Is BitTorrent Search Harmful?

protee writes "p2pnet published a report arguing that the robustness of BitTorrent to free-riding might have been more related to the lack of meta-data search rather than to its tit-for-tat-like strategy. The question now is: how the release of such search engines is going to impact the BitTorrent network?"

It'll obviously help out such networks.

Such networks thrive because individuals can find the content they want. Searches will help improve that much as has happened with the World Wide Web. Remember, it didn't become explosively popular until the early search engines like Yahoo!, Altavista and Magellan came about.

Re:Difference is the universities' attitude

But they don't need the "fat pipes" to supply everyone who wants to download a given file. That's the very nature of BitTorrent! Indeed, the decentralized nature of BitTorrent allows for individuals or non-profit projects (ie. Slackware) to distribute massive files at neglible cost.

Yeah!

That Braham Cohen is so dumb, he probably never considered anything like this when he put together his own official bit torrent search engine. What does he know, sitting there coding in his mommy's basement when all the real geniuses are on Slashdot and p2pnet!

I mean, c'mon... *eyeroll*

People will start sharing...

...when they can't be traced. Up the encryption and IPsec and you'll find that people will start to share.

Isn't the principle of Bittorrent...

the more.. the merrier?

Re:Isn't the principle of Bittorrent...

LEECHERS genius.

More leachers != merrier

More peers = merrier

I think the main problem with some bt clients is that they flood your upload bandwidth... thus killing your DL speed.

A client that intelligently detects/limits/manages ULs is probably the best thing that can happen to bittorrent

As long as uploading is a transparent process that doesn't interfere with n00bs general internet usage, they won't bother to become leechers.

Network?

The question now is: how the release of such search engines is going to impact the BitTorrent network?

The answer: not at all. There isn't a BitTorrent network, just an application that has caused many thousands of disjoint, single purpose networks to come into existance.

And that disjointness will help protect them, I feel.

Re:More info for the idiots.

Yes, but the real question is what causes that lack of "altruism" in the first place. My assumption (which could be wrong) is fear of retribution by some media conglomerate. Those with transfer caps would also be candidates for leechhood too, I suppose. However, when nearly untraceable P2P technology becomes the rule, when the Fear of God(tm) and/or somebody's lawyers is no longer a significant issue, I would expect altruism levels to shoot up. Remember the original Napster: everybody pretty much shared their entire collections. It wasn't until the RIAA started slinging lawsuits around that people even thought about anonymity (I think most people assumed they were anonymous.) Well, now they are thinking about it, but so are a whole lot of developers. From the RIAA perspective, I think this is going to backfire bigtime. I mean, they had to know this was going to happen.

What difference does it make?

If the number free loaders gets too great, nobody will be able to get fast downloads off of BT due to lack of seeds (or whatever they're called). Once that happens, popularity amongst freeloaders declines, service returns to normal. A file sharing system without anybody seeding any files is a waste of time.

There is no "BitTorrent Network"

The main strength of BitTorrent is that it works on individual files. It is not a network, rather a protocol like ftp or http. Ftp sites that offer copyrighted content can be taken down, but the ftp protocol is alive and well.

Not sure I buy the analysis

The thesis is basically that by causing your client to change identity frequently, you can take advantage of the leniency that BT allows newcomers to the network, and thus "leech" without punishment. This isn't done because you'll get kicked out of the communities that publish BT metadata if you do it.

I don't see it. If you're going to leech, that's the way to do it, but cooperating overall results in even better upload rates; you're not fighting for the few slots afforded newcomers, you will be given as many packets as you can eat as fast as you can eat them so long as you reciprocate. And I'm sure those communities will survive - I suspect that Bram will have thought of how to integrate search with community.

Do you think it will sanitize BT?

Seeing as how the **IA and its international counterparts have been successful in shutting down the tracker sites and this will help them locate these sites, don't you think the impact will be a move to only legal files being indexed for the search. This could actually lead to a vindication of p2p as a useful piece of software and a decline in the number of sites specializing in illegal copyrighted downloads.

It could be compared to bootlegs being move from inside the music/video/etc. store to the street merchants that have to pick up and move everytime the cop walks near them.

May well be right

I've never seen a P2P network without leechers. Even those which include an economics system like edonkey still have their share. I don't think there's anything fundamentally different about bittorrent. Now it's pretty much an ordinary P2P net leechers will appear. The economics will help limit their impact though.

