BSA Reacts to 'New' BitTorrent 326
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.'"
Re:So what? (Score:2, Interesting)
Shared responsibility (Score:5, Interesting)
What bittorrent is about is being able to send very small but verifiably authentic parts of the file - but is that enough for them to prove the person has the infringing content?
My guess is that this is going to be made into law in the US in the near future - that if they get a single BitTorrent packet from you that belongs to an infringing file, it's enough to convict you of a crime and haul your behind in jail.
-- Arik
Re:Shared responsibility (Score:5, Interesting)
Yes, because the clients broadcast how much of the file they have.
If you don't think thats enough for a warrant, go down to the local police station and start shouting that you're carrying a pound of crack.
I2P (Score:3, Interesting)
So, in real time we hash the payload to a (Score:3, Interesting)
DMCA violation trumps copyright violation any day.
Re:A question about incomplete files (Score:1, Interesting)
Two dilemmas (Score:5, Interesting)
What if you and your 10,000 friends each stand a in line and each of you are holding a paper citing a line from the book. Are each of you just using your citation rights?
Re:Copyright? (Score:1, Interesting)
Very bad analogy. It is not generally expected that anyone finding a manuscript on a street corner will attempt to publish it. It is generally accepted that someone finding a link to download a file they want will click on the link.
Correct analogy: if you give me a copy of your book, I have the right to accept the gift, and you can't turn round and accuse me of theft.
Trackers won't get hosed - Will Swarms Balkanise ? (Score:2, Interesting)
A more interesting question might be will this lead to other problems as swarms split and fragment. You may end up joining a tiny swarm cut off from the main swarm and thus get no bandwidth.
Or stuck in a swarm with no seeds.
Bram is very Clever though and I believe he has thought of this - can someone explain it to me though?
Bittorrent is designed to scale well and to ease the load on the Seed.
The problem was that the tracker did not scale well, even though it is a small file, it gets communicated with reguarly and just doesn't scale, popular files take down trackers.
So trackerless trackers simply allow better scaling and ease publication - so I would say that this innovation is more for legitimate files running on indiviual sites rather than Advert funded Warez trackers.
The myth of Internet anonimity has allowed an awful lot of fools to be caught. Naughty Bittorent swappers only have security through numbers.
How about underground fanzines which publish Movies as UUENCODED ASCII which is then typed in or OCR'ed - these could be published as poetry and protected as Free Speech.
Rodi - an alternative to BitTorrent? (Score:2, Interesting)
It is good news (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:So what? (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Two dilemmas (Score:2, Interesting)
What if you and your 10,000 friends each stand a in line and each of you are holding a paper citing a line from the book. >Are each of you just using your citation rights?
This is equivalent to (weakly) encrypting the book before distributing it, and here's why:
In order to verify the authenticity of the parts, the receiver must have the authentication algorithm. Therefore, the sender must send the data (i.e. 500,000 chicks, each with a letter on her t-shirt) as well as the key (i.e. the order in which the t-shirts must be removed to be read).
Obviously, the guy that thought this scheme up and implemented it is guilty as sin; he had the intent. However, I would not consider the chicks to be guilty, even if each one had her own copy of the key, as long as she was unaware of what the key unlocked.
If the chicks are a general transport mechanism, then they are just couriers, and could very well be used for legitimate purposes. It is only when they are aware that what they are carrying is part of an illegal act that they assume responsibility for that act.
I guess my thesis here is that there has to be intent to commit a crime for there to be guilt, in this situation.
BT definatly contributes to warez (Score:1, Interesting)
No, you can't blame BT for piracy but you can blam eit for the boom in the amount of piracy.
First let me qualify myself by saying I have been involved in the Warez scene for about 10 years. I remember when Quake 2 was the zero day release and when the size of the acceptable release was raised.
Now, back in "the day" the warez scene was a community. You needed to know somebody or contribute to be involved. Leeching was shunned upon. You need to have skills (I personally hacked server to make zero day FTP's). You couldn't just download to your hearts content.
When P2P came into existence this started to change, you no longer needed to involved, you could go to what amounts to a store and pick out any song and or piece of software to pirate.
As the pipes for fatter and people caught on, even the P2P community started to go down hill. It was flooded with crap, bad files, and incorrect releases.
Along comes BT. It provides the redundancy check to make sure you are getting the correct info, it FORCES you to share with anybody else who has the torrent and it scales in such a way that big file downloads are no longer a huge drain on bandwidth for the provider.
BT has facilitated the world of warez a lot. Without it you would still need to be on IRC getting zero day FTPs and provided a service to the community. With BT any person can download a torrent and if they are on a fat pipe, have a new movie, album, or expensive piece of software in a short amount of time.
Blocks (Score:5, Interesting)
Each block is, say, 128 KB.
Each block contains bits that are indistinguishable from random noise.
Each block has a number, which is its hash. Block numbers are much longer than in the example below.
Each block may have come from a different IP address, indeed, even through a different network protocol (Gnutella, OpenNap, Mute, Http, etc.)
You obtain a list of reassembly instructions through another network and reassemble the blocks as follows. (Each block you downloaded is labeled with a B, and the content blocks of the reassembled result are labeled with a C.)
C1 = B224 xor B166
C2 = B287 xor B948
C3 = B569 xor B982
C4 =
C5 =
etc....
Blocks C1, C2, C3, etc. taken together form a copyright infringement.
Which IP address sent you the infringing work? Each block may have come from a different address? Each block is not infringing content.
Which block is infringing? The first block of the infringing reassembled file C1, was formed from B224 and B166. So was B224 infringing? Or was B166 infringing?
B224, when combined with a different block in the network results in a portion of The Declaration of Independence. B166 when combined with yet some other block from the network results in a portion of The Bible.
