BitTorrent News

Legal tension over tech abuse

2005/02/24
In 2002, a young software programmer in Seattle named Bram Cohen solved a vexing Internet problem: how to get large computer files such as home movies or audio recordings of music concerts to travel rapidly across cyberspace.

Among the benefits of the invention, called BitTorrent, was that millions of users could quickly see lengthy amateur videos documenting the devastation of the December tsunami, helping to spur an outpouring of charitable aid.

But BitTorrent also is wildly popular because the technology makes it easier to freely trade Hollywood movies and television shows, putting it in the cross hairs of the entertainment industry.

Increasingly, that same tension surrounds a dazzling new generation of high-tech products and services that help people copy, customize and increase the portability of digital works, sparking a sharp legal debate: how should courts view technologies that have beneficial uses but also are heavily used for illegal acts?

Next month, the US Supreme Court is scheduled to hear arguments on whether a file-sharing service named Grokster should be held liable for those who use it to illegally trade music, movies and software.

The entertainment industry is asking the court to rule that even though Grokster itself does not engage in stealing files, the service is responsible because it is mostly used for theft and has done nothing to try to stop that use.

The prospect that the court might adopt this legal reasoning is sending shudders through the technology and consumer electronics communities. Hundreds of existing products could be threatened, they say. And they fear that new products, and early funding, will die if gear is co-opted by people wishing to use it improperly.

``If it's so risky for me to try out new things or put new things on the market, you are really going to devastate people's willingness to innovate,'' Elliott Frutkin, chief executive of TimeTrax Technologies, said.

His company's hardware and software turn individual songs or entire programs from XM and Sirius satellite radio broadcasts into digital files that can be stored on a computer, burned to a CD or transferred to portable players.

Frutkin said his product safely falls on the legitimate side of law and regulations. But he also knows that many users of technology, especially those who are the quickest to latch onto new gadgets and services, may be willing to push legal boundaries.

``The first people who were playing with the technology TimeTrax is based on weren't people that I would have over for dinner,'' Frutkin said. ``But that's the way things happen.''

Technology companies, including Microsoft, Google, Yahoo and America Online, have urged the court to avoid basing its decision on how much a product is used for nefarious purposes. They argue that courts should look at whether Grokster actively encourages and helps users to steal, which would be punishable under existing copyright law.

Officials of the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) and the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) say that approach would make it too easy for firms to avoid prosecution for acts they tacitly approve but never explicitly encourage.

The Grokster case, they insist, is not about scaring off new inventions. It focuses purely on file-sharing services whose operations the entertainment firms claim are built to encourage, support and profit from piracy, even if the underlying technology has legal uses.

Firms that do not have illegal file-sharing as their primary business model have nothing to fear, Fritz Attaway, chief policy counsel for the MPAA, said.

As an example, Attaway said the MPAA has not sued Cohen, the inventor of BitTorrent, instead targeting several operators of Web sites that serve as BitTorrent directories and openly list copyrighted movies.

Cohen said he developed the technology to allow devotees of bands that allow their concerts to be recorded to share copies with other fans. But he is well aware of the misuse by some BitTorrent index sites, whose operators have openly pitched their directories as resources for copyrighted movies.

``That's like putting a big `shoot me' sign on your forehead,'' Cohen said.

Device makers have fended off the entertainment industry before. In a case that set the legal standards that will be reviewed in the Grokster case, the movie industry sued Sony over its Betamax recorders, arguing that copying TV programs violated copyright laws.

In 1984, the Supreme Court ruled that making a copy to view at another time, or ``time-shifting,'' was an acceptable personal use. More broadly, it determined that device makers could not be held responsible for illegal acts of users as long as the product was ``merely capable'' of substantial uses that were legal.

The decision did not stop the entertainment industry from targeting, sometimes successfully, other products, including digital audio tapes, an early MP3 player and ReplayTV, a digital television recorder that also allowed users to skip commercials and send program copies to a handful of others.

