Official BitTorrent Search Opens

starrsoft writes "The official BitTorrent search has debuted. The search engine was built by BT inventor Bram Cohen. The question? Will he get sued? The BT search seems to be down right now. (It'll really be down after this story is posted...) Spiegel has more (En): "Naturally other sites such as Bitoogle, Isohunt, SuprNova or Torrentspy have tried before, but either they became fast a goal of legal attacks on the part of the industry or they furnished rather durchwachsene [??] results. BitTorrent search however proves with first tests [that it is] as...Google...fast. The results come from a large number [of] more well-known and unknown... sites, and...permits sufficient restricting to the inquiry, in order to obtain really relevant results.""

use gnutella?

[Anonymous Coward]

I wonder why people haven't been using many of the other p2p applications out there, particularly the decentralized ones, to search for .torrent files. Or am I just crazy?

Distributed webhosting

[Anonymous Coward]

All that's left to do now is build a bittorrent-based webserver

A lawsuit may clear the air...

[Prospero's Grue]

I can't help but wonder if there's a provocation behind this - I guess techdirt thinks so. A legal examination and decision (through a lawsuit) might be just what's needed to clear the air of all the *AA FUD that's tossed around...ala SCO v. Linux case. ...or it may add to it, I suppose - lots of histrionics and propoganda while the wheels of justice grind. Is Grokster settled yet?

Re:I think he'll get sued but...

[solitarian]

so if i were to post a link to the DeCSS code a couple years ago. i wouldn't get sued, because i have only posted a "road sign" to the code?
i wish laws and our courts were more intelligent, but i don't think we can expect the correct judgement from our judiciary system.

Question

[millennial]

Why does the "news" link send you to MySearch, a well-known spyware-related site? Is this why they're planning to be sued?

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:In other news...

[tricops]

One thing that's nice to see in the ICE press release is this (emphasis added):

"ICE and the FBI have shut down a group of online criminals who were using legitimate technology to create one-stop shopping for the illegal sharing of movies, games, software and music."

Re:Speedy

[Adrilla]

If they sue the bittorrent engine shouldn't they sue google since you can always use the 'filetype:torrent' search in the google engine?

Re:Speedy

[Tony Hoyle]

Blizzard's World of Warcraft game uses a bittorrent-like p2p download system for all its large patches. ..which is why anyone with any sense waits for the fileplanet mirror.

BT is great if you're not behind a firewall or on a corporate network... for normal usage get used to downloading your 500MB file at 1k/second.

I have 20 machines behind this firewall.. there is no way in hell port forwarding is going to work, so WoW doesn't get updated for a couple of weeks while until the mirrors get up to speed.

Plus Google is mo better

[jmorris42]

Just tried searching for "Revenge of the Sith" on bittorrent's new search engine and "filetype:torrent Revenge of the Sith" on Google. Google wins hands down for number of hits. Two hits on BT's search and three pages on Google.

Re:Speedy The Drug Dealer

[Tiger4]

"Could I be taken to court for telling people that Joe Bloggs on the other side of town can put them in touch with someone who will give them [illegal item] - I wouldn't think so"

They picked up several dozen people at my high school for doing exactly that.

In that case it was a drug sting operation, but the principle is the same. If you tell me about a friend of a friend that can get me weed/pills/blow, you go to jail for facillitation. Why would that not also be true of warez and music/movies?

Re:Speedy

[mspohr]

You may find it interesting that Metallica has a lakefront house near where I live. They are having constant hassles with people because they keep trying to close "their" beach even though the beach is public access up to high water mark. This is the same as their attitude on their music... greedy.

BitTorrent.com is also using filetype:torrent!

[imtheguru]

I'm surprised that in 150 odd posts, no one has bothered to check the page source.

from http://bittorrent.com
(emphasis mine)

function sendheader(searchtype) {
var searchstr = document.search.searchtxt.value;
if (document.search.rdfile.checked == true) {
--------> searchstr = searchstr+" filetype:torrent"; <--------
document.search.action = "http://ms128.mysearch.com/jsp/GGmain.jsp?searchfo r="+searchstr;
document.search.submit();
}

So, BitTorrent search is using MySearch.com to perform 'filetype:torrent' searches. This also explains the presence of the MySearch news links.

Re:Speedy

[grmoc]

The whole "no-reverse engineering" provision is pretty dang scary to me.. .. So I'd say it wasn't a good law by any stretch of the imagination, because it enforces vendor lock-in, which -may- have absolutely NOTHING to do with defending copyright. .. The prime example of this is the DVD region stuff. The main reason to do this, from a market perspective, is that you can sell to China at a lower price than in the U.S., and those people in the U.S. are prevented from playing those chinese discs on their american dvd players, regardless of whether or not those discs were legally purchased.

There are other problems.

Re:Owner of torrent website was just arrested

[Anonymous Coward]

Ah yes, the standard slashbot "WTF, The fbi/government isn't going after real criminals today! They must be devoting 100% of their resources on catching warzers! How dare they catch those who infringe copy rights, why don't they just do some *real work* and let us download all these movies/games/songs/etc for free?"

Re:Plus Google is mo better

[Yocto Yotta]

Keep in mind that that the BitTorrent engine is going to show you two specific torrents. Google shows you those same two torrents, albiet listed (likely even just referenced and not linked) on dozens of websites. I think Brahm is gosh darn crazy having a hand in this, but as an avid torrent downl- err, 'content browser,'- it's seems as efficient as using several sites to find one particular thing.

Re:Speedy

[squidsoup]

I've been playing Guild Wars [guildwars.com] recently, which like WoW is a MMORPG. The patching system they have implimented is quite remarkable in that you really don't even know it's there. The Guild Wars client, very unobtrusively, streams new content and patches while you are playing.

Monolithic patches are so 2004 :)

What if Google spiders infringing content?

[Anonymous Coward]

If you put the full text of a copyrighted book up on your website (and you don't have permission from the copyright holder), then you are infringing copyright.

If google then spiders your site and caches all that text, then *google* is also infringing copyright.

It's not willful infringement, but they'd still have to remove the content from their caches on request or they'd be fair game for a lawsuit.

IANAL, and if I'm wrong about this I'd love to hear a lawyerly explanation of why.