BitTorrent and Piracy

by on May 10, 2006 · 2 comments

Apropos the discussion of peer-to-peer technologies below, I have to say that the headline of this Forbes article, “WB Sails With Tech Pirate,” is rather obnoxious. Here’s how the article concludes:

However, BitTorrent raised $8.75 million last year in a bid to transform itself from the leading developer of piracy software into a legitimate company that distributes content on the Internet.

BitTorrent is a software tool for efficient file distribution. Do a lot of people use it to commit copyright infringement? Sure. But the same can be said of many other Internet technologies. Indeed, most users who download illegal files with BitTorrent find those files using web-based directories of files available for download. It makes as much sense to say that the web is “piracy software” because many people find illegal BitTorrent trackers using web-based search engines.

Just like the Web, BitTorrent has plenty of legitimate uses. Many open source projects, including SUSE Linux and OpenOffice, use BitTorrent to distribute their software to save money on bandwidth. Blizzard’s World of Warcraft distributes software updates via BitTorrent.

Finally, the Forbes article seems to have difficulty distinguishing between the company and the technology. BitTorrent-the-technology is open source software which anyone is free to use to distribute any type of content. BitTorrent-the-company runs a search engine that allows users to find Torrent files for download. BitTorrent removes links to illegal files as they’re discovered. The fact that some people use BitTorrent to distribute illegal files is no more the company’s fault than it’s Apache’s fault if somebody uses their web server to distribute infringing files.

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About Tim Lee

Timothy B. Lee (Contributor, 2004-2009) is an adjunct scholar at the Cato Institute. He is currently a PhD student and a member of the Center for Information Technology Policy at Princeton University. He contributes regularly to a variety of online publications, including Ars Technica, Techdirt, Cato @ Liberty, and The Angry Blog. He has been a Mac bigot since 1984, a Unix, vi, and Perl bigot since 1998, and a sworn enemy of HTML-formatted email for as long as certain companies have thought that was a good idea. You can reach him by email at leex1008@umn.edu.

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  • Steve R.

    First: you wrote a great paper “Circumventing Competition: The Perverse Consequences of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act”

    Second: Forbes, as a media company is schizophrenic concerning the public’s use/access to content on the internet.

    For example Forbes ran “Attack of the Blogs” (11/14/05). The article intro: “Web logs are the prized platform of an online lynch mob spouting liberty but spewing lies, libel and invective. Their potent allies in this pursuit include Google and Yahoo.”

    Forbes also ran “My Life As a Blogger” (12/26/05). A quote out of the article: “People write blogs because they want to know themselves and want to be known by others and because they want their lives to count.”

    To broaden the topic into the piracy arena; in reading Forbes, NY Times, LA Times, and PCMagazine, I get the impression (that as media companies) that they are stuck in an obsolete business model. Rather than adapt, these companies are professing the position that they “own” content and have an exclusive “right” on how it is to be used. To legitimize this approach they have lobbied for legislative support citing “piracy” as a major threat to their revenue stream rather than acknowleding their lack of ability to adapt. General Motors and Ford are slowly going down the tubes because they failed to adapt. Here you have Forbes magazine supposedly promoting capitalism and innovative technologies actually fostering a reactive luddite approach to progress.

  • http://www2.blogger.com/profile/14380731108416527657 Steve R.

    First: you wrote a great paper “Circumventing Competition: The Perverse Consequences of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act”

    Second: Forbes, as a media company is schizophrenic concerning the public’s use/access to content on the internet.

    For example Forbes ran “Attack of the Blogs” (11/14/05). The article intro: “Web logs are the prized platform of an online lynch mob spouting liberty but spewing lies, libel and invective. Their potent allies in this pursuit include Google and Yahoo.”

    Forbes also ran “My Life As a Blogger” (12/26/05). A quote out of the article: “People write blogs because they want to know themselves and want to be known by others and because they want their lives to count.”

    To broaden the topic into the piracy arena; in reading Forbes, NY Times, LA Times, and PCMagazine, I get the impression (that as media companies) that they are stuck in an obsolete business model. Rather than adapt, these companies are professing the position that they “own” content and have an exclusive “right” on how it is to be used. To legitimize this approach they have lobbied for legislative support citing “piracy” as a major threat to their revenue stream rather than acknowleding their lack of ability to adapt. General Motors and Ford are slowly going down the tubes because they failed to adapt. Here you have Forbes magazine supposedly promoting capitalism and innovative technologies actually fostering a reactive luddite approach to progress.

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