BSA Reacts to 'New' BitTorrent

An anonymous reader writes "It seems the Business Software Alliance isn't afraid of the new, tracker-less BitTorrent beta. While it concedes it will have to 'regroup', Tarun Sawney, BSA Asia anti-piracy director, said BitTorrent files could still be identified. 'BSA has traditionally sought the assistance of those hosting the actual pirated files. With or without the tracker sites, someone still hosts the infringing files.'"

Arrrgh!

[ale3ns]

Shiver me timbers!We can just bury the torrent files and make a map!BSA's having the Davies now! Arrrgh!

Hmmm ...

[Anonymous Coward]

"I find your ideas interesting and would like to subscribe to your newsletter." - HJS

Re:Shared responsibility

[Neil]

If someone connects to your BT client using the protocol they can find out which pieces you are offering to your peers.

I don't see that it makes much odds anyway: if the file is copywrited work, and you don't have have permission to redistribute that work, then copying parts of it is just as much an infringment as copying the entire file.

BSA Reacts to 'New' BitTorrent

[gowen]

Today the released a statement saying : Why should it bother us? We manufacture classic motorcycles [wikipedia.org].

Re:Shared responsibility

[daikokatana]

The question is, can they prove someone has the infringing file, if they only transmit PART of the file?

IANAL, but thinking like one would lead me to say yes.

Suppose the BSA/RIAA/MPAA/whoever succeeds in downloading 1 part of a total of 500 from your IP address. They could then automatically assume that a) you have that part on your disk, b) you were downloading that same file and c) you would end up with the same file they were downloading which you could share later on.

Even if you were to argue that, after downloading, you would disconnect and stop sharing, you would still have had the chance to upload 99% of the file in question. Don't mess with lawyers on these issues.

Re:Shared responsibility

[void dummy()]

Whats about the million ip packet, which are misrouted. Whats about dynamic ips? If i request something and disconnect, probably someone else get this package.

Re:Two dilemmas

[!the!bad!fish!]

I haven't even got 4 friends, you insensitive clod.

Re:Two dilemmas

[Nytewynd]

I only have 2 friends, and one doesn't know the alphabet... You must be quite the party animal to have 500,000 friends.

Re:Shared responsibility

[tankd0g]

They have yet to prove anything, it doesn't stop them from sueing, despite having never won a case, it's still effective against those few sites their "experts" pick out. It seems a site has to be nearly as well known as google before it pops up on their radar however, which suggests to me the guy looking is not especially skilled. I once got a letter from a lawyer for Oakley Sunglasses for deformation of their product from a 3 year old reply to a post that they printed out from the google archives. Oakley sunglasses are still polycarbonate garbage that break if you look at them wrong, by the way.

Re:Shared responsibility

[Anonymous Coward]

I would have thought that at the moment you would be in breach of copyright if you pirated part of a copyrighted work. Otherwise you could simply throw away or rewrite one page of a book and then resell the result safely.

Fear?

[otter42]

Why should they be so scared of it? Is it made to attack them? Is the stated goal of BitTorrent to attack incessently, to give no quarter to the BSA?

Or are they just self-rightious overreacters that think that everything technological that doesn't come from them is a threat to their god-ordained, constitutionally protected business model?

When in doubt, fight copyright with patents!

[vkapadia]

Someone should file a patent for "a method of identifying a Bittorrent user by means of their IP address".

Re:BSA?!?

[Anonymous Coward]

Hey, Windows programmer! Learn how to use strcmp() correctly.

Re:BSA?!?

[chrish]

Mod: -1, Hungarian notation and ugly brace style.

Re:Trackerless BitTorrent will never work

[mrsbrisby]

You have no idea what you're talking about.

Right now: if the tracker _or_ the seeds go down then torrent doesn't work. The changes remove a redundant step and do NOT add any additional privacy.

The new .torrent files contain simply discovery about the seeds instead of about a tracker. The new clients share tracking information.

This means the MPAA actually has it easier: they don't have to "take" the tracker, they connect to a torrent like any other downloader and collect all of the addresses of all of the downloaders (as they would be operating as a tracker as well).

And for the record, I would never be caught dead downloading Slackware ISOs as I don't have time to waste. Ubuntu's tracker (on the other hand) went down two days ago.

Re:Copyright?

[emilv]

Then they should just connect to a tracker and see what pieces other hosts have made available, and record their ip's...

Oh, you've missunderood it; the other hosts are only QUOTING the original material ;)