So is BitTorrent dead?

Hardly.

Now maybe you're not the sort of person who used to use the BitTorrent service for downloading. If you were, then you could have been watching The Incredibles on 5.1 audio DVD over Christmas. (A copy of the Disney DVD hit the net the week before Christmas, I am reliably informed).

For those who don't know, BitTorrent is the latest and greatest way to download large files quickly from the internet. Obviously, this system has been waylaid by individuals who trade in music, movies, and television shows. I hear that in the US, most fans of the Battlestar Galactica series have already seen the episodes, thanks to BitTorrent. (The series starts on Jan 14th in the US).

A few weeks ago, the MPAA made the fatal mistake of trying to take down all the websites which serve the "torrent" files. They had some success. The sites hosting the torrent files were not doing anything illegal really, since a torrent is not a copyrighted work. But it's hard to face legal threats against a monopoly when you're just an individual. And in the US, let's face it, Justice can be bought with a nice big cheque.

So for the moment, the traditional well-known torrent sites, like suprnova.org have gone away. And the MPAA is probably thinking "excellent" and "we did it".

Fools.

Those who do not learn from the mistakes of history are condemned to repeat them. Specifically, the bit where making DeCSS code illegal led to the whack-a-mole days where the code sprang up EVERYWHERE, even on T-shirts, and the cease-and-desist letters couldn't keep up. Or the way shutting down Napster led to the creation of Gnutella and eDonkey and Kazaa, which meant more music is traded illegally now in a DAY than was traded by Napster in the average calander month.

Attacking the torrent sites has done only one thing. Forced the evolution of a better system. Just as Napster had a central server which could be attacked (and it's people sued) as its primary weakness, this led to Gnutella and the rest, which did not have that weakness.

In just a few weeks, we will see the launch of eXeem, which will combine the best qualities of Gnutella and other P2P technology, with BitTorrent. A series of dynamic trackers passed quickly back and forth between a virtual cloud of peers. No central point. No weak spot. And no way to stop it.

There are 5000 beta testers working with this right now.
And when it goes public in about 20 weeks, give or take, the MPAA is truly fucked.
posted by Manchild at 2:30 AM