aTypical Joe: a gay New Yorker living in the rural South
Friday, November 25, 2005
Bit Torrent beauty
Whoa Nelly, here’s a little sumtin’ sumtin’ to get the attention of the MPAA and RIAA litigation gestapo: Dutch company LamaBox is launching today what they are claiming to be the world’s first media player with built-in peer-2-peer functionality. It plugs directly into your TV, provides search and download support for all the major P2P services you’d expect including Bittorrent and Kazaa, ships with a DVD burner and up to 400GB with 2 additional IDE connections for expansion, and is said to play “any format” of image/audio/video files found on the Internet.
In a deal aimed at reducing illegal internet traffic in pirated films, Hollywood reached an agreement Tuesday with the creator of the popular file-sharing software BitTorrent.
The agreement requires 30-year-old software designer Bram Cohen to prevent his BitTorrent website from locating pirated versions of popular movies, effectively frustrating people who search for illegal copies of films.
Don’t Confuse the Company and the Protocol… The company more or less had to do this to stay a legal enterprise, and is putting a good face on the inevitable. Presumably, few people trading, say, first-run movies are going to be stupid enough to put their torrent sites into the index of the search engine anyway. So in the end, unless Hollywood somehow figures out a way to put the protocol genie back into the bottle this is going to have just about zero impact on the trading of content via BitTorrent (the protocol).
Looking a layer deeper, this story is about whether or not the Cartel will allow companies that kowtow sufficiently to go legit, especially after showing they can smash Grokster (the company - no effect on music trading of course). As with any protocol, BitTorrent software can be used for any number of purposes. If the Cartel ever want to have a distribution protocol and network for their content they’ll have to buy or build something. if BitTorrent (the company) wants to be part of that buy/build answer - and I bet it does - then this kind of agreement is absolutely necessary table stakes.