In ReplayTV's case, the firm was forced to shut down rather than fight industry lawsuits, Andrew Wolfe, who was the company's chief technology officer, said. He said that once the litigation started, the company could not raise additional money from venture capitalists or other investors.

``What would have happened if you applied these same standards [sought by the entertainment industry] when people were shown the first Xerox machine?'' Wolfe asked.

One problem is that it is hard to know what the entertainment industry deems to be acceptable use.

The recording industry, for example, has never explicitly said whether burning songs to CDs is acceptable use, Steven Marks, general counsel of the RIAA said.

But burning a CD and distributing it to others is ``clearly illegal,'' he said.

There is also a difference of opinion about what someone can record with a VCR. According to the MPAA's Attaway, the Betamax case gave consumers the right to record over-the-air TV transmissions, but not programs via cable or satellite television.

Such distinctions could pose problems for the burgeoning business of digital television recorders, Gary Shapiro, head of the Consumer Electronics Association, the lobbying arm of roughly 2,000 device makers, said.

``The content people will tell you that everything that is not authorized ... is infringing,'' he said. ``This is the corporate equivalent of living under a tyrannical dictator. You are not breaking the law, but you want to keep your head down and not be noticed because the dictator randomly kills.''

In one ongoing dispute, the movie industry is challenging Federal Communications Commission (FCC) approval of a new feature from digital-recorder maker TiVo that allows its users to make copies of digitally enhanced television programs and transfer them to a limited number of other locations.

Attaway argues that product and service providers who base their businesses around piracy should not be able to hide behind the mantle of innovation.

``Why should device manufacturers be exempt from all possibility of litigation?'' he asked.

Another source of tension will probably be copying of digital radio programs and other broadcast ``streams'' designed to be listened to but not downloaded. Marks of the RIAA said his organization has told the FCC that users should be allowed to record only an entire program or stream, not cherry-pick individual songs to build their own music libraries.

TimeTrax allows recording of individual elements of a program, Frutkin said, but to demonstrate the company's anti-piracy commitment, it electronically stamps any recorded element so that if it showed up on a file-sharing net work it would be easy to trace.

A small California company called Grouper Networks makes file-sharing software for the private use of family members or other small groups, mostly aimed at those wanting to share photos. The software prevents copying music files and imposes restrictions on the size of any group wishing to share photos.

``We know what people want to do'' with the software, founder Josh Felser said.

``But we are not going to get embroiled in the controversy surrounding file-sharing.''

Some who are concerned about the Grokster case say no matter what the Supreme Court does, the movie studios and recording labels are ultimately fighting a losing battle by trying to bottle up new technologies.

``We are moving into a world where access to information is more democratized,'' Brad Burnham, a New York venture capitalist who works with early-stage media companies, said.

``It's too easy to move it around. Value is going to shift from the creation of content to the organization and customization of that content.''

LokiTorrent Site Suffers Downtime

2005/02/10
According to a report by research and analysis firm Netcraft (netcraft.com), the BitTorrent hub LokiTorrent (lokitorrent.com) was offline on Thursday for an extended period of time. Netcraft did not say what caused the outage.

LokiTorrent is one of the most popular sites supporting the BitTorrent file sharing protocol. The site has more than 680,000 registered members and has been averaging 185,000 visitors per day in recent weeks, Netcraft says.

Sites supporting BitTorrent have come under legal pressure over the last few months. In December, two BitTorrent hubs � SuperNova.org and BitTorrents.org � were forced to shut down after the Motion Picture Association of America began filing lawsuits against sites supporting BitTorrent. The MPAA is concerned with the popularity of BitTorrent because the protocol is often used to pirate DVDs. LokiTorrent has reportedly said it will fight the lawsuit.

BitTorrent breaks large files into smaller chunks and allows users to simultaneously upload and download them for more efficient sharing of large files. The software has been downloaded more than 20 million times.

At press time, LokiTorrent was up and running.

BitTorrent in Morpheus 4.7

2005/02/10
StreamCast Networks, makers of the Morpheus p2p file sharing application, will today unveil Morpheus 4.7 ...