Blocked already

A quick search of torrentspy [torrentspy.com] ("os x tiger") [torrentspy.com]:

There has been an error with your search This search query has been blocked at the request of the copyright holder, in compliance with the Digital Millennium Copyright Act ("DMCA")

I was betting mates this would happen... shame I didn't put a $ figure on it ;-)

Re:Blocked already

Uh oh.. describing a process for circumventing DMCA restrictions is also in violation of the DMCA!

Just repeat after me, "These aren't the torrent files you're looking for."

Is BitTorrent Search Harmful?

<MPAA_Exec> Does a bear shit in the forest?!?!

It's Going to Help

Search = More leechers = More seeders = More health. That means less dead torrents. It's that simple.

Conflicting Answer

Bittorrent Search could be slower than normal bittorrent usage, if these techniques are used (though I personally find that my download speeds are abysmally slow until I have enough segments to upload too, this "new user window" the report talks about could be a figment of the author's imagination)
But this will not effect Bittorrent Itself. Bittorrent remains useful for legitimate downloads- of the type that people will be downloading the .torrents for from a website that's trying to provide files for people.
Bittorrent may not become more useful because of searching, but it wont become less useful.

Well I'm surprised...

I'm surprised that companies haven't taken advantage of this and similar ideas. They are wasting millions of dollars trying to shut down trackers and p2p sites instead of turning them into a source of profit.

Would it not be a better idea to sign a new set of commercial contracts with various comanies for the rights to the commercial break(s) in an encoded version of the show specifically made to be freely distrubted, probably with a form of DRM or copy protection to deter the ease of making versions without commercials, over the bit torrent protocols?

Am I the only one who has thought that this would make a lot of sense, and provide a new source of income? Think of what companies would be will to be pay for such rights? These releases could potentially reach more people than television can and the episode would be available on demand, instead of requiring the end recipent to wait for their television providors to get around to airing the episode. It would also attract more users to the bit torrent network and allowing them legal access to the files they want.

easier access + legal downloads = more clients sharing the files

I saw something like this with eXeem

As you may know, eXeem was a proprietary protocol "extending" (well, at least it was slightly different) BitTorrent to be trackerless with a built-in search engine in the client for ultimate ease of searching and ease of sharing.

Everything should then be great on the paper (besides being a proprietary protocol + client that was adware), but what I saw was immediate signs of Kazaaification with tons of people spread out over lots and lots of versions of the same files. And you got absolutely horrible speed too.

So if the number of BT trackers would increase along with wide-spread usage of non-tracker specific search engines (like the one at BitTorrent.com), I think the BT community could see some negative effects from this, as people start trying to download (and hence upload) the same file from unrelated trackers, instead of giving one or few trackers a very large number of seeders and leechers, i.e. when the BT protocol truly shines.

Just wait....

Do you know what will be awesome... is when anyone with a half-decent upload speed (~1 mbit) can start up their own high-quality video stream, or tv station, so that independent media can be distributed through p2p networks like bit torrent - but just by clicking tune in on your favorite channel! This sort of system will significantly reduce the amount of bandwith that a streaming host server has to push through the first few pipes. Then, users utilize each other's bandwith. "Leechers" will be an antiquated term when you can stream anything you want any time!! Get ready.... ACTLab TV. We have some big plans for internet television with student work through Allvium. Our next big plan is laying it out for everyone, with details so that everyone else can do it too!! I am the Enchilada Man.

Only if you are looking for...

The .ISO image of Mac OS X 10.4.1 for the Intel platform.

Everything else is OK.

I found the research very unsatisfying

The thesis of the research appears to be that, (1) if they can get away with it, some programmers will write implementations of the bittorrent protocal that are designed to "cheat" in such a way that they can have a higher ratio of downloading to uploading than they can currently get away with, and (2) it is the multiple swarms created by a lack of a central search engine that stops this.

The research is very unsatisfying to me for several reasons. First, its not even necessary to "cheat". On every bittorrent I've ever downloaded, my download has completed *way* before my ratio has reached 1:1, and it is only because I choose not to end the session that I continue seeding (or, more often than not, because I'm asleep, so the choice to continue seeding is made for me).

