Of Pirates and Business
Over at paidcontent there is an interesting interview with the founder of BitTorrent Ashwin Navin. BitTorrent is the biggest filesharing tool out there and its estimated that at least 90% of downloaded material is pirated. Now they are preparing to become ‘lega’. Whatever this means is unclear – are they going to ban, censor content dsitributed via BitTorrent, which infringes coyright? The interview only speaks about how to make money via – BitTorrent with ads and premium services – and introducing ‘legalized’ content, but not what will happen to those pirated 90%? But earlier they quoted a Disney executive saying: “Piracy is a business model”. How times change….
3 Responses to “Of Pirates and Business”
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And according to the article:
“There will be plenty of changes to improve the user experience and the new service will no longer be open source.”
They are going to close it up…
It conflates the bittorrent protocol and the site bittorrent.com. The protocol itself can’t be ‘legalized’ or otherwise, since it’s just a delivery mechanism. Anyone can start a tracker and choose to distribute illegal content using bittorrent — it can’t be controlled any more than can FTP or HTTP. Occasionally, pirate sites get shut down (Suprnova) or go legit (Napster) and the pirated 90% quickly finds another tracker. I think bittorrent.com have been legit for a while now, anyhow.
Just quoting the article George. How much longer will a group with such an attitude warrnt a mention on openbusiness?
all the best,
drew