Maybe the infringer is who gave you the list of reassembly instructions that told you which blocks to obtain and how to reassemble them? But this information is not directly a copyright infringement. In fact, it may be a fairly short text file.
Note that I did use double the download bandwidth to obtain my copyright infringing material. But for that cost, I raised a whole bunch of questions about who to blame. And I did not suffer the horrible performance of Freenet. (I have not tried Mute.)
(This is an idea I read somewhere.)
Such a hypothetical Blocks p2p system could potentially be designed with the swarming advantages of BitTorrent. Each block could be available from multiple sources -- even multiple network protocols.
Re:Fry the BSA members in the Electric Chair (Score:3, Interesting)
I suppose that if you got enough people on your side to create a direct vote to remove copyright protection it would be democratic. That doesn't mean it wouldn't be right.
What you do for a living? If you do anything which isn't directly involved in the production of hard, physical goods, I hope you'll come to see the hypocracy in your stance.
The reason copyright protection exists is that creating content takes work, and while the physical nature of many other forms of creation (making physical goods, which cannot be duplicated without a similar expenditure of effort) leads to scarcity that drives a fair asking price, no such natural restrictions exist on content that may take just as much legitimate effort to create. Hence, another method to drive a fair asking price has been created.
Further down the same road, why pay for services? Those people serving you at the restaurant... they aren't really GIVING you anything, are they? The lawn care person, the teacher, the housecleaner... you don't HAVE anything that you didn't before employing their services. What's more, you don't have anything they can take back, so why not just refuse to pay?
You might say "Yes, but I'm just getting a copy of the work... the artist didn't do anything more for me specifically." This is true, but by that nature, you should be paying a few thousand dollars or so for every CD you DO buy. Copying and timeshifting makes something that costs loads of money to make and market available at a much lower cost.
I'm not saying that price is required, just that the rights of distribution being held by the creator is a good thing, since similarily arduous tasks have the same protection through physical laws. And, yes, enforcement is a bitch when you get slapped with the lawsuit, and I'll fight on the side of anyone who's unfairly punished, but in many cases, the rules of the game were laid out well in advance.
As for your "movement", you forgot to mention the option of disagreeing and being the fuck in the way... I'd say that's a valid option, non?
(I really should just save one of these sometime-- slashdot-copyright-rant.txt-- so I don't have to keep typing it out all the time.)
Re:Shared responsibility (Score:3, Interesting)
Yes, they would.
(And thereby upload to others themselves at the same time.)
Not if they set it up behind a firewall. Sure, it'll be slow as hell, but they only need to request enough of an uncompressed ISO to confirm that it is what it says it is (ie, if they know where on the ISO their installer is, they can grab that chunk of data and prove that the file being distributed contains their installer, which is, of course, copyrighted.)
Re:Shared responsibility (Score:4, Interesting)
In such a case, there are existing "turkey laws" that apply. Selling a pound of powdered sugar and calling it cocaine carries the same penalty as selling real cocaine. Such laws only apply to drug sales, and for any other sale, the charge would actually be simple fraud.
Sharing is Sharing, Stealing is Stealing (Score:4, Interesting)
If you don't like the price of a movie, don't pay it, but also.. don't steal it. There's people who make that stuff for their living. They spend lots of time and energy on it in the expectation that many people will be interested in buying a copy for personal use. It doesn't matter if you think that's a valid profession, or morally correct. it's their business. Their life. And if they wouldn't sell you the copy if they knew you were going to turn around and give it away for free to everyone you could, on a massive basis, on the world-wide internet, that means that if you do, you're lying and stealing and violating their trust.
Sharing can't happen without trust.
Now, if you give it to a friend, and that friend gives it to a friend, etc. etc. and it remains low-level, then it doesn't matter what they think. It's none of their business what you do with it as long as it's basically private to you and your friends and family.
Now maybe you disagree with the particular place I've drawn that line. You may see the line at a slightly different place in the sand. Or think it's blurry. Or gray, or not so gray. That's a whole other argument.
But I think we would all benefit us all to identify a community-determined middle area where we tread softly, and broad side areas where we firmly plant our feet. I think we should all preserve and protect the practice of small-scale sharing of everything in the world, even in the face of pressure against this by The Man. I also think we should all preserve and protect the expectation of honesty in a market transaction, even in the face of painful desire for the latest and greatest popular piece of culture.
Re:So what? (Score:3, Interesting)
Just to clarify:there are two basic approaches to creating a protected network: making every member of the network anonymous, or creating a trusted network in one way or another.
Projects like I2P and Tor go the first route of making network members anonymous. Freenet does this too, currently (we'll see what the future holds).
PeerGuardian is a tool to block nodes that are known/suspected of being untrustworthy from accessing your computer using IP filters. While this does help, it is a bit of an uphill battle, and certainly doesn't account for the edge case where the **AA simply pays some college student's tuition to report all IPs that are hosting "Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith".
In the long run, trusted solutions are much harder to implement, and will become a part of networks that will grow relatively slowly. There are a couple of VPN based "metanets" around right now that follow this model, and most of us don't even know about them, much less use them. Their growth was designed to be slow.
Re:Fry the BSA members in the Electric Chair (Score:3, Interesting)
Evidence for this ? I used to think this till I spoke to people I know working on tours. The cost of touring is massive and the artists tend not to make huge sums of money so do still need recording revenue. Also how do you propose that you come up with the large deposits needed to secure the venue bookings and down-payments for the sound and lighting crews etc if they don't get paid for recordings.
I dont think the economics of the music industry are as simple or black and white as regularly made out here.
I am interested in other peoples views on this.
Re:Fry the BSA members in the Electric Chair (Score:3, Interesting)