So some news this morning that BitTorrent is going the legal. They’ve made partnerships with major media studios so that people will be able to legally purchase and download content via the popular P2P system that is currently soaking up up to 40% of the Internet’s bandwidth at any one time.
This is clearly good news from a legal stand point.
Its also good news from a competition stand point, as anything which drives down prices from Steve Jobs is a good thing.
Some unexpected beneficiaries? People who use illegal networks to download illegal torrents.
How?
Well, although the downloaded movies and television shows will surely have their own version of DRM-’d locked down security, you can bet that as soon as its released — or even before — some enterprising hacker will break that protection.
The result? Nirvana.
The bane of P2P networks will be banished. Gone will be the crappy cam-videos, poorly encoded movies or television shows, and fake seeds — and zero day productions that is available to all. Illegal torrents will have a mainline towards the Good Stuff.
Another benefit is that some ISP’s currently employ some methods to control torrent traffic through a method called “throttling” — I know it certainly occurs in Canada to a greater or lesser degree, as ISP’s can control the packets which come through their networks (as far as I can tell). Once BitTorrent downloading becomes legal in part, ISP’s won’t have a leg to stand on when it comes to throttling bandwidth, because — and someone can correct me if I’m wrong — they won’t be able to identify which traffic is illegal and which isn’t.
So, BitTorrents being legal? Sounds like its a great time for everyone.
November 29th, 2006 at 8:00 pm | Permalink
The euphoria shown online about this is a HOAX. Nirvana is the term. More and more people will get broadband because of things like this, or even Wal-Mart including digital vouchers in their DVDs.
But soon all the new P2P users will realize that the download they pay for surely isn’t as great as the 8GB DVD image they find freely . Actually, operations like those just show people the way to even more illegal downloads.
November 29th, 2006 at 8:03 pm | Permalink
Addendum : and surely Mark Cuban eill also bitch about this. Did the Yahoo! visionaries who provided this guy with enough money to make him believe he were smart, already get executed?
November 30th, 2006 at 12:29 am | Permalink
Well franky, its only a matter of time before DVDs, and even HD-DVD’s get their encoding and DRM’s shredded up.
I haven’t heard of any newer or better alternatives to BT at the moment; once BitTorrent starts offering free downloads its like opening up the pandora’s box. Its only a matter of time before the high definitoin stuff getes offered … then ripped, and then distributed.
December 1st, 2006 at 2:43 pm | Permalink
Check the worlds largest legal torrent site at http://www.datagalaxy.net
July 10th, 2007 at 1:59 pm | Permalink
I have just finished a site with an intersting twist on legitimizing bittorrent. PeerIt.com is fully integrated with PayPal and Google Checkout, and allows sellers to list their torrents for sale. Buyers get paid for sharing their purchases. Check it out at http://www.peerit.com
March 30th, 2008 at 11:29 pm | Permalink
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