BitTorrent Gives Hollywood a Headache 694
fudgefactor7 writes "Although the MPAA and the RIAA, and practically anyone else who has an interest in protecting their intellectual property rights online, are fighting against P2P programs like EDonkey, Morpheus, and Napster, BitTorrent is coming under even greater scrutiny, albeit with less actual success so far, and that is giving Hollywood a headache, since they really don't know what to do about it and they can't go to Cohen and moan. Once he let the genie out of the bottle there was no way to put it back in. And with the likes of PeerGuardian, et. al., it only gets harder for the corporations to put the virtual, and legal, smackdown on file sharing."
Legally (Score:5, Insightful)
What's the problem? (Score:5, Insightful)
The tracker is what facilitates the download, the person who runs the tracker has set it up with the intent to share the specific file being shared. The tracker site is typically also the root of all the sharing through being a base seeder as well. So, basicly this brings things back to the days of piracy over public FTP and HTTP download sites, just attack the one facilitating the downloads. While foreign hosting and such might make this trickier it sure is way simpler than trying to attack the typical P2P network where the users are also the ones bringing the content to the table.
I don't think BitTorrent will be much of a problem (Score:3, Insightful)
What's the difference? (Score:5, Insightful)
Kazaa:
BitTorrent:
(The effectiveness and ethics of this method are a different story.)
So many legit uses (Score:5, Insightful)
As long as there is a legitimate use... (Score:5, Insightful)
As the article said, the genii is now out of the bottle, and there's no way it can be captured and contained again.
Re:Legally (Score:2, Insightful)
It`ll be interesting to see how they deal with it.
Why don't they use it instead (Score:5, Insightful)
I fail to see why Hollywood won't learn from RIAA's mistakes (and Apple's success) and start a service like this, the audience is global, there's tons of cash to make!
I live in a small nordic country (Sweden) where you have to wait 1-2 years for most "cool" shows (and even then they might get a timeslot around midnight) or get passed altogether (example, they just started running Angel Season 1, 01:00), so downloading series and buying them in DVD formats is more of a norm for me and many of my friends.
Now, a legal torrent.. that I'd pay for (and they'd even get my upload bandwidth for free).
Simple solution. (Score:2, Insightful)
Is this legal? (Score:1, Insightful)
You might say that by downloading I don't watch the commercials, but there aren't any commercials on shows like Dead Like Me, and I already PAY for the premium channel it's on.
Re:Peerguardian (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:What's the problem? (Score:5, Insightful)
The only defense here for such a website is that DMCA-style laws and even old copyright laws provide a safe haven clause. This means that the copyright holder must inform them that the content is copyrighted and unauthorized for sharing. If you check most sites that host Bittorrent links to copyrighted content, they always have some clear language saying "if you are the copyyright holder and this is your stuff, tell us and we will remove the link". Until that kicks in and the copyright holder informs them, there is no liability.
That all being said, the newer laws (like the one just passed in Australia) lets anyone notify the site and force a reaction. No longer is only the copyright holder themself required.
Re:Why don't they use it instead (Score:5, Insightful)
Light DRM
Reasonable and Flexible Cost
Marketed Well
Acknowledge the Inevitable
Legit uses (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:What's the problem? (Score:3, Insightful)
Remove the source of the high quality pirated material and you will inevitably reduce the interest in the illegal copies.
Re:What's the problem? (Score:3, Insightful)
I think BitTorrent users are harder to sue (Score:5, Insightful)
When you find a BitTorrent user participating in a big swarm, you can only sue them for that single infringement, not for sharing hundreds of movies or music files via programs like Kazaa. In order to make it cost effective they would have to keep track of your online BitTorrent activity for quite a while to collect multiple infringements.
File Sharing Will Kill CD/DVD Maeket (Score:3, Insightful)
Personally, I don't believe anyone has a right to "share" the data on a CD or DVD unless that right was passed to you by the person who created the data. (I put quotes around share because use of that word is a deliberate attempt to whitewash what's really going on.)
If I don't own all rights to something I make (which , of course, I do, since it is impossible for anyone else to own those rights unless I transfer them), then I can't benefit from its production and reproduction. If I can't benefit by selling some of those rights, I'm likely to quit making things. So will almost everyone else, contrary to the naive opinions often expressed here that legitimate artists just want to give it all away and don't care about making a living.
Re:Legally (Score:2, Insightful)
The likes of the MIAA have trouble shutting down certain file-sharing like Kazaa because they can't prove that the parent companies can control what is being served. That does not extend to you, you are making the copyrighted material available for others and you know you are.