... with BitTorrent on board.

BitTorrent creator Bram Cohen has been kept au fait with the application’s progress, but wasn’t involved in its actual development, a source told p2pnet.

We asked StreamCast ceo Michael Weiss if the inclusion of BT gives him concerns that his company might wind up on the wrong end of a lawsuit launched by the MPAA (Motion Picture Association of America), which has been targetting BT sites over the past few weeks, even using parents as surrogate movie industry cops.

“There are solutions beyond lawsuits – especially when they’re against dead people,” he said, referring to the RIAA’s (Recording Industry Association of America) recent attempt to sue a deceased 83-year-old grandmother.

“Lawsuits aren’t the answer.

“A better way is to give users the option to purchase a file or content at a fair price using p2p software.”

In the meanwhile, “Everyone is very proud of what’s under the hood this time around,” says the source.

“The big thing is Morpheus 4.7 gives people the ability to search for, and simultaneously download, multiple torrents easily from across the major p2p file sharing networks, and all from within the Morpheus interface.”

Until now, "the only readily available way for users to find and obtain files and content using BitTorrent was both inefficient and, often times, inaccurate, leading to files and web pages that are out of date or are no longer in existence,” says Weiss.

The 4.7 release is the most technologically advanced Morpheus to date and builds on the existing NEOnetT technology. When a user downloads a file, it puts it into a share folder which populates both NEOneT and Gnutella.

“NEOnet is a decentralized peer-to-peer file search and sharing software application,” says Morpheus, emphasizing. “It’s not a network, system or service. It’s content agnostic. It’s also legal.”

Morpheus 4.7 could ultimately enhance Gnutella’s robustness, adds the source.

Morpheus 4.7 is ad-supported and available as a free download here. The Morpheus Ultra ad-free version is going for $19.95 here.

To date, the Morpheus software has been downloaded more than 130 million times, says StreamCast.

Legal downloads can't stop piracy

2004/12/11
I'm about to save the music industry from shelling out hundreds of thousands of dollars for consultants and research reports, by revealing the marketing secret behind the five-year-long surge in illegal online swapping of songs:

People like to get things for free that would otherwise cost them money. And they won't stop taking them for free just because there's a convenient legal alternative, if that alternative requires opening their wallets.

Stunned by my unique powers of insight? You shouldn't be, yet this obvious lesson seems lost in the squabbling among record labels, quasi-legal peer-to-peer file-sharing networks and start-up companies hoping to offer compromise solutions.

One of those start-ups is Snocap, officially unveiled a week ago. The new service, formed by Napster founder Shawn Fanning, intends to provide copy protection for legal sharing of songs through peer-to-peer networks. In theory, this could help convert thieves to paying customers.

In reality, San Francisco-based Snocap has failed to recruit a supporter among the biggest peer-to-peer services operating today, such as Kazaa, eDonkey, Morpheus and BitTorrent. That's no surprise; these services make money by pushing ads at their users. Free music pulls in more eyeballs, and more eyeballs means more money.

Legal music downloads, by themselves, simply aren't enough to stop piracy.

Like any good consultant, I've got statistics to back up my argument.

Ongoing project

The NPD Group, a research firm in Port Washington, N.Y., released survey results Thursday from an ongoing project where the company monitors activity on 10,000 home computers. NPD uses software that tracks what consumers actually do, not what consumers say they do -- an important distinction in examining touchy subjects such as illegal music downloads.

NPD found a paltry 8 percent of peer-to-peer users, who are busy sucking up unauthorized copies of CD tracks from services such as Kazaa, Morpheus and BitTorrent, have tried legal download services such as Apple's iTunes Music Store or RealNetworks' Rhapsody.

Of that 8 percent, two-thirds continue to use illegal peer-to-peer services, NPD says. The small remaining number have presumably exited the dark side, and are now legal downloaders. But that's a trickle.

