The Internet Archive Starts Seeding Over a Million Torrents

An anonymous reader writes with news that The Internet Archive has started seeding about 1,400,000 torrents. In addition to over a million books, the Archive is seeding thousands and thousands of films, music tracks, and live concerts. John Gilmore of the EFF said, "The Archive is helping people to understand that BitTorrent isn't just for ephemeral or dodgy items that disappear from view in a short time. BitTorrent is a great way to get and share large files that are permanently available from libraries like the Internet Archive." Brewster Kahle, founder of the Archive, told TorrentFreak, "I hope this is greeted by the BitTorrent community, as we are loving what they have built and are very glad we can populate the BitTorrent universe with library and archive materials. There is a great opportunity for symbiosis between the Libraries and Archives world and the BitTorrent communities."

Comments

Re:SHUT UP AND TAKE MY MONEY!

[Anonymous Coward]

The fact that BT is still going stronger then ever today is awesome. Maybe one day the corporate fuckheads of the world will wake up and figure things out

Or perhaps they'll just throw-in the towel and stop making the baubles you covet. And maybe then you'll realise how much of your short life you wasted sitting in front of the TV.

If we are fortunate we have 80 years on this Earth. Grab a camera and go OUT THERE and write about what you see. Make a differencein your community. Write a book. But please, I beseech you, stop sitting watching pointless crap on TV.

Re:These Guys

[jamstar7]

Plus, they tend to not have that annoying 'don't pirate this movie' warning and a 20 minute run of trailers for movies you don't intend to see and you can't break out to the main menu to actually, I dunno, watch the fucking movie you put in the player.

Re:Changing perceptions of BitTorrent...?

[EzInKy]

To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.

Forgoiong a discussion on whether or not the "entertainment" in question actually promotes Progress or is useful, it does seem to say that after a certain period of time that "entertainment" will no longer be protected by an "exclusive Right." Certainly you don't have a problem with the Constitution, do you?

And where does all this content come from?

[Grayhand]

Take away the profit and you take away the reason to create new content to share. It's not a popular argument but it's a realistic one. Share copyrighted material and eventually the copyright holders stop producing new content. Not because they are being mean or greedy but eventually they run out of resources. It's not even an argument. If it costs a 100 million to make a movie and there's no profit as in you take a loss, how long until you stop making movies? Yes I know fan movies will save us all but are you honestly pirating fan movies or "The avengers"? This is a fight we all will loose. I know being realistic makes me a troll and I promised myself to stay out of this loosing battle but as a movie fan and some one that works in the industry I see the end coming and no one will be happy with the final outcome. I loose my way of life and everyone finds themselves pirating old movies. The pirates winning means no new movies. That's the reality of what we are facing.

Re:And where does all this content come from?

[hyades1]

Movies used to be made and paid for on the basis that they'd be seen ONCE. Now the entertainment corporations want multiple kicks at the can. They want their first run theatre rights, which they've always had, PLUS DVD, Netflix, cable television, regular television and merchandizing revenue.

You aren't being "realistic". You're not even a troll. You're an industry bum-kisser. Why don't you tell us all how much money "The Avengers" made, then try to tell us again how the industry is bleeding to death.

Re:And where does all this content come from?

[TemperedAlchemist]

Do you know what happens with all of that money earned by litigation against piracy? It goes directly back into the pockets of the anti-piracy groups. That's right -- while the industry kicks and screams about those poor starving artists in court, they don't lift a finger to help them out with the money that should go to the artists.

So don't go pointing your fingers at the pirates. Point your fingers at the people who license and manage the content. They're the ones controlling its distribution and taking a good big cut of the profits for themselves. What, you think the writers and actors behind Game of Thrones had any control over whether or not they could make their stuff available on hulu or netflix?

Please, if you actually think that you need to pull your head out of the lala land the MAFIAA have created. It's not that people really aren't willing to pay -- it's that companies like HBO try their darnedest to give potential customers the worst treatment ever. Let's face it, would you go to the DMV and pay a fee, stand in line for hours, and then talk to a lady that's got an attitude OR would you rather click a few buttons and have your new registration appear right in front of you for free?

Re:And where does all this content come from?

[Dr_Barnowl]

Duh - "The Avengers" lost money. Every film that Hollywood makes loses money. Especially the ones with the biggest box-office numbers.

Didn't you know, the entire industry is funded by multi-billionaire philanthropists? The only reason they insist on you buying tickets is so they can count how many peoples lives they are enriching.

Re:And where does all this content come from?

[biodata]

Most of the best content comes from passionate people making it because it is the thing they want to do most in life. This is true in the arts, music, science, sport, and most other areas of cultural production. Recessions tend to produce a cultural flowering, because people have more time on their hands, so more time to devote to their passions. We used to need huge business enterprises to do DISTRIBUTION, but we have that sorted now thank you. Having less big budget movies being made does not make me think our societies will become a cultural desert, although, as a movie fan and someone who works in the industry I can see how you would be worried. And by the way the pirates are entirely winning, and no, it isn't meaning no new movies. This is flawed thinking.

Re:And where does all this content come from?

[ledow]

So your solution would be what? Following through your logic, we should all give them money if they've said they've had something pirated. We should pay for something that others didn't. Because without us doing that, we'd have no movies. A bit like those rich people who "fund" the ballet (which is also pretty profitable, I'd like to add)?