The only reason all end users are not targetted so far is due to cost. If you keep yourself informed at all on this then you should already know that many people have been threatened with being taken to court over this and I really doubt you would win in such a case. Ignorance is not a viable defence and you can't even hide behind that as you know what is going on is wrong.
Your only hope is that the large suing syndicates don't believe you are a worthwhile target.
Re:Why don't they use it instead (Score:3, Insightful)
$0.99/song to have it forever works great.
$3 for a show which, knowing how these things work, STILL HAS ADS THAT YOU CAN'T SKIP, won't.
Re:File Sharing Will Kill CD/DVD Maeket (Score:1, Insightful)
Absolutely. Younger slashdotters won't remember this, but back until the mid-70s, there was an entire industry devoted to recording and selling music by popular musical acts. Then the cassette tape came along and nobody ever bought any music ever again, so that industry disappeared. Now the only way to hear music is to make your own, because nobody records any more.
There was another industry called Hollywood. They made movies. But then the VCR came along, and nobody ever went into a movie theater again.
There is no doubt in my mind that file-sharing will destroy the music and movie industries the same way the cassette and VCR destroyed the music and movie industries.
Why try to sell something people are just going to steal?
Just going to steal? So nobody is buying music or movies any more? Hint: They're not producing it because people will steal it, they're producing it because people buy it. Don't take my word for it, go to Best Buy and you'll see it happening.
Sure some people are copying content. But your premise is wildly false. You are equating some illegal copying with zero legit sales. That's not happening, and that's why your argument is so drastically wrong.
Re:File Sharing Will Kill CD/DVD Maeket (Score:2, Insightful)
Look, if nice stuff, in nice boxes would be sold on reasonable prices - reasonable to payments in our countries, there would be no problem with so called "piracy". In Poland, I earn maybe 300-400 USD monthly. New game cost here from 30 to 50 USD. New audio CD - 15.
Isn't this ridiculous? Hardware guys are happy with coming 3-5% over their costs. Why RIAA/MPAA/whatever shall get more? Why do they have to ride in silly, costly limos?
We gave our culture to corpocracy, and now they're responsible for bringing it to masses. If they failed us in this job, we can replace them. With p2p networking, for example.
Think about this...Bootleg quality SUCKS! (Score:3, Insightful)
Think about what happens when you download music, I'd say 40% of the time. You find that there's a click or a pop or an early cutoff in the song. Not 100% recording studio quality, or maybe even the encoding rate is less than 128k.
Also, anyone who has ever seen a bootleg knows that even TELESYNCS are of worse quality than that old TV that used to be in the garage with the aluminum foil on the antenna, and whose antenna was actually a coathanger.
The answer is to make reasonable quality movies available easily to people. TiVO has the right idea, and this idea may just bury the whole theatre industry (or set it back hundreds of paces).
I've bought bootlegs on every corner of NYC, and they all SUCK, and I'm not just talking about quality. Same has been said about the quality of the music that is being released these days. The RIAA is mad that we're downloading music that isn't worth even a legit 0.99 cent download. The answer? GET MORE TALENT ON THE LABELS!
Same is true for movies. Let's do a brief history of movies that have come out recently, shall we?
Lady Killers - I fell aasleep, personally. Horrible.
Van Helsing - PUH-LEESE. Should have ended 45 minutes before it did.
White Chicks - umm...right. White Chicks.
So one could argue that buying/downloading bootlegs is really just saving us from having to spend $10 now on a crappy movie. 10 BUCKS! Maybe there wouldn't be so much downloading if tickets were still reasonable. $10!
When I buy/download a good movie, I go to the thetre and see it.
SAW is a perfect example. GREAT MOVIE, new, fresh, original. Bought a bootleg, watched 15 minutes, and went to the theatre. They DESERVED the price of the ticket.
Spiderman 2 also....downloaded it, watched it, and went ot see it 3 times in the theatre.
My advice to MPAA/RIAA...better product. Make it so that we're foolish to try and get a cheap copy of your product. Nobody is out there manufacturing BMW knockoffs, are they? THey'd be FOOLISH to.
Take a lesson, and stop complaining.
Just my
Re:What's the problem? (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Legally (Score:5, Insightful)
Copyright law does not have any language regarding intent that I'm aware of. Anyway, if you are using BitTorrent to download copyright restricted works, I can't imagine how that's going to engender any sympathy on the part of your local judge or jury. There is already a prevailing feeling (among the people I talk to, anyway) that even downloading is not morally acceptable.