Back in summer 2001, when the original Napster service was about to be shut down by court order, I wrote columns saying Napster should be unplugged because artists and record labels deserve to be paid for their work.

I got a huge volume of e-mail in response, much of it filled with morally questionable arguments. My favorite: Record labels charge too much for CDs, so it's OK for me to take them through Napster. That's like saying it's OK to rob convenience stores when the price of milk gets too high.

The more serious arguments for Napster went like this: I'd be willing to buy songs online if there were a legal way to do so, especially if I could buy single tracks instead of being forced to purchase an entire CD.

Well, that's exactly what you now get with iTunes. The service today offers about 1 million tracks, almost all of them available for 99 cents each. And it's hard to imagine a service that would be much easier to use. Once you've set up an account, you find the song you want and just click the ``buy'' button.

But statistics from NPD and others show illegal peer-to-peer downloads are still trending upward. The legal services at best have blunted the rate of growth.

The Recording Industry Association of America, or RIAA, got a huge amount of flack in September 2003 when it began suing people who had thousands of illegal songs on their computers. But the industry had no other choice. The courts ruled, properly I think, that peer-to-peer services weren't responsible for policing what was transferred through their networks. So the only way to stop illegal swapping is to go after the individuals who are breaking the rules.

The fear factor

You wouldn't expect convenience stores to fight shoplifting with nothing more than signs saying, ``It's not nice to steal.'' Most of us don't shoplift because we know it's wrong, but a significant minority don't shoplift only because they're afraid of getting caught.

The music industry won't survive in anything near its current form unless it wields both a carrot and a stick. New and more creative forms of licensing are needed to make legal services increasingly attractive. Why not sell older and more obscure tracks at 49 cents, for example, or allow users to listen to a downloaded song once for free before buying?

At the same time, the industry needs to keep prosecuting pirates and taking other unpleasant but necessary steps. No form of paid service can survive online when there's a free alternative that users aren't afraid to tap.

BitTorrent giving Hollywood a headache

2004/12/11
LOS ANGELES -- Bram Cohen didn't set out to upset Hollywood movie studios. But his innovative online file-sharing software, BitTorrent, has grown into a piracy problem the film industry is struggling to handle.

As its name suggests, the software lets computer users share large chunks of data. But unlike other popular file-sharing programs, the more people swap data on BitTorrent, the quicker it flows -- and that includes such large files as feature films and computer games.

Because of its speed and effectiveness, BitTorrent steadily gained in popularity after the recording industry began cracking down last year on users of Kazaa, Morpheus, Grokster and other established file-sharing software.

The program now accounts for as much as half of all online file-sharing activity, says Andrew Parker, chief technology officer of Britain-based CacheLogic, which monitors such traffic.

"BitTorrent is more of a threat because it is probably the latest and best technological tool for transferring large files like movies," said John Malcolm, senior vice president of anti-piracy operations for the Motion Picture Association of America. "It is unusual, perhaps unique, in that the moment you start downloading you are also uploading," he added. "It's what makes it so efficient."

Cohen created BitTorrent in 2001 as a hobby after the dot-com crash left him unemployed. He says the aim was to enable computer users to easily distribute content online -- not specifically copyrighted content.

"It seems pretty clear that a lot of people are actively interested in engaging in wanton piracy," said Cohen, 29, of Bellevue, Wash. "As far as I'm concerned, they're just pushing around bits, and what bits it is they're pushing around is not really a concern of mine. There's not much I can do about it."

BitTorrent has proven to be resistant to some of the countermeasures the entertainment industry has taken to sabotage file-sharing, including a process known as file-spoofing in which incomplete or decoy versions of songs or other material are uploaded to discourage piracy.

"Spoofing is very difficult on BitTorrent, if at all possible," said Mark Ishikawa, chief executive of online tracking firm BayTSP Inc. "There's no defense for this one."

Programs such as Kazaa and Morpheus allow users to link their PCs to computer networks and then query a search engine for the file or title they're seeking. The software then churns out a list of other computers sharing the file.