Second, the example they give of a strategy that beats tit-for-tat is one in which several cooperating strategies are used at the same time, with some taking on a "master" roll and some taking on a "slave" roll. This may make their point on some academic level, but as a realistic example is fails utterly. Who in their right mind would start ten different bittorrent sessions, with some acting as slaves and some acting as masters? The overall download speed would be awful from having multiple sessiosn running over the same wire. Its just stupid. At least come up with a better example of a strategy that can best tit-for-tat.

Third, I don't see evidence that people would use a bittorrent program that was designed to cheat. Maybe they would, maybe they wouldn't... the article assumes people would. My bet is that not enough people would use such a program that it would make a difference. Its not like this is evolution, where the successful cheaters "pass on their genes" to create more cheaters.

Overall, I think the research is a lot of academic mumbo-jumbo that may sound good on paper, but has very little, if any, connection to reality.

My own simpler thesis would be this: bittorrent works so well because a lot of the downloaders fall asleep and end up seeding longer than they otherwise might.

Isn't this to be expected?

1) P2p of copyrighted materials is about cheating the system to get free material you would other wise have to pay for. 2) So why should they suddenly be moral and not cheat the P2p system if they can find a way to?

Group selection?

The thesis is that hacked nonreciprocating bittorrent clients are discouraged due to group selection among swarms, because of people manually abandoning poorly performing swarms poisoned with too many nonreciprocating clients. I don't buy it. First, they don't provide evidence that parasitic clients exist "in the wild" in substantial numbers sufficient to be significantly contribute to differences in download speed among swarms. Second, nonreciprocating clients could shift swarms as well. Third, they don't establish that there is sufficient incentive to motivate users to hack or acquire parasitic clients. Given that there is a "cost" to obtaining a hacked client, if only the time of searching it out, then there needs to be an offsetting benefit or people are not going to bother to do it.

asdf

Can't, and why aren't, major companies setting up arrays of computers to leach on new and popular downloads. It seems if they totally screwed the bandwith few new users would stick around. Also, couldn't they seed huge BS files whose filanames identify them as something popular? This would steal bandwith from the involved computers.

Why do people think BitTorrent search is new?

I made a BT search engine before /. post news about it (see sig), and mine is not the only one. And just as others have said, there is no BitTorrent network, only swarms. Tit for tat works because that's what it is: the faster you upload (give) and faster you download (get).

Again, an uninformed news fluff.

is x harmful

I'm getting so tired of all these "is X harmful?" the answer always is "yes if" or "no, but" come on, anything CAN be harmful, but its the probability, not the possibility that matters!

Freeloaders

There are going to be more freeloaders but ther eare still such sites like oink me that only offer downloads to selected crowed which share as well as download not just close window right after they've downloaded

Re:Funny search

I like how pirate bay relishes in its criminality. So what happens when pirate bay gets busted by the RIAA-imperial navy? Do they bury their trackers in secret locations, kill all the leechers and hope in 50 years time someone will make an 80's themed movie about cyber pirates, booty-porn traps and a russian internet gang called the fratellis?

Re:Funny search

(Note: I'm Swedish, just like the ones running and hosting Piratebay)

So what happens when pirate bay gets busted by the RIAA-imperial navy?

It's not clear whether they are breaking any Swedish laws - that's why they're so smug and play around with all the takedown notices. The only law they _might_ break would be something like "large scale contributing to copyright infringement" but even that's a stretch. There's a reason why they haven't been charged with anything yet, even though the Swedish Anti Piracy Beaureu are all over the piracy sites they know they can bring down in court.

Let's pretend...

... that Slashdot is a large auditorium where the entire community sits in the audience and listens to those within the community that have something to say and then give there responses... would you still stand up on stage and say that in front of all the uber-nerds?

Re:Serious Question

Afraid not. Bit Torrent depends upon a central "tracker" computer to keep track of who has what pieces of the torrent so that clients know where to go to get said pieces. Remember that Bit Torrent was not designed as an anonymous protocol and was only intended to efficiently distribute large files, such as Linux distros. Consequently, it's almost as easy to monitor who is downloading what as it was for the original Napster service. If you download using Bit Torrent, your IP address is wide open to any media company investigator that wants to query the tracker. And they do, so do it at your own risk. Some clients, like Azureus, offer extensions to the Bit Torrent protocol to support anonymous tracking but I don't know how widespread it is (or how well it works in practice.) But I'd say there's not much question that this is a technological issue that will be effectively addressed in the not-to-distant future, either by Cohen himself or some other equally bright developer.