In this case, it would be wise to simply not use BitTorrent for sharing copyright restricted works without permission from the person or organization that has the copyright for the work. BT was never intended to anonymize users or be a one-way stream. The BT application works best when users share data and client and tracker software can accurately detect which IP is doing what. If no one shared while using BT, the whole process would be no more efficient than a simple HTTP or FTP transfer. Anonymity would interfere with the tit-for-tat algorithm that throttles upload and download to different clients depending on their own sharing practices.
Personally I'm done using BT for "sharing" copyrighted works. Too bad for the MPAA and RIAA, really. My latest discovery via P2P was "Penn and Teller's Bullshit!" After viewing several episodes downloaded via BT, I went out and bought the DVD set of the first season. A $45 purchase I would have never made otherwise. Oh well, there's still USENET. :)
Or for the same price I could just get cable and subscribe to a few premium channels and record all this stuff directly to digital (for now). You'd think the MPAA would learn from the RIAA and move quickly to get direct digital distribution going. I'd pay $2 for a commercial-free 1/2 hour show and $4 for hour shows. $5 or $6 for a movie. Skip all the useless DVD packaging. Of course, the files will need to be at least as good quality as the rips out there, and playable on GNU/Linux.
http://digitalpanic.org :-0 :-) ;-P (Score:3, Insightful)
I love bittorrent - I have about forty full length jam band shows that I've obtained over the last couple of months from www.digitalpanic.org.
I have an office cable modem, a home cable modem, a girlfriend's house cable modem, a mom's house cable modem, and most of them have BSD boxes for firewalls. I'm working on a method to automate the three home boxes participating in torrents I seed so when I start distributing shows I'll come with a megabit of bandwidth. Once the process is 'cooked' I have a couple of customers that probably won't mind some torrent activity on their network, so long as I keep it between 9:00 PM and 6:00 AM.
If you worry about the RIAA the solution is simple; get interested in bands that *promote* your right to copy their live work - Widespread Panic, Grateful Dead, Phish, Moe, Jerry Joseph & Jackmormons, String Cheese Incident, Government Mule, Drive By Truckers, Southern Bitch, Star Tangled Angel Revival, and a hundred other, less famous acts I've haven't listened to yet. There *is* something there for everyone
Lol doofus (Score:3, Insightful)
So basically your entire argument is wrong. Only the actual filesharers can be held to blame in bittorrent not the central tracker.
Re:So many legit uses-Barrel Spoling. (Score:3, Insightful)
If you wanted to do so, you could cite the percentage of internet traffic which bittorrent uses, some figures were even in the article.
Some people estimate 800,000 copies of bittorrent might be running at any one time. Download.com estimates that 1.5 million copies of the standard BitTorrent client have been downloaded from their site alone (more than firefox). I think the claim of "large sections of the internet being affected by someone trying to fuck-up BitTorrent" is justified.
"Copyright violations aren't a free speech issue"
Indeed. Wasn't suggesting they should be. But trying to shut-down whole systems of communication for fear that copyrighted stuff might be transmitted on them is a free-speech issue.
My analogy was with speaking in public. You can read a copyrighted book in public. You can sing a copyrighted song. But restricting the ability to speak in public is not a valid solution to either of those problems. Similarly, restricting the ability to use BitTorrent is not a valud solution to the problem of people using it to share other peoples' video.
Or to use a more specific example, I don't want MPAA-funded vandals interfering with my Debian and Mepis downloads, then claiming that what they're doing is legitimate.
Re:Legally (Score:2, Insightful)
Or a gun for someone else to use. Something to ponder about.
They cheated the system (Score:5, Insightful)
There are two paths to changing the law - pursue it through petition to representatives, or pursue it through civil disobedience. Since the congresscritters appear to be bought and paid for, disobedience seems to be the only reasonable choice that remains. The file sharing folks aren't making a buck doing so. In fact, it costs them time and resources (electricity, disk space, bandwidth, etc.) to participate in the activity. The pirates who sell the materials are a different matter
Wrong (Score:5, Insightful)
Is it that hard to understand? They can distribute as much of it as they want, because they OWN IT. You, however, do NOT.
Re:About naive, short-sighted, idiotic people (Score:3, Insightful)
"Copyright law is there for a reason..."
That reason is solely corporate lobbying. There was no public interest in or demand for changes like a 70 year extension.
Hollywood & this article misses the point agai (Score:5, Insightful)
Why can't "Hollywood" adapt to technological change instead of fighting it ? Why can an unemployed programmer sitting in his apartment out-inovate a handful of multi-billion dollar corporations ?
Why do these wealthy CEO and entertainer types think they're immune from change ? I used to be a high paid COBOL guy, I had to adapt. Do any of these people expect me to feel any sympathy or support for them ?