The process is simple and straightforward, which makes it relatively easy to corrupt with spoofed files.

With BitTorrent, however, users don't find whole files. The program seeks out torrent files, also known as seed files, that are hosted by a number of Web sites.

The files on the Web sites are not songs or movies but serve as markers that point the way to other users sharing a given file. BitTorrent then assembles complete files from multiple chunks of data obtained from everyone who is sharing the file.

Attempts to upload bogus files to corrupt the process fail because the BitTorrent program follows a blueprint of the original file when piecing it together.

"It's very difficult for an interdiction company to get in the middle of that system," said Ishikawa, whose company combs file-sharing networks on behalf of Hollywood studios and alerts clients when their movies turn up on the Internet.

Some of the BitTorrent host sites, like SuprNova.org, generate a daily list of new seed files added by users. The site recently had listings for movies such as "Van Helsing" and "Wimbledon," which is not scheduled for release on DVD for another three weeks.

Some sites offer digitized broadcasts of "The Daily Show With Jon Stewart," computer games like "Star Trek: Klingon Academy" and "Half Life 2," e-books on the physics behind an atomic bomb, even footage of kidnap victims in the Middle East.

"A bunch of the different beheadings are online," Ishikawa said.

Downhill Battle, a Worcester, Mass.-based independent music group that has developed its own BitTorrent-based software called Blog Torrent, says the technology is much more than a tool for swapping copyright movies and software (a blog is a Web journal).

"What we're excited about as far as BitTorrent goes is the possibility for people to blog video and blog their own home movies (and) independent films and have a way to distribute them online without having to have a big budget for Web-hosting," said Nicholas Reville, one of the group's directors.

"Bandwidth has been a big barrier," he said. "BitTorrent solved that."

While some of the BitTorrent sites that host seed files have been forced to shut down, many others escape scrutiny because they're only hosting marker files, not copyrighted material.

Malcolm of the MPAA says his organization is not focusing any more or less on BitTorrent than other file-sharing system. He declined to say whether the trade group intends to sue Cohen and wouldn't name any BitTorrent users who may have been included in the entertainment industry's latest wave of lawsuits.

"Anyone who uses BitTorrent and is under the illusion that they are anonymous are sorely mistaken," Malcolm said. "There is no reason why those lawsuits wouldn't include BitTorrent" users.

So far, Cohen said, he has not become a target of the entertainment industry, which has aggressively pursued litigation against other file-sharing software distributors, with mixed success. On Friday, the U.S. Supreme Court agreed to hear an appeal by movie studios and music labels of a ruling that found Grokster Ltd. and StreamCast Networks Inc., the firm behind the Morpheus software, to not be responsible for their customers' online swapping of copyright songs and movies.

For his part, Cohen said he has received just one legal warning, over a computer game that was being distributed using BitTorrent.

"Someone else was doing something with BitTorrent that I had no knowledge of," Cohen said. "It's not being done on any machines I have any control over ... what do you want me to do?"

BitTorrent takes a hit from DDoS attacks

2004/12/04
According to this story at CNet, unknown attackers have been flooding popular BT networks since last Wednesday, putting servers and tracker hosts to its knees. As some of you know, despite of the fact BitTorrent infrastructure does not depend on a central server for finding/searching through available files on the network (like the old Napster, Kazaa do), it still does heavily rely on trackers that redirect the user to the different pieces of a file which could be hosted on several users\' PCs. At the time of posting both Suprnova.org and LokiTorrent sites were down.

