Hollywood Buddies up with Bram Cohen 205
brajesh writes "According to an AP story at Yahoo News, Hollywood studios announced an agreement with Bram Cohen, the creator of the popular BitTorrent file-swapping technology, that will keep him from helping users find pirated copies of movies online. The agreement requires BitTorrent to remove Web links leading to illegal content owned by the seven studios that are members of the MPAA. The agreement is a major breakthrough in MPAA's anti-piracy efforts. BitTorrent has been one of the major targets[.doc] of MPAA's anti-piracy tirade. However, Cohen's engine is far from the only tool used to find pirated BitTorrent files online. A handful of other online engines can search BitTorrent-specific sites, and ordinary search engines can also be used to find BitTorrent files."
total perfection not always needed (Score:5, Interesting)
There's an old saying, "the squeaky wheel gets the grease". The big copyright holders will always go after the highest-profile "choke points" first, and in general (i.e. when solving problems of any kind, regardless of how you feel about the studios' motives ion solving this particular "problem"), it can be a perfectly appropriate, effective strategy.
Techies often have a bad habit of adopting a sort of slippery-slope, sky-is-falling, all-or-nothing approach to problem solving (especially if it's a problem they don't really want to solve). "This proposed solution has a hole in it and is not guaranteed to be 100% effective, therefore it is no solution at all and is foolish to pursue." Not necessarily true. You don't always need to find a perfect solution; sometimes a 90% solution is good enough, especially if the alternative is sitting on your hands doing nothing wishing you had a 100% perfect solution.
(Off-topic, but to rescue my karma before I'm accused of siding with the studios here: the same thought processcan act in all sorts of other situations, not just copy protection. For example, if you suggest that a great way of reducing the threat of e-mail vuruses would be to redesign mail clients so that they don't make it easy to click on executable attachments and run them, while still allowing users to click on data attachments and view them, you'll receive all sorts of "objections" from techies who think they know better, pointing out that your solution "won't work" because of the possibility of e.g. JPEG and Word viruses.)
The MPAA is smarter (Score:4, Interesting)
GNUnet, better than 'torrent anyway... (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:total perfection not always needed (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Weak (Score:4, Interesting)
Its a just quid-pro-quo, which I imagine works a bit like this:
I can't say I blame him. He's never condoned piracy, there's no reason for him to start now, and it's not as if he's talking about the protocol, just his search engine - which is a whole other subject.
It's all about intent... (Score:4, Interesting)
This is all to protect himself from future lawsuits. It will have no effect on other bittorrent search sites.
He done good....and did it without harming any users, legit or not.
Re:total perfection not always needed (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Weak (Score:5, Interesting)
"I build systems to disseminate information, commit digital piracy, synthesize drugs, maintain untrusted contacts, purchase anonymously, and secure machines and homes...I refuse to work on technology to track users, analyze usage patterns, watermark information, censor, detect drug use, or eavesdrop. I am not naive enough to think any of those technologies could enable a 'compromise'."
He was the last person I'd have expected to deal with the MPAA, given what his rhetoric used to be.
ISPs blocking or retarding BT traffic (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:total perfection not always needed (Score:4, Interesting)
I also think the MPAA are becomming smarter. This quote FTA shows that they are learning from the mistakes of and bad publicity of the RIAA:
Well, even most /.'ers would have to admit that there is a bit of a difference between MPAA and RIAA. RIAA's entire business model is based around enslaving artists into draconian contracts where they make the lions share of the money off CD sales and the only thing the artist gets out of it is publicity. One wonders why such a business model survives in the internet age.
The members of the MPAA actually make a product (of sorts) that's tangible. They aren't paying actors and writers 15 cents a movie and telling them to make it up with autograph sales and concerts. Who here can't understand why the MPAA would get pissed when the new Star Wars or Harry Potter movie is floating around the internet days before it's released? Granted, I still have issues with them (region codes come to mind), but nothing like the complete lack of respect that I have for RIAA.
Re:Juran's Assumption (Score:3, Interesting)
To propse that somebody's busiess will fail because they don't adhere to the intricate technicalities of a rule of thumb is preposterous.
Re:Relevancy? (Score:2, Interesting)
How come the porn industry isn't the least bit worried about filesharing, and is in some cases encouraging it; i.e. many movies on empornium are put there by those who own the copyright to them.