Legal Torrent Sites Help Legitimize BitTorrent

Jeff writes "In today's Seattle Times, technology columnist Paul Andrews highlights how legal torrent sites such as CommonBits may lead to wider adoption and acceptance of BitTorrent. With reports that illegal torrent usage may be more than a third of Internet traffic, sites like LegalTorrents, Torrentocracy, Prodigem and bt.etree may offer a compelling defense to future legal attacks while simultaneously promoting fair use rights. Andrews goes on to argue that the future of television may be no further away than integration of podcasting, RSS, tagging and BlogTorrent."

Legal torrent sites?

[bigtallmofo]

Doesn't that imply that the mere (former) existence of sites like Lokitorrent and Suprnova was illegal?

I'm not sure if that was ever decided by a court - rather it appears that scare tactics caused them to be shut down. For that reason, I personally don't feel comfortable declaring linking to content hosted on other systems illegal.

Fighting this same battle now.

[Ph33r th3 g(O)at]

TPTB at my school have unilaterally blocked BitTorrent, characterizing it as a rogue protocol. The argument the admins make is that any legitimate product will have plenty of bandwidth to be downloadable via http. The administration supports the sysadmins, because they don't like getting C&D's from the *AA, so the power of the technical folks is unchecked--the faculty, traditionally the guardians of freedom on campus, don't even have the issue on their radar.

Examples like this can only help the cause, though I'm not sure by how much.

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[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

My legal bittorrent experience from yesterday

[A beautiful mind]

Everyone remembers that article about privateer 1.0 remake?

My university sits on 2.5gbyte/s pipe, i have control over around 500mbyte/s.

I decided it would be cool to help share the wealth and let around --max_upload_rate 20000 for a few hours. It was maxed out ;)

The Internet is now useless for legal purposes...

[ip_freely_2000]

"With reports that illegal torrent usage may be more than a third of Internet traffic"

I wish I had a link, but I have also heard that spam accounted for two thirds of Internet traffic.

So, the entire bandwidth of the Internet is taken up by illegal traffic?

3D Gamers use .torrents too

[Jugalator]

I downloaded the fairly recent Unreal Tournament patch yesterday from 3D Gamers here [3dgamers.com] and their "World" download is a .torrent. When download sites like these start using BitTorrent, I really think it has become a mainstream technology.

I also downloaded the Linux version of the same patch.

Needless to say, the Windows version downloaded at 200+ KB / sec, and the Linux version was restricted by their slightly loaded server at ~80 KB / sec.

Re:Like the open source

[plasticmillion]

I totally agree with this view, in fact I recently wrote a whole essay on the topic of what media companies can learn from the open source movement (see my sig if you're interested).

The biggest lesson, in my view, is that people will take matters into their own hands if corporations don't play fair. This is what happened with open source: programmers got so sick of companies like Microsoft bullying them that they banded together and created a whole new IT infrastructure of their own.

What's to stop artists in the film, music, photography and print industries doing the same? Absolutely nothing, which is why sites like Commonbits are now springing up to facilite consumer-to-consumer-style interactions that cut corporations out of the loop. All that's missing is a payment system to finance more professional production and the media industry is going to be facing a very similar threat to what established software vendors have experienced as a result of the open source movement.

Maybe Google will buy it

[hooded1]

I know this is a bit far off but it would be interesting ot see google run a tracker for legal files. If anyone they make bit torrent legit. Two years ago i never would have considered it, but given google's expansionist policies recently it sounds plausible if still unlikely

Re:Sure...

[cowsandmilk]

etree.org has been popular for a long time as it holds concert footage of a number of bands that are well liked by a portion of America. While they may not have the popularity of pop music, noone is going to argue with downloading legal Dave Matthews, Grateful Dead, Phish, and other bands. The bands on that site are quite akin to the ones that one sees at Bonaroo each year, which has been a bigger success than many people imagined. I don't know much about the others, but as a long-time etree user, I can attest to its popularity.

Re:Legal torrent sites?

[araemo]

Well, actually...

There are very narrow circumstances where downloading a torrent of a movie is indeed 'legal'(If you can't copy the DVD you bought, but want a backup copy anyways.. damn css. ;P).

Likewise, it is possible for a torrent to be 'legal' to download sometimes/by some people, but 'illegal' for other times/people.

Also, running a torrent site is not legal or illegal. Providing torrents(Or, perhaps more accurately, running a tracker) for copyrighted materials is quite likely contributory infringement, and therefor 'illegal'.

Re:Defense

[DaHat]

You are half right, and this doesn't really apply to Bram Cohen the way it does Kazaa and the old Napster which both of the latter are networks were the principal purpose is copyright infringement, such is not the case with Bit Torrent. BT was designed from the beginning with other purposes in mind and has effectively been hijacked by illicit users. The technology is not to blame, just the network owners, and this is why the makers of Kazaa and other 'piracy' networks have been hauled into court repeatedly and why Bram Cohen has been left alone.

Jamendo ...

[lkratz]

*** Disclaimer : I'm one of the founder of Jamendo ***

Reading this /. thread, sorry about this, I can't resist explaining what we're doing here in Luxembourg.

We started jamendo [jamendo.com] beginning of 2005. The aim of Jamendo is to help artists use P2P technologies and particulary BitTorrent to get to a larger audience. We combine Creative Commons Licence [creativecommons.org] with BitTorrent to have artists publish their work, and promote a legal use of BitTorrent or eMule or Shareaza or ...

Thanks to our jamloader [sourceforge.net] , artists put their demo CD in their PC/Mac/Linux and automagically their work get published as a torrent on jamendo and accessible with eMule. The software rips the CD to FLAC, ask to choose one of the 6 creative commons licenses and uploads the datas to our servers. On our servers we do the rip in other various formats, Ogg, MP3, AAC, and do the creative commons watermarking. We also do some kind of community moderation, in order to avoid the ones that upload the latest Britney Spears or the ones that upload the latest neo-nazy band. Bands have to link back to our website from their official website as a control ( see godon [godon.org] for exemple )

Finally we use iRate [sourceforge.net] as our core technology to do the rating of the music, and do intelligent propositions to our audience. Our XMLRPC-iRate server ( http://irate.jamendo.com/ ) supports the latest features of the iRate protocol but today, there's not enough client software, but we have the project to write our jamplayer that will combine iRate and BitTorrent and foxytunes.

What about the money ? Our business model differs from the one of magnatune [magnatune.com] for instance ( I quote magnatune because John Buckman made a very nice and cool entry in his blog [magnatune.com], thanks again to him). We have a more ad-centric model were the service is free for the artists, is free for the audience, but the web pages are ad supported (no popup), the streamed music may be ad-supported up to 1 audio ad every 3 songs, the published archive in P2P networks are high quality archives with no ads. The idea is : bandwidth heavy is ad-supported, bandwidth friendly (i.e. BitTorrent) is ad-free ! We are not a label but rather a "community driven music hosting company" , we allow the bands to put their paypal button to receive donation on their jamendo page, jamendo takes no margin.

Sorry again /. crowd to present our project in this thread, but I really felt it was on topic ! So if you want to listen to indy music coming from Luxembourg, Belgium and North of France point your favorite BitTorrent client to jamendo.

Laurent.

Re:Legal torrent sites?

[dotwaffle]

Ok, why do i seem to be the ONLY person in the world that does back up my media??? How many times have we had damaged products because of misuse or lending? I backup my media, so should you!