\"The distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack on the BitTorrent infrastructure prevented some users from downloading files for up to 10 hours on Wednesday, said the administrator, who asked to be identified only by his online handle, \"Lowkee.\" The target was the central BitTorrent directories, or trackers, which are used by people to find movies, music and other content on the file-swapping network, he said.\"

As a side note, Suprnova owners seem to be working on a new file-sharing application called \"Exeem\", currently under beta testing:

\"No more web mirrors, no more bottle necks and no more slow downs. Exeem will marry the best features of a decentralized network, the easy searchability of an indexing server and the swarming powers of the BitTorrent network into one program.\"

Shaw ISP Customers Experience BitTorrent Slowdown

2004/11/18
In late October, Slyck reported on the bizarre and unexplained P2P occurrences for MediaCom ISP users. According to numerous MediaCom users on BroadBandReports.com and Slyck, the ability to connect and participate on P2P networks, especially BitTorrent, was virtually nil. According to statements from both MediaCom and their provider, AT&T, there was no known problem and the situation mysteriously corrected itself.

It appears a similar situation is appearing in Canada with Shaw Communications subscribers. Shaw Communications is well-established communications company that provides Broadband Cable access across Canada. Much like the mysterious situation in the United States two weeks ago, Shaw customers have witnessed their BitTorrent experiences deteriorate.

According to numerous forum posts at RBUA.org (Resident Broadband Users Association) and BroadBandReports.com, customers of Shaw Communications have experienced their upload speed drop to often below 1 kB/sec. Different customers have been affected in various ways. While some report no difference in download speed, others report deterioration in both upload and download speed. Interestingly, much like the MediaCom situation, there are some individuals that report no deterioration at all.

Shaw Communication has commented (11th post down) on the issue, in response to an anonymous post by an individual claiming (fourth post down) to be a technical support employee of the ISP. The anonymous individual claimed that Shaw Communications was indeed throttling certain P2P traffic.

"This information is based upon the posts of a user in a discussion forum rather than on an official statement issued by Shaw. While posters in forums do often make claims of having inside knowledge of the issues with the service in question (whether that service is Shaw or otherwise), there is no way to confirm the accuracy of the information being posted by that user, not to mention the fact that the poster may or may not even be in a position to acquire that information. The only information about the Shaw network which should be taken as fact is that information released by Shaw. At present, Shaw has not taken any position on the situation regarding peer to peer filesharing speeds, and is investigating the situation in order to determine the cause of the issue. If you could provide us with the following information, we would be better able to investigate the problem and take the appropriate action to address it. "

In addition, Shaw Communications denies any throttling of P2P traffic (page 3, third post from bottom.)

"Shaw has certainly not taken any action to throttle BitTorrent traffic. We do not place restrictions of that sort on what a user can do with his/her Internet connection. Rather, there have been problems reported all over the Internet from a good many different service providers about problems with BitTorrent. I've noticed that my own BitTorrent downloads have slowed dramatically, but there is no apparent explanation for the problem. Since the decline in speed only seems to affect BitTorrent (i.e. other downloads are not affected), this suggests that the cause of the problem is with some aspect of the BitTorrent protocol itself, though there are also many users who are reporting no problems at all. We are investigating in order to determine where the cause of the problem is, but since it is being so widely reported outside our network, this suggests that it is not a problem with Shaw, but with BitTorrent, and since we do not produce or support BitTorrent, our options for resolving the problem are limited. We are doing what can be done, however."

How the BitTorrent protocol could suddenly cause such a wide spread slow down is unclear at this time. Shaw Communications has assured its customers that they will look into the issue, however no explanation has been offered. It is quite possible this is a transient problem, much like the MediaCom situation, and that a resolution in one form or another may present itself in the near future.

MacGameSeed offers game downloads via BitTorrent

2004/11/08
MacGameSeed is a new online resource for Mac gamers that links to Mac game demo and trailer and update downloads available through the BitTorrent peer-to-peer file sharing service.

BitTorrent has become a popular method for sharing files because users help to collectively distribute the content they're sharing, rather than downloading it from a single server or a specific peer. While BitTorrent can be -- and often is -- used to distribute pirated media and software, it's also been legitimately used by companies like Blizzard Entertainment, which has relied on BitTorrent to distribute the massive beta versions of its soon-to-be-released game World of Warcraft.

