MyDogHsFleas
Premium
join:2007-08-15
Austin, TX
 ·AT&T U-Verse
 ·AT&T Southwest
| Re: Bit torrent is here to stay The ISPs don't like BitTorrent because it breaks their business model of shared bandwidth. It makes everyone an always-uploading server. They don't care, really, that copyrighted material is being shared.
The content owners and re-distributors, on the other hand, care a lot about copyrighted material, whether it's shared via BitTorrent or straight downloaded from YouTube or wherever. But they don't like BitTorrent because, by any measure, the vast amount of traffic sent using BitTorrent is copyrighted material.
Corporations also don't like BitTorrent because it's a security risk. One mis-click and confidential stuff on my work laptop is suddenly pushed out to the world. (The company I work for prohibits BitTorrent for exactly this reason.)
The people who like BitTorrent are 98% those who want to receive and distribute copyrighted material, and 2% people who use BitTorrent to distribute, legitimately, their own material, or freely-copiable FOSS material.
The intersection of people who think BitTorrent is good, and people who use it for legitimate purposes, is very small. Not zero... but very small.
This is a problem. I don't know what the solution is, but it's a problem. Because BitTorrent is great technology. It's like a new kind of node in the network.. not a client, not a server, but something else. And it's easy to set up, it works great, and it is effective at what it does. It kind of turns the Internet into a crude data grid. |