Or maybe they should stop treating movies solely as a way to make themselves rich and actually, you know, make something people can enjoy watching. Let's ignore the fact that virtually no movie you've ever heard of has ever really made a loss (but according to LucasArts, Return of The Jedi still isn't profitable despite a 10x difference between sales and the cost of making it).

The top 4 in my country, by sales, at the moment are:

The Dark Knight Rises (which number Batman film?)
Ice Age: Continental Drift (Ice Age 4?)
The Amazing Spider-Man (which number Spiderman film?)
Magic Mike (A dance-movie)

Collectively, they've taken some hundreds of millions of pounds and cost much less to make. But it's shite like that that stops me going to the cinema. I never *used* to have problems finding something worth watching, but in the last 10 years I haven't seen anything at a cinema that was worth the entrance price for an adult.

Every night I have the same dilemma of "finding something to watch" on TV. More than 50% of the time, I end up watching pre-recorded media that I purchased (most of it at least 10 years old, some of it virtually unobtainable now). The rest, I watch free-tripe-that-I-can-cope-with or do something else entirely. There is literally about a day's worth of new programming that I would watch spread over the entire year and hundreds of channels.

I don't claim to be too cultured to watch some tripe now and then, but really I buy all my stuff on DVD **AFTER** having watched it (usually for free on TV or at a friend's house). There's just too much junk for me to wade through, and the profits that are made out of me make it the only viable way to purchase movies. I don't purchase music at all. Ever. Not once. Because I don't listen to it.

But the industry's solution to this is not to improve their content, or change their target, or provide archive footage for a reasonable price, but to penalise *me* for other people being criminals.

I have to wade through DVD adverts (and actually now have been forced to rip the DVD's I own onto drives with UOP's removed just to avoid that), I have to deal with the industry wanting to monitor my connections, cut me off, turning YouTube into a mess of adverts and DMCA notices because there's a five-second clip of their music on a home video, forcing their copy protection on my TV cables (HDCP), attempting to make timeshifting illegal, increasing the amount of junk legislation and bogus lawsuits and chasing criminals in Russia to stop their pirating, and millions of other knock-on effects. Hell, even making some countries citizens pay tax on a blank disc.

If you want my custom, respect me. Put your archives online, for a reasonable price in a reasonable format. If I can get the "genuine" download for £1 compared to some rip-off for free, I *will* go for the genuine download. So long as I don't have to install DRM, Silverlight, or some other junk just to play a video file. And, no, I wouldn't copy it and give it to my friends - my friends aren't cheapskates and would buy their own copy for £1 too. Let me download the movie the same day its released, wherever I happen to be. Let me get it on DVD and not just Blu-Ray. Let me not have region restrictions, UOP's and ten minutes of trailers.

Then you might see some money back from me. At the moment you get minimal money because you treat me like an idiot and/or a criminal, so I don't resort to piracy, I just stop consuming your products (in the same way, if a restaurant piss me off, I don't steal their food, or con an advantage on their "all-you-can-eat" deals, I just never eat there eve

Re:SHUT UP AND TAKE MY MONEY!

[Anonymous Coward]

I wish we had a law saying that you can obtain something for free if the copyright holders refuse to sell it to you. This would keep a lot of this horrible litigation from ever occurring.

Re:SHUT UP AND TAKE MY MONEY!

[K. S. Kyosuke]

Intellectual property law is designed to protect the creator's right to control the property. It carries no obligation to make the property (or music or movie) available to others

One could argue that the whole purpose of copyright is to benefit the society by stimulating the creation of new works that the society can then enjoy, but the part where the works exist but are denied to society under any terms kind of makes the copyright pointless, so the question is whether it should even apply to those cases.

Re:Next move

[Arancaytar]

"flooding the torrent channels"?

That is so not how BitTorrent works.

Re:How about Freenet?

[MartinG]

I don't think they are trying to "validate" bittorrent. That's just a side effect of what they are doing. They are simply using one of the most efficient and cost effective ways of distributing data because it helps them, and possibly makes a better experience for the users.

freenet offers anonymity but they don't really need that here. Bittorrent also offers fault tolerance, doesn't it?

Re:Torrents should be used for software updates

[progician]

OK, man, but your argument has been countered successfully. The BT protocol works out of the box the way how validated downloads work: they send you a hash, and once you downloaded, it will check if the file produces the same hash as the source. Can the hash be faked? Sure, there are some ways to do that, but that is a problem with HTTP downloads as well. From a cost and technical point of view BT should be perfectly legitimate choice for a company to distribute their shit.

The real deal here is the bad reputation of BT in the media. There's a whole crusade against file sharing and BT in particular, the technology is associated with criminals, hackerz, child pornography, necrophilia, and communism. Can you imagine the suits in the director board meeting taking the chances for such an association? They rather pay for bandwidth. As a side effect, our internet infrastructure is distorted with having terrible download/upload speed ratios and you have to pay a fortune just for getting a static ip with a decent upload speed. If central repository distribution is a business model that became supported by many parties, including ISPs, cloud service providers, social media and audio/video streaming.

Re:SHUT UP AND TAKE MY MONEY!

[niftydude]

Has anybody mathematically proven that the current copyright laws are detrimental to the sciences and useful arts? If we could do that maybe we could get some laws struck down as unconstitutional. (I know, I'm dreaming...)

It's a nice idea: the problem is that the only maths our current crop of politicians understand is how to calculate how much money is being contributed to their re-election fund, and by whom...