The service is an outgrowth of Ludomac, a French-language Web site for Mac gamers. MacGameSeed co-founder Simon de Chabaneix said Ludomac's BitTorrent service was popular enough that he and co-founder Camille Thouvenin decided to expand the service to international users. MacGameSeed requires no identification or registration, though you will need a BitTorrent client in order to download the files.

Hollywood can't stop the BitTorrent

Movie and record industry executives want America's highest court to review a ruling legitimizing peer-to-peer software, but file-sharing networks won't give up the fight.
November 9, 2004

Fearing a new technology that could let file swappers download feature-length movies in two hours instead of twelve, Hollywood wants the Supreme Court to make the nightmare go away.

The companies sued by the record and movie industries - Grokster and StreamCast - filed their own request yesterday, asking the Supreme Court to ignore Hollywood's last-ditch effort at control.

Experts say neither the entertainment industry nor the Supreme Court can block technology's progress. The technology that frightens movie execs most: BitTorrent, a simple and powerful tool that allows Internet users to get huge files, and fast.

BitTorrent's inevitable entry into file sharing is just around the corner, industry insiders say.

Those in the know believe the Supreme Court is unlikely to step in on behalf of the entertainment industry, which filed a request asking the court to reverse a ruling earlier this year that that favors file swappers.

"Their chances are slim to none," said StreamCast attorney Charles Baker, one of the lawyers defending peer-to-peer networks against the movie and recording industry's lobbying efforts. Based in Los Angeles, StreamCast is one of several companies developing file-sharing software.

Yesterday, 41 attorneys general lent their weight to Hollywood's war, claiming that criminals, like child pornographers, use the peer-to-peer networks to sell and swap smut.

"My primary concern deals with the child porn that is so pervasive on peer-to-peer," said Mark Shurtleff, Utah's attorney general. "This file-sharing software has become a major problem for us."

Mr. Shurtleff supported the request to reverse the ruling so he can hold file-sharing networks accountable for "allowing" child pornography to pass through their gates.

"In looking at the possibility of potential prosecutions," said Mr. Shurtleff. "I'm concerned that if the court doesn't overturn the Grokster decision, we may have trouble going after the software people."

But attorneys don't believe StreamCast and similar companies can be blamed for criminal use of the Internet.

"The notion that somehow the court decision must be reconsidered in order to prevent child pornography from spreading further on the web is preposterous," said John Palfrey, director of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School. "There are plenty of laws that outlaw trafficking in child pornography."

Mr. Palfrey said the reason four judges have ruled in favor of the peer-to-peer companies is simple: the file-sharing networks cannot be shut down for the sins of their users.

BitTorrent Accounts for 35% of Traffic

LIVEWIRE - File-sharing network thrives beneath the radar

By Adam Pasick

LONDON (Reuters) - A file-sharing program called BitTorrent has become a behemoth, devouring more than a third of the Internet's bandwidth, and Hollywood's copyright cops are taking notice.

For those who know where to look, there's a wealth of content, both legal -- such as hip-hop from the Beastie Boys and video game promos -- and illicit, including a wide range of TV shows, computer games and movies.

Average users are taking advantage of the software's ability to cheaply spread files around the Internet. For example, when comedian Jon Stewart made an incendiary appearance on CNN's political talk show "Crossfire," thousands used BitTorrent to share the much-discussed video segment.

Even as lawsuits from music companies have driven people away from peer-to-peer programs like KaZaa, BitTorrent has thus far avoided the ire of groups such as the Motion Picture Association of America. But as BitTorrent's popularity grows, the service could become a target for copyright lawsuits.

According to British Web analysis firm CacheLogic, BitTorrent accounts for an astounding 35 percent of all the traffic on the Internet -- more than all other peer-to-peer programs combined -- and dwarfs mainstream traffic like Web pages.

"I don't think Hollywood is willing to let it slide, but whether they're able to (stop it) is another matter," Bram Cohen, the programmer who created BitTorrent, told Reuters.

John Malcolm, director of worldwide anti-piracy operations for the MPAA, said that his group is well aware of the vast amounts of copyrighted material being traded via BitTorrent.

