport with free Wi-Fi that the entire terminal is sharing and tell me how well that works out. Try using Netflix on a train where everyone else that train is also streaming Netflix and internet connection is sparse. Let me know how free those ABC.com shows are and you inadvertently go past your monthly data cap and pay $0.10/KByte for the second half of it.

I'm glad that these services get us halfway there,but Hulu and Netflix inherently require a level of connection that DSL or cable can provide, but mobile internet cannot. I'd be perfectly on board with a method to even pick videos and cache them in a container I can't open myself when I'm somewhere with Wi-Fi. Sadly, even this compromise does not yet exist.

Re:Not quite

[cluedweasel]

Another nitpick. I record a show from my cable provider using my home brew DVR.. I remove the ads from it automagically before watching. Still illegal? Is it any less moral than downloading a copy via bit torrent or Usenet with the ads already removed?

Re:Not quite

[Culture20]

A single user here, Using bittorrent since the beginning to download dead shows. But the majority of my usage is piracy. Whether or not you want to believe me, thats all you, but my use is almost all illegal.

That's you. There are plenty of WoW players out there. Every last one of them uses bittorrent for updates, whether they know it or not (most don't even know what bittorrent is). Other update programs are using bitorrent too according to the scuttlebutt.

Re:Not quite

[tnk1]

Bittorrent is a protocol for moving data. It's really good at moving files, particularly large ones. This is a good thing.

The problem is, most files of that size happen to be media files like games or DVD rips or applications, which are particular targets for being distributed illegally.

Having said that, you can probably take just about anything that is legal and find some way to put it to a use that can abet some sort of illegal or prohibited activity. Possibly illegal use is not really an argument, by itself, for prohibiting something. There would have to be very compelling special circumstances to make that palatable.

What's more is that, because it is an open-ended protocol and not a specialty tool for "piracy", if you outlaw it or block it, someone will just come up with something that resembles it... and that will then be used for downloading content too. The cat is out of the bag. Trying to stop downloading at that level is simply attacking the utility of the network for users without really addressing the source of the problem. Bulk download protocols are needed, even if their legal use is dwarfed somewhat by their illegal use. Eventually, as data sizes increase in general, more and more legally sourced files will be large enough to need distribution.

Re:Not quite

[MobileTatsu-NJG]

I remove the ads from it automagically before watching. Still illegal?

No, but it's worth mentioning that I never said that it was.

Is it any less moral than downloading a copy via bit torrent or Usenet with the ads already removed?

I don't know. But I'll put this in another perspective: If your favorite ad-supported website goes off-line, would you feel bad if you had Ad-Block on?

It's a balance. On the one hand, these content providers need to respond to supply and demand. On the other hand, there's no free lunch. They need to be reasonable and you still need to pay. To me the word 'moral' has nothing to do with this conversation.

Re:Not quite

[Fluffeh]

Ummm, that depends on who you ask. When Jamie Kellner (TV Exec, at the time was CEO of Turner Broadcasting, looking after a bunch of channels including the Cartoon Network) answered that very question his reply was this: "Because of the ad skips.... It's theft. Your contract with the network when you get the show is you're going to watch the spots. Otherwise you couldn't get the show on an ad-supported basis. Any time you skip a commercial or watch the button you're actually stealing the programming."

Seriously, you just can't make up quality like that.

Re:Not quite

[sosume]

"This content is not available in your region."

Re:Not quite

[TheRaven64]

And it's only available for streaming. My main use case for this kind of thing is having something to keep me entertained on long train journeys or on flights. Even if I have 3G Internet on the train, I lose that when we go into a tunnel or through a deep cutting. On the plane it's stupidly expensive. I don't want to stream, I want to download. I want to pay a fixed monthly fee to be able to download whatever I want (maybe with a limit of downloads per month) in a DRM-free format so I can watch it on whichever device I choose. The closest I get is renting DVDs, but if I want to watch them on anything other than my laptop it's a pain to rip and transcode them.

Re:Not quite

[MBGMorden]

That - or rather, the difficulty in "going legit" - is the real issue here.

People tend to take the path of least resistance. In the past, I've bought some TV shows off of iTunes. Also bought a few on Xbox 360 Marketplace, and a few off of Amazon's service.

You know what? The iTunes ones don't really work anymore as I decided I no longer wanted to use iTunes. The Amazon ones don't work either after I switched away from Windows. The Xbox360 purchases technically still work, but only on the Xbox which sits in my bedroom, when almost all my TV watching is done in the living room.

The bottom line is that PURCHASED media is limited, crippled, and aggravating crap.

Compare to the piracy route: go to Bittorrent, search. Click on the little magnet. Wait for a bit, and a regular media file shows up. Whatever quality I want. I can copy it to my Android tablet. I can stream it over to my AppleTV running XBMC. I can play it on any of my computers in the house. It just works.

Essentially, but people who actually PAY get an inferior product.

Compare to music now: I buy virtually ALL of my music, because music is generally not copy protected anymore, and the legit sources are easy to use and priced right.

Re:I agree that BitTorrent is a tool, but....

[cheekyjohnson]

It seems like network owners have the right to shape their traffic

Unless that right is taken away, that is.

Re:bittorent is not for speed

[drkstr1]

he didn't need bittorrent, all he had to do was go to a mirror site that didn't have bandwidth issues. Bittorrent can be usefull but speed is not one of the things it excels at.

It depends on the peers in the swarm (local peer discovery), and how well your set up can handle multiple connections. Using automated block lists to prevent people from poisoning the protocol also makes a big difference.

I rarely get speeds off BT that are less than 3 - 5 times the max I've ever pulled off a single HTTP pipe. It is significantly faster than any other transfer protocol I have used. It can also be turd slow given the right circumstances, but if you can connect to a hundred or so legit peers... whoooooweeeeeeiii it's fast.

Government documents

[demonbug]

Sadly it seems like places that would most benefit from Bittorrent are the least likely to use it. My favorite example was a big document that was fairly recently released publicly, I don't recall what it was on. But there was major press interest, major public interest, and you just knew that the Library of Congress website (or whatever agency it was that was hosting it) was just going to implode under the strain. Impressively the website didn't completely go down, it just sat there serving a 100+ MB pdf at about 100 bytes per second. With all that interest, all those people trying to download the same public document at the same time it would have been perfect for Bittorrent. Sadly I think it is too closely entangled with piracy in the minds of politicians, so it is very unlikely that it will ever be put to such a use.

Re:A slightly extreme example

[LordNimon]

Also, what is your suggestion for a proper analogy?

Banning guns because they're used in so many crimes.

BitTorrent was NEVER the Performance Problem

[davecb]

Over and above the claim that torrents helped pirates, there was the claim that it was a bandwidth-hog.

Well, it aint so! Jim Gettys researched it, and found what the network vendors were seeing was ... bufferbloat! See https://gettys.wordpress.com/2012/05/14/the-next-nightmare-is-coming/

Re:bittorent is not for speed

[Fred Ferrigno]

On the other hand, a direct transfer is never faster than the most congested link between you and the server. If you have a reasonably fast connection, the bottleneck is often not your connection. Downloading from multiple peers that are likely taking different paths to reach you lets you reach an high overall speed even if all the peers are congested.

Re:second second first third post

[Samantha Wright]

Is it just me or does "Wheaton Wil" sound like a suitable Ubuntu version codename? Karmic Kirk, Picky Picard, Jaded Janeway, Suspicious Sisko... Quixotic Q, Whiny Wesley?