Examining Bittorrent 451
ToyKeeper and other wrote in with this: "The Register published a detailed analysis of BitTorrent traffic and user habits today, focusing on four aspects: availability, integrity, download speeds, and ability to withstand flash crowds. BitTorrent carries 53% of all P2P traffic (or ~35% of all 'net traffic), and this paper helps explain why. Also included are data about torrent lifetime, network poisoning, response during downtime or attacks, and lots of pretty charts. A few performance problems are revealed, which will hopefully be addressed in future p2p systems." The original paper (pdf) is available.
Legal Torrents (Score:5, Informative)
Re:How would you measure such a thing? (Score:1, Informative)
BT isn't limited to those ports in any way, shape or form, and many users use different ports.
Re:Bartering? (Score:3, Informative)
Note for the militant: I don't throttle down like that as a rule. When I was first playing with BT I did for each stream when I would have 3-4 running at a time. Now I just do one at a time, and play with the settings because I get bored and want to see what happens.
Sites that list legal torrents... (Score:5, Informative)
On Finland-Sweden, and funny legal threats (Score:5, Informative)
Yes.
Also, everyone should take a look at their hilarious responses to the letters from lawyers
here [thepiratebay.org].
It's therapeutic to see the slimeball lawyers really getting what is coming to them. These guys have really got a daring attitude
for those who didn't read the article... (Score:5, Informative)
Re:It's you who are to blame (Score:3, Informative)
Says who? Considering the popularity *and* size of, say, ISO images of Linux distros/*BSD releases/..., I actually would think twice before making statements like this. There is no study yet that examines the ratios of illegal vs. legal or illegit vs. legit BitTorrent traffic, and furthermore, not everything that you might think illegal at first glance actually is - copyright laws are quite varied throughout the world.
Re:It's you who are to blame (Score:3, Informative)
So?
The issue is, for contributory infringement, whether it materially contributes to the infringement of another, with the knowledge of the infringement. As for vicarious infringement, whether the party had the right and ability to control the infringement, and directly profited from it.
Both could include pointers. In fact, Napster merely maintained a database of pointers that permitted downloaders that wanted to reproduce works to find uploaders that provided access to copies, thus distributing them. Napster never hosted anything, however.
Sony simply says that the capability of the technology for infringement, where it's capable of substantial noninfringing uses, isn't enough by itself to impute knowledge for contributory infringement. If you can show knowledge by some other means, however, Sony is no obstacle to liability.
Most torrent sites make it clear that postings of torrents by users are the property/responsability of the user, not the site
That's irrelevant. The issue is simply as it is described above. Generally, a mere disclaimer won't absolve one of liability for one's own illegal actions.
What next - try to break down the "common carrier" status of ISPs? Oops, they've tried that, too. Damn!
ISPs aren't common carriers, IIRC. Their protection from liability largely derives from some important precedents and statutory safe harbors such as 17 USC 512 or 47 USC 230. (which ironically are parts of the DMCA and CDA respectively, showing that those acts weren't all bad -- just mostly bad)
BTW - love your sig.
Thanks. It's all true, too.
Re:Legal Torrents (Score:5, Informative)
Hosting the 3.85GB Gutenberg DVD image would be a bit costly for the Gutenberg folks. Without BT or something like it, it would be much less convenient for volunteers like me to help them out by spreading the load around.
Interesting stats (Score:5, Informative)
Compare the stats from week ago, and today. Guess what changed?
Most telling is the last graph indicating traffic for the whole year.
The largest Finnish torrent site, Finreactor got busted by [p2pnet.net] Keskusrikospoliisi [poliisi.fi] (roughly the same as FBI of USA).
I guess they weren't sharing just Linux images
Re:It's you who are to blame (Score:3, Informative)
The infringements are distribution by the people who upload, and reproduction by the people who download. With BT, pretty much everyone is both kinds at once.
And tangible media includes RAM (see the MAI v. Peak case, which is widely followed) so as a general rule, following e.g. Napster, you have the right and ability to control if you can kick people or files off of the portion of the network that you're involved with.
It could be argued that removing the torrent would also stop the copying, but that could be argued as being several steps removed from the actual act of copying.
But it's the actual act of distribution, so there you go.
By the same logic, the sale of blank CDs should also be banned (and burners).
No, because the issue is right and control as to the infringement. Selling someone a burner or not isn't control over infringement. Only if you could control their use of it, would it be.
Controlling people's use of a network is fairly easy, however. Networks of these types aren't standalone things, really. You'll note that the way Grokster et al avoid vicarious liability is to make sure that the network is designed so that they cannot ban users or files no matter how much they want to.
The "directly profited from it" is easy - there is no direct profit from hosting a torrent file - it actually costs you resources.