"It's a very efficient delivery system for large files, and it's being used and abused by a hell of a lot of people," he told Reuters. "We're studying our options, as we do with all new technologies which are abused by people to engage in theft."

FOR GOOD OR EVIL

BitTorrent, which is available for free on http://bittorrent.com, can be used to distribute legitimate content and to enable copyright infringement on a massive scale. The key is to understand how the software works.

Let's say you want to download a copy of this week's episode of "Desperate Housewives." Rather than downloading the actual digital file that contains the show, instead you would download a small file called a "torrent" onto your computer.

When you open that file on your computer, BitTorrent searches for other users that have downloaded the same "torrent."

BitTorrent's "file-swarming" software breaks the original digital file into fragments, then those fragments are shared between all of the users that have downloaded the "torrent." Then the software stitches together those fragments into a single file that a users can view on their PC.

Sites like Slovenia-based Suprnova (http://www.suprnova.org) offer up thousands of different torrents without storing the shows themselves.

Suprnova is a treasure trove of movies, television shows, and pirated games and software. Funded by advertising, it is run by a teen-age programmer who goes only by the name Sloncek, who did not respond to an e-mailed interview request.

Enabling users to share copyrighted material illicitly may put Suprnova and its users on shaky legal ground.

"They're doing something flagrantly illegal, but getting away with it because they're offshore," said Cohen. He is not eager to get into a battle about how his creation is used. "To me, it's all bits," he said.

But Cohen has warned that BitTorrent is ill-suited to illegal activities, a view echoed by John Malcolm of MPAA.

"People who use these systems and think they're anonymous are mistaken," Malcolm said. Asked if he thought sites like Suprnova were illegal, he said: "That's still an issue we're studying, that reasonable minds can disagree on," he said.

GOING LEGIT

Meanwhile, BitTorrent is rapidly emerging as the preferred means of distributing large amounts of legitimate content such as versions of the free computer operating system Linux, and these benign uses may give it some legal protection.

"Almost any software that makes it easy to swap copyrighted files is ripe for a crackdown BitTorrent's turn at bat will definitely happen," said Harvard University associate law professor Jonathan Zittrain. "At least under U.S. law, it's a bit more difficult to find the makers liable as long as the software is capable of being used for innocent uses, which I think (BitTorrent) surely is."

Among the best legitimate sites for movies and music:

-- Legal Torrents (http://www.legaltorrents.com/), which includes a wide selection of electronic music. It also has the Wired Magazine Creative Commons CD, which has songs from artists like the Beastie Boys who agreed to release some of their songs under a more permissive copyright that allows free distribution and remixing.

-- Torrentocracy (http://torrentocracy.com/torrents/) has videos of the U.S. presidential debates and other political materials.

-- File Soup (http://www.filesoup.com) offers open-source software and freeware, music from artists whose labels don't belong to the Recording Industry Association of America trade group, and programs from public television stations like PBS or the BBC.

-- Etree (http://bt.etree.org) is for devotees of "trade-friendly" bands like Phish and the Dead, who encourage fans to share live recordings, usually in the form of large files that have been minimally compressed to maintain sound quality.

BitTorrent legal games distribution debuts

By Macworld staff

Mac gamers looking for the newest demos have a new source, MacGameSeed.com.

This site distributes legitimate game demos using a variant of the popular BitTorrent. This is a protocol designed for transferring files. It is peer-to-peer in nature, as users connect to each other directly to send and receive portions of the file. However, MacGameSeed acts as a central server which coordinates the action of all peers and keeps a copy of each file to seed them.

Because it's based on peer-to-peer file distribution, the company claims, "unlike other distribution system, the most popular files get even higher download rates".

MacGameSeed co-founder Camille Thouvenin said: "After five years spent working on European Mac gaming sites and two years in the Mac gaming industry, I felt it was time for me to give some of my free time and help Mac gamers from all around the world. When used for legal purposes BitTorrent is a stunning technology."

The site is open now, no identification or registration is required.