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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