• BitTorrent, Hollywood to Fight Piracy

    BitTorrent, Hollywood to Fight Piracy

    Techtree News Staff, Nov 23, 2005 1246 hrs IST

    The Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) and BitTorrent have collaborated to fight against Internet piracy.

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The American movie industry has achieved a major break-through in its fight against Internet piracy, with the announcement of a collaboration between the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) and BitTorrent - a P2P network.

So far BitTorrent's technology has been widely used for illegally copying movies and TV shows over the Internet. While downloading a movie, BitTorrent's technology takes parts of the file from different sources simultaneously, thereby facilitating a quicker download of the movie.

Under the terms of this agreement, Bram Cohen, founder and CEO, BitTorrent, has agreed to remove links which direct users to pirated content. It is said that the deal might also pave the way for eventual adoption of BitTorrent's technology by movie studios for new, legal services.

Dan Glickman, chairman and CEO, MPAA, and Bram Cohen said in a joint statement, that BitTorrent is an extremely efficient publishing tool and search engine, which allows creators and rights-holders to make their content available on the Internet securely. Cohen said that BitTorrent discourages the use of its technology for distributing films without a license to do so, and that the company is pleased to work with the film industry to remove un-authorized content from BitTorrent.com's search engine.

The agreement symbolizes a joint initiative, to fight against the continued illegal use of technology.

MPAA vehemently opposes piracy in any form, since it hurts the very many individuals employed by the movie industry, including carpenters, lighting and sound technicians, etc. Until now MPAA has sued many Web sites which use BitTorrent technology for illegal movie distribution; and 90 percent of these have shut down.

MPAA estimates losses to the movie industry due to piracy at around $3.5 billion last year; analysts express the view that the figure might close at approximately $5.4 billion this year.

Gartner has meanwhile said that the BitTorrent-MPAA collaboration might actually give rise to legitimate online networks backed by the movie industry, as a viable alternative to the illegal movie-sharing networks of today.

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Discussion Board
frankmehta
,mumbai, on Nov 23, 2005 04:29 PM
the dollar to rupee conversion could have been made if we were spending that $5 in india... dude....$5 pay per view movies on tv are high definiton format and the movies are released much much much before movies are released in india....thats the very reason why ppl download movies off torrents so that they dont get to swatch a 6 month old movie or before the suspense of the movie is out.... half the dvd's u rent are pirated...so there is no question of renting dvds if torrents are off....as most pirated movies are cheap camera copies circulated as torrents... basically copyright protected torrents are nothing good for you unless you are part of the film fraternity.... just my viewpoint buy it or not!
rockquatic
,delhi, on Nov 28, 2005 06:26 PM
The move just reins Bittorrent ,the original client written in Python by Bram Cohen who made it open source.Now you have much more efficient and light(in file size) clients written in C++ like utorrent, rufus etc which are being used.So the judgement just restricts bittorrent usage per se and not other technology based on or modified over bittorrent.
Anonymous
,mumbai, on Nov 24, 2005 12:40 PM
wats the gr8 fuss when u can get a pirated DVD for 75-80 buks??????????????? with 3-4 english movies .
NIl
,M, on Nov 24, 2005 01:50 PM
This type of dvd quality is very bad.Some time it is look worse than vcd.
JassSingh
,N.Delhi, on Nov 24, 2005 11:10 PM
