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.'"

So what?

[CoolVibe]

BitTorrent was never designed to anonymize. It was designed to distribute the load of hosting a file. A lot of hoopla about a non-issue.

Re:Copyright?

[leonmergen]

Are but the torrent files do they actually in fringe copyright??

It isn't the .torrent files they're talking about, it's the actual torrent data. They're probably just joining a tracker, and see which ip addresses try to contact their host... not sure if it is enough proof in court, but I can still see they're not scared of this indeed.

Correct

[hotdiggitydawg]

They're right, this changes nothing. At the end of the day someone is still hosting the infringing material, and they're in the firing line.

The BSA, Microsoft and the definition of Extortion

[NZheretic]

The BSA, Microsoft and the definition of Extortion [tuxedo.org]

Re:So what?

[w3weasel]

BitTorrent was never designed to anonymize

For help with that... try this [methlabs.org]

Vive la BitTorrent! Morte du le BSA!

Re:Copyright?

[NewStarRising]

I may be wrong, but isn't it the UPLOADER (distributer) that is commiting the offence?
If someone who owns the copyright to a material is allowing it to be distributed, then there is no offence.

Re:So, in real time we hash the payload to a

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't be touting this stupid shit, it's simply untrue. DMCA doesn't protect infringers any more than trying to hide your IP.

Re:Rodi - an alternative to BitTorrent?

[Professor_UNIX]

Unlike traditional proxied (very slow) anonymous networks (Freenet, Mute, Ants, Winny, etc) the use of IP spoofing can allow high-speed full-bandwidth downloads while keeping the uploader's true IP address hidden from the downloader.

If your ISP still allows IP address spoofing they need to be hit with a clue-stick.

Re:Correct

[Harinezumi]

It doesn't make it impossible for them to shut down a torrent, it simply makes it much harder. Instead of having a single site to shut down (the one hosting the tracker) in order to kill the torrent, they now have to shut down everyone with a complete copy (every seed).

This can number into hundreds or thousands of users, with the number constantly changing as people finish their downloads. And if one or more of those seeds happens to be in a foreign country, it may take months or be outright impossible to shut the torrent down.

Re:Copyright?

[Anonymous Coward]

Entrapment is reserved for criminal cases... ...the word you're looking for is "Maintaining an Attractive Nusance".

winny sucked.

[Anonymous Coward]

winny's creator was arrested.

After failing to crack Winny's encrypted communications used in its file sharing feature, the Kyoto Police switched to a different method, namely tracking users via Winny's integrated forum feature. Unlike its file sharing feature, the forum feature of Winny provided anonymity for users who accessed message threads, but not for creators of threads. Users accessing threads were able to determine the IP address of the originator of the thread.
The Kyoto Police first looked for a thread where its originator was posting the file names of copyrighted material he was sharing, and recorded his IP address. They then configured their firewall to only allow connections to them from the thread owner's IP address. Finally, they confirmed that they could indeed download the copyrighted file from the user who stated (on his thread) that he was sharing it.

Re:Two dilemmas

[TGK]

The problem with your argument is that you're relying on a ficticious bunch of altruistic distributors who don't want anything in return for their bandwidth/services.

In reality, the distributors want something - they want the copyrighted work. Now there is the origional altruistic individual, who donates his bandwitdth or whatever to distribute the file. But everyone else has to download the file in order to distribute it. Now some of those people might have their own legal copies of a particular work, but we can safely assume they don't have that copy for - say - prerelease films.

So if the *AA sees you uploading portions of a file, X, for which there is no publicly available licence, they know you've necessarily downloded those portions or are the origional distributor.

Either on is actionable. The protocol you're using is one desinged to download the entire file -- not just a pre-agreed upon fragment. As such, you can likely be prosecuted for your possession of that file.

Moreover, because the sharing networks have each indivual hosting a large number of file fragments, it's harder to claim Fair Use for partial work distribution.

In short - these programs encourage the agrigation of the data by the host. As such, it's not legaly unreasonable to investigate further based on the evidance given by a single fragment.

Analogy -- you go out a buy a large amount of cold medicine. Now, you could be shopping for a bunch of friends who all have the cold. Or you could be running a meth lab. While the cops can't get a warrant for your arrest based on that, they can get a warrant to search your house.

I smell fear

[springMute]

What are these guys smoking? The concept of the trackerless torrents wasn't created because of the need for protection of tracker servers, but for the ease of distribution... this is not about making it harder to identify trackers. The whole torrent system isn't about circumventing identification or about being completelly anonymous, and the BT author has mentioned this several times.

Re:[slightly OT] Setting up a trackerless BT

[Badaro]

Try port 6969, that's the one traditional trackers use (AFAIK the "Trackerless" mode runs a lightweight tracker on the client).

[]s Badaro