Touted by its creator and its users alike as convenient for file sharing, BitTorrent is being touted by Hollywood as a pain in the rear. And the movie industry just might be hoping to kick their butt in court.
"BitTorrent is more of a threat because it is probably the latest and best technological tool for transferring large files like movies," Motion Picture Association of America senior vice president for anti-piracy John Malcolm told reporters earlier this week. "It is unusual, perhaps unique, in that the moment you start downloading you are also uploading. It's what makes it so efficient."
And so acutely an entertainment industry target. The movie industry, as expected, filed several suits against American and European computer servers that relay digital movie files over networks like BitTorrent and rival eDonkey.
"Today's actions are aimed at individuals who deliberately set up and operate computer servers and Web sites that, by design, allow people to infringe copyrighted motion pictures," Malcolm said at a Washington, D.C. press conference, without naming defendants but saying the suits were filed in the U.S. and England against over 100 targets. "These people are parasites, leeching off the creativity of others. Their illegal conduct is brazen and blatant."
BitTorrent's mastermind told reporters he is only too well aware that, while he created BitTorrent for convenient file sharing, his program could and would be used for swapping movies and similarly copyrighted materials.
"It seems pretty clear that a lot of people are actively interested in engaging in wanton piracy," the 29-year-old Washingtonian said of the program he created as a hobby following the dot-com crash of 2001. "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."
Electronic Frontier Foundation senior staff attorney Fred von Lohmann – whose group is defending Morpheus parent StreamCast in a case the U.S. Supreme Court agreed to hear in 2005, an appeal of lower court rulings holding Morpheus and Grokster not liable for infringement activities their users engage – said these new movie industry suits against servers could end up hurting more than helping the industry.
"By bringing these suits," he said in a statement, "the MPAA runs the risk of pushing the tens of millions of file sharers to more decentralized technologies that will be harder to police."
BitTorrent not only lets users swap faster when there are more people online to swap, but it is believed resistant to a number of countermeasures the entertainment business has used to obstruct peer-to-peer file swapping, including spoofed files which use unfinished or decoy films or songs, the better to discourage actual or alleged piracy.
In what some P2P opponents might consider a small touch of irony, BitTorrent actively urges its users to download only from its own approved site and not elsewhere—because pirate software sites are believed to be distributing copied versions of BitTorrent which their copiers wrap with spyware, often considered another P2P headache.
The Associated Press said the movie industry's lawsuits will aim at American computer servers to disrupt BitTorrent users and European servers to block eDonkey users.