Yeah, but direct doesn't mean all that direct. More 'attributable to.' Napster profited by using the infringement there as a draw for users who could then see ads, or who could be charged for other services that were planned, etc. No one would use Napster, as it was, if they were 100% legal. So that's enough.
Whether the school (or site) as a whole makes a profit is irrelevant to the question of whether any particular use qualifies as exempt.
I would disagree. You can probably be held liable for providing free resources for infringement if you're using that somehow to profit elsewhere.
"safety" of filesharing (Score:3, Informative)
Except the copyright holder only needs one file to hit you with statutory damages of $30,000 to $150,000. And on KaZaa/Gnutella/eDonkey most people have file-listing disabled, so the copyright holder only knows about the one file they found through searching. And even if they did know about all the files, they can only sue you for the ones they hold copyright to. So BitTorrent seems just as dangerous as "standard" means.
Don't forget torrents are time based, ie. you are only sharing file for a certain percentage of the time that .torrent is being shared. Someone would have to look for all new torrents and connect to the tracker and start logging IP addresses for the lifetime of the .torrent
That's not very difficult. They only need to get your IP once.
plus who is to say you have the whole file? Are you a criminal for sharing part of file, a chunk that is useless on its own?
Sharing just a part of a file is still illegal. It's not sufficient for "fair use" and "being useless on its own" is no defence, as copyright law says nothing about usefulness of the works protected (except the constitution does say copyright is to promote "Invention and the useful arts"...)
If you want safer use FreeNet. If you want legal check out Gnomoradio [gnomoradio.org].
PS: IANAL
The availability problem can be solved. (Score:5, Informative)
35% of all net traffic belongs to BitTorrent traffic. The corresponding web and traffic tracker required to power that is inconsequential.
I used to run NovaSearch.net, which was for a time the official search function of Suprnova.Org. I made up roughly half of all their traffic, something on the order of 300k pageviews per day by the end. Availability was indeed a large problem, and always my primary concern. However, my possible availability was much higher than actual availability. By this I mean that Novasearch had the POTENTIAL to be available much more than it was, due to reliance on Suprnova.
When SuprNova went down, NovaSearch (usually, often it could be used as an out-of-date cache when Suprnova was down) went down too, because it didn't get updates. That accounted for most of my downtime, very little of it was actually from issues relating to NovaSearch itself.
Despite all this, NovaSearch, during it's primary operational period, relied on only one dedicated server (A second was added for static content later on, but for transfer cap reasons, not actual bandwidth or load). This highlights the primary problem with Suprnova in regards to their reliability, they rely on donated mirrors, and that reliance has caused them to use an insufficient architechture (Last I heard the core of Suprnova was one single dual xeon server). Had they instead chosen to use a clustered solution that they managed themselves, combined with hardware firewalls and DDoS mitigation technology, the availability then and now would be significantly higher.
Tracker reliability is a much lesser problem. Torrents can easily survive short to medium tracker downtime just by the shear momentum of the users. Once they have a peer list, they can continue communicating with those peers even with the tracker down. And the widespread adoption of various unofficial additions to the BitTorrent protocol have further improved that. One such improvement that enjoys almost universal support among third-party BitTorrent clients is the multi-tracker protocol, which effectively allows trackers to be clustered so that even if all but one of the trackers for a torrent is down, it can continue normally.
Anyhow, this is a long post that sort of went off on a tangent and started rambling, but I thought that I should put a few words in because of the role I played.
Re:The availability problem can be solved. (Score:3, Informative)
When Suprnova told me they wanted to switch from NovaSearch to their own internal search, I gave them the source to NovaSearch in hopes that Suprnova's search would be as good as NovaSearch. While it seems they mimmicked some of NovaSearch (which is good), they left out some of NovaSearch's more unique features.
Re:35% (Score:3, Informative)
100% of all Internet traffic is P2P, for the simple reason that the Internet is a P2P network. There is no separation between client and server machines at the network level, no matter how hard ISPs try to create one with asymmetric bandwidth and port blocking.
Re:Religious nut (Score:3, Informative)
Wrong. Atheism means you don't believe in god(s). What you're talking about can be called naturalism [wikipedia.org] or materialism [wikipedia.org] (or even "asupernaturalism")... disbelief in supernatural forces. Gods are one kind of supernatural force, but not the only kind, so materialists are a subset of atheists.
AC: The point of Atheism is not to avoid deism or theology but to avoid the acceptance of ideas that cannot be disproven
Once again, you have incorrect definitions for words. What you're talking about is scepticism [wikipedia.org] (or "rationality", or "science"). Many atheists are also sceptics, and vice-versa, but the words are not equivalent (although this explains your confusion)
Also, you keep on capitalizing "Atheism", which is technically a spelling error. It is not a proper noun.