Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Wil Wheaton: BitTorrent Isn't Only For Piracy

Posted by samzenpus on from the not-just-for-evil-anymore dept.

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."

16 of 354 comments (clear)

  1. Not quite by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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 :(

    1. Re:Not quite by xstonedogx · · Score: 5, Interesting

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

    2. Re:Not quite by scdeimos · · Score: 5, Informative

      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.

    3. Re:Not quite by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

      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.

    4. Re:Not quite by Kjella · · Score: 5, Informative

      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.

      --
      Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
    5. Re:Not quite by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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]"

    6. Re:Not quite by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

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

    7. Re:Not quite by MobileTatsu-NJG · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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.

      --

      "I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)

    8. Re:Not quite by Voyager529 · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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.

    9. Re:Not quite by Culture20 · · Score: 5, Informative

      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.

    10. Re:Not quite by Fluffeh · · Score: 5, Interesting

      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.

      --
      Moved to http://soylentnews.org/. You are invited to join us too!
    11. Re:Not quite by sosume · · Score: 5, Informative

      "This content is not available in your region."

    12. Re:Not quite by MBGMorden · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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.

      --
      "People who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do."-Mark Twain
  2. Re:I agree that BitTorrent is a tool, but.... by cheekyjohnson · · Score: 5, Insightful

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

    Unless that right is taken away, that is.

    --
    Filthy, filthy copyrapists!
  3. Re:bittorent is not for speed by drkstr1 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

    --
    Fanboy Status: Apache Flex, C#, Eclipse, KDE, Pirate Party, Ron Paul, Slackware, Windows 7
  4. Government documents by demonbug · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.