BitTorrent to Industry and Digital Right

"My second position paper"
Posted by Nancy.
March 05, 2007.

BitTorrent was originally created and designed to solve some problems of peer-to-peer sharing of large files. This content distribution protocol was written in the Python programming language by Bram Cohen and is freely distributed under an open source license. The idea of BitTorrent is to enable other users to serve as redistribution points rather than downloading from the original server on every requesting. To share a file using BitTorrent, a user creates a .torrent file, a small file which contains: the filename, size, and the hash of each block in the file, the address of a tracker server. The torrent file can be distributed to other users, often via email or placed on a website. The BitTorrent client is then started seeding, allowing other users to connect and commence downloading. Therefore, this content will make the original server to serve more varieties of files without requiring the huge amount of bandwidth and resources.

Whenever one user completes the download, the content will turn that user as another distribution point in a group by optional reseed choice becoming an additional source for the file. The concept of BitTorrent is a fairly simple one. You can only download if you also upload. This means the more people are downloading from you, the faster you can download from other people. Downloading with BitTorrent is straightforward. Each person who wants to download the file first downloads the torrent and opens it in the BitTorrent client software. The torrent file tells the client the address of the tracker.

Additional features and Rundown Clients

Currently, BitTorrent was added features called multi-tracker and trackerless Torrent. The first feature has multiple trackers in one torrent. This way, if one tracker failed, the others can continue supporting file transfer whereas trackerless is something of a misnomer. Trackerless based on the decentralized or distributed tracking of DHTs (Distributed Hash Tables) essentially treats every peer in the swarm as a tracker.

There are many clients offering different features and service for BitTorrent. Some of them offer more details and some have more functionalities. The rundown examples of 4 major clients are such as the Official Client, Azureus, BitTornado, and BitComet.

The Official Client is originally produced by BitTorrent.com. Howevere, it lacks of features found in other clients but can handle multiple download with no problem.

Azureus is a java-based client, which is pretty new in BitTorrent clients but provides a BitTorrent protocol implementation and offers multiple torrent downloads.

BitTornado, a very similar look of the Official Client, is one of the most popular clients. It is quite functional and easy to use. You can also change IP settings and ports and perform other operations with one or two clicks of the GUI.

BitComet has more functionalities like fast-resume, chatting, disk cache, speed limits, port mapping, proxy, and IP-filter which allow user to check or non-check the contents before the download begins.

BitTorrent is a relatively new way of sharing large amounts of data. Generally the users today are mainly professional who have technological knowledge in information system. In the future, clients would be getting, easier to use, track, and access by people who do not have a great amount of knowledge on this technology. Using the BitTorrent will help internet surfers to reach the large size of material whenever they want.

Impact to Industry and Digital Right

BitTorrent’s popularity has grown exponentially in the past couple years. The advantage of this P2P protocol as mentioned earlier allow people to freely use for sharing and downloading material including the copyrighted music, movies and TV shows so easy. This has caused complaints from the producers of TV shows and film industry due to the illegal distributions. Since it is hard to control posted on web servers and client tracker, the risk of being sued or even arrested is a big disadvantage on using BitTorrent, and other similar programs. Being spread out the internet for free with BitTorrent is where the copyright conflict comes up and leads to legal issue of Digital Right and Piracy.

According to The New York Times on February 26, 2007; BitTorrent Inc. has done agreements with more than 35 entertainment companies to offer their content to run a download service. The options are both offering the purchase of ownership which can be played up to 2 players or rental with variable range. BitTorrent will also use digital rights management (DRM) technology from Microsoft to prevent protected content from being redistributed on the Internet or played on a different PC from illegal file trading.

From my perspective the introduction of the BitTorrent technology these borders have been more or less removed benefiting the free information flow between different parts of the world. The BitTorrent technology gives a person any other part of the world the possibility to take part of information presented. In addition this technology is a cheap and reliable way for distribution of material.

I believe that problems of the legal aspects and illegal file sharing can be resolved soon like another situation. For example, we wouldn’t stop using computers because of virus but we invented the anti-virus program. My side is that how can we use the advantages of the BitTorrent technology to find new opportunity and make it even better. And how can we improve and get rid of weakness to make this protocol much more effective. Today it is just the beginning of a minor revolution regarding data sharing. In the future, I believe that it will probably find new areas where the BitTorrent technique can be used with a great success.