The Commercial Future of Torrrents 314
acrid_k writes "Yahoo is covering a story from SiliconValley.com entitled BitTorrent moving uptown. From adding Ask Jeeves content in search results to investigating use of torrents for sharing bandwidth for paid downloads, the future is looking both more restrictive and more commercial. You have to wonder about a crucial part of the equation: why would internet users share their bandwidth to benefit media companies?" From the article: "BitTorrent already has struck deals with video game publishers to distribute games with its technology. Cohen's bid to commercialize BitTorrent is a measure of how far the entertainment industry has come since the late 1990s, when
Napster introduced millions of people to the power of peer-to-peer technology for downloading songs -- and mobilized scores of lawyers to shut it down."
Commercial use can be for us too (Score:3, Interesting)
Media companies aren't the only people who can be helped by commercial application of torrent tech. Think of this (and it's just an idea):
What if Apple integrated bittorrent into the next version of iTunes? Users that subscribe to the same podcast could be torrenting from users instead of just from the server. This way, you can get your podcasts faster, and without hogging up one server to do it.
That's just my idea. But why would we want to make things faster for us?
How are they going to control commerce? (Score:3, Interesting)
What's going to stop them from propagating those commercial links around the web? Arguably, I'd say that they need to force users to log into the tracker. That suddenly makes accessing those torrents more difficult.
I do agree, though, that such a setup would likely be a lot more secure than just a "pure download" method. If they DO set up some way for users to log in and access (and download) their torrents, then that means they would just need to store a list of torrents, making it easy for users to re-download stuff that's lost.
Similarly, a business could keep bandwidth and speed up by simply distributing a release among, say, 5-10 permanent seeding machines for their various releases. Most of the bandwidth would come from those, but for popular files, it wouldn't matter if you're leeching due to the increased speed of everyone on the network.
I can see how it would work for commercial stuff -- pretty much just the same as any non-commercial torrent release with dedicated distribution. What I don't see is how they're going to control access to the torrents, trackers, and the like.
I can say right now, though, that if they expect me to use my bandwidth for a download that, in all likelyhood, will take longer than a pure straight http/ftp download, I better get a "seeder" discount.
Maybe it's just me... (Score:3, Interesting)
Torrents for files that are being freely distributed - sure, I can share my bandwidth, especially when I don't need it. Even patches for some commercial games I don't mind because it improves games I play.
Torrents for commercial files that are charging users for the download? Kiss my butt, unless you are paying me for the bandwidth.
Hate to point this out... (Score:3, Interesting)
Of course, that's also exactly why it's so popular and people like it.
Movies are just BIG, and since the torrent protocol is lets face it, about as hostile as you could design to any other traffic, it's always going to be packet shaped/blocked/filtered.
Still, gotta love free as in not paid for
isp contracts (Score:2, Interesting)