Revenge of the Sith Bittorrent Discussion

[Fellfrosch]

The thing is, during this period of flux there is almost no way for a major corporation to win--if they fully embrace the new tech economy, still largely unformed, then they are turning their backs on the existing economy and will be crushed by other corporations still in power. The fact that those other corporations will eventually fall to the same fate is small consolation. It's easy for us to say "don't fight the future," but our jobs and livelihoods aren't at direct risk.

[Skar]

True enough, it's not my job at risk.  But there are plenty of places for a big corporation to turn.  Explain to me why the big corps aren't the ones making big bucks on song by song MP3 sales, like Apple?  It seems to me it's because they were too busy fighting to maintain the status quo to adapt.

It doesn't mean anything to say that the other corps still playing in the old economy will come to dominate that market because to adapt means to go to a new place.  If you're making money on a new thing who cares if another corp  is now making money on your old thing?

[Fellfrosch]

Because, at least for the time being, the corps making money on the old thing are making a lot more than you can on the new, and they will squish you--if you abandon the old completely, I think the market is unstable enough that you'll die just as inevitably as those who refuse to adapt. The companies that are going to thrive in the new economy are the ones who, like Apple, and playing both angles right now.

[Skar]

Agreed.  I still think the RIAA folks could have prevented all that they complain about if they had adapted instead of legislated and complained, done what Apple is doing.

Essentially what bugs me is this.  The bottom falls out of the market for everyone. Attempting to keep it from happening through lawsuits and legislation that harms innovation is evil.  Corporations should show civic responsibility as much as regular people should.

I realize that I'm complaining without offering a solution to the real problem of people stealing, using peer-to-peer network technologies.  But making things like bit-torrent and kazaa ILLEGAL is not a good answer, it would actually be damaging to our society if they succeeded, and I think the corporations know it.  Shame, shame.

[House of Mustard]

So here's a question.  (And I don't have an underlying point I'm trying to make -- I just want info, because I know very little about the subject.)

I don't use file-sharing services mainly because, in my limited understanding, their main purpose is to spread copyrighted material for free.  I know that there is some music that is available -- stuff that the artists will let you copy -- but what else is there?  You guys are obviously big defenders of the technology -- what are you downloading?

Like I said, I'm not trying to make a point -- my only knowledge of file-sharing was back with Napster, and that didn't seem particularly ethical.  For those of you who share files, what exactly are you sharing?

[Entsuropi]

A lot of people use it like a demo service - download a game, play it, if they like it they add it to the to-buy list. I did just that with Rise of Nations, for example.

[Tage]

Blizzard uses bittorrent to distribute their patches (which can be huge). Most significantly, and what it was originally developed for, Linux distros are distributed via bittorrent. They're generally 600~1200 MB in size, and hosting that kind of file on a server, getting hundreds of downloads per day, would be horribly demanding.

[Oseleon]

rgr
as I said in my post.  There are a ton of active legitimate uses for BT.  Linux distros and Patches are just 2.  It is a legitimate tool that sometimes gets used for illigetimate reasons.  
It would be like banning a hammer because it CAN and HAS been used as a weapon, ignoring that a Hammer is also a valuable tool

[Spriggan]

THere's also a difference between bit-torrent and P2P like Kazaa.  Personaly I think BT is a great technology that in a few years might actualy make dowloading big things painless, but P2P stuff was built upon illegal file disterbution so I feel no pain for Kazaa or Napter.  That being said BT is the current rave for theft and I also do not feel bad about hollywood and others closeing down BT websites that provide access to such files.

[House of Mustard]

Interesting.  Certainly that Blizzard and Linux stuff makes sense, and makes filesharing a useful tool.

But I guess my question is this:  what percentage of filesharing is legitimate, legal stuff?  Oseleon said that we wouldn't outlaw hammers because they could be used as a weapon, but I wonder -- if 75% of hammers' uses include homicide, we just might outlaw them.

Now, I just pulled 75% from nowhere, so correct me if I'm wrong.  What do you suppose the real percentages are for filesharing?  How much is legal and how much isn't?

Like I said, I'm not try to argue -- it's just that the only experience I've had with filesharing was Napster, which was about 95% illegal, if not more.

[Spriggan]

With P2P you're probaly reaching 90% easly.  With Bit Torrent it's harder to guess becasue there's no central server for distrabution.  As a guess I would say over 60% just becasue I rarely, if ever, hear of people mentioning BT with legal downloads in conversations or forum discussions (except on the WoW forums).

It's a great tool but one that is easly, and more often then not, abused.

[fuzzyoctopus]

I know that there is some music that is available -- stuff that the artists will let you copy -- but what else is there?  You guys are obviously big defenders of the technology -- what are you downloading?

We're downloading TV shows mostly. My big example is of course, Doctor Who, unavailable by "legitimate" means here in the U.S.  

[Mad Dr Jeffe]

Trading in TV shows is one of the Bittorrent Grey areas too... the argument for the trade is that the shows were broadcasted and in the case of more marginal shows they may never see the light of day again.

For instance Space Above and Beyond and Earth 2 were never released on VHS or DVD.

More recent shows like Veronica Mars arent being rerun yet and are a couple of years from DVD release. Miss a show and you can get the torrent to catch up....

the legal status is debateable.

[fuzzyoctopus]

J.T. and I were talking about this the other day. Paying for internet access is more important to us than paying for television. If they uploaded the files with commercials kept in, we'd watch them, though.  If the TV networks uploaded torrent quality files to their OWN websites - with commericals left in - for free download, I'd watch them there.

They need to set up the way Yahoo's Launch has - you can watch online for free, and we'll throw in commericals.

But who wants to bet that will never happen in the next 10 years?

[Mad Dr Jeffe]

heres a nice legal torrent example from the pages of wired magazine...

One example of how the world has already changed: Gary Lerhaupt, a graduate student in computer science at Stanford, became fascinated with Outfoxed, the documentary critical of Fox News, and thought more people should see it. So he convinced the film's producer to let him put a chunk of it on his Web site for free, as a 500-Mbyte torrent. Within two months, nearly 1,500 people downloaded it. That's almost 750 gigs of traffic, a heck of a wallop. But to get the ball rolling, Lerhaupt's site needed to serve up only 5 gigs. After that, the peers took over and hosted it themselves. His bill for that bandwidth? $4. There are drinks at Starbucks that cost more. "It's amazing - I'm a movie distributor," he says. "If I had my own content, I'd be a TV station."