Why would people want to download in the first place ? Is it because ticket prices are too high, and the cost of soda and popcorn is almost offensive ? Do people in one country want to see the movie as soon as people in another country ?
Is the loss of revenue real or imaginary ? Is their existence really threatened ? Are movie industry profits really sliding ? Are American high school kids really going to start staying home instead of going to the theatre ?
Sorry if this sounds like a bit of a rant. I'm really tired of the pro-CEO slant in the mainstream media. If any journalists are reading this I hope you address these questions in your future articles. It would really make me alot more interested in what you do for a living.
Re:I don't think BitTorrent will be much of a prob (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:What's the problem? (Score:2, Insightful)
I personally hardly ever get music or movies off bit torrent anymore. Most new music is crap anyway, so I only leach the occasional cool song off kazaa, and for movies netflix [netflix.com] coupled with a dvd burner is better than any p2p network. The one thing that bit torrent is ideal for is downloading tv shows the day they air. I've noticed that The West Wing, The Simpsons, and South Park are usually available on suprnova.org they day they air. If the tv networks would just come to their senses and offer their own high quality copies of these shows with commercials included (like Jon Stewarts live televised bitchslapping of Crossfire) viewers (their customers) could use bit torrent like a free tivo.
Off Topic: grammar critique discussed (Score:3, Insightful)
We can start by breaking down the original essay, to wit:
"Man, you're so wrong."
In my classroom this contraction would be inappropriate, but in an informal letter, it is acceptable.
"The tracker only hosts the .torrent files, if that!"
This is acceptable, since the suggested usage, "tracker hosts only..." implies that nothing else is on the server at all, whereas the original more correctly implies that the tracker does not host any other part of the specific transaction that interests us.
"It's primary roll is to just keep a database of..."
This is actually a mistake; "it's," is always a contraction for, "it is." What was meant here is ownership, so "its" is correct.
The use of primary is admittedly confusing, since it implies secondary roles. Perhaps our author includes maintaining DNS position and such in the server's secondary roles. Certainly, the actual error in this sentence is the incorrect use of, "roll," where, "role," was intended. Perhaps our self appointed grammar expert could expand to definitions of common words as well?
"...The information the bittorrent client's request from it"
Similar to another mistake made previously. The use of, "client's," is incorrect since it implies ownership. Perhaps if we reworded the sentence this way: "the bittorrent client's request is only for the database of who is sharing, so that is the tracker's role."
" ...Any copyright.."
As was pointed out, this ought to be in the past tense, since the copyright in question would have already been issued.
"...material, it just tracks those"
A travesty of modern education is the use of commas where semicolons are more desirable. This is a typical example, and is common worldwide. Even the highly educated tend not to use semicolons where such items technically ought to be used.
But again, our young grammar nazi^H^H^H^H expert failed to point out the most critical error here, which is the ending of the sentence.
Overall, the English usage here was excellent although obviously informal.
I am drawn to conclude that the original author's grasp of English is acceptable for a native speaker, whilst quite impressive in any other case. Whilst the individual writing the critique, in contrast, is simply an ignoramus with a giant lump of coal wedged up his sorry little ass.
Thank you for your time and consideration, I hope we have all learned something here today.
'Light' DRM is only a temporary respite (Score:3, Insightful)
AISI, there are essentially two kinds of DRM: one that allows you to do specific things, preventing everything else, and one that prevents you from doing specific things, allowing everything else. Now, the specific things are arguable in each case, but it's that 'everything else' which ends up causing the biggest problems.
'Everything else' includes all the changes in technology which will occur in future, the great new killer apps and uses that haven't been invented yet, along with progressive improvements to existing apps uses. But it also includes all the tricks and loopholes that we, er, sorry, naughty evil hackers can use to bypass the DRM. So you can't allow free access to 'everything else' for future-proofing without also allowing it for evil hackers.
The upshot of this is that DRM will only allow specific things and prevent everything else, and in doing so, ensures that even if it's not a huge nuisance now, it will be in the future. All DRM ends up being heavy eventually.
Acknowledge the Inevitable (Score:1, Insightful)
The way the Internet works today, free P2P downloads will always be cheaper, in terms of convenience as well as price.
Millions of people have already tasted the forbidden fruit; don't expect them to turn back.
Rather than trying to change reality to fit the law, how about changing the law to fit reality? Copyright obviously doesn't give a dime to pirated artist. we need something better. Piracy is the symptom, not the disease.
As a sidenote to the whole copyright discussion, what will we do when we can reproduce food etc as cheaply as information today? Ban that as well, because it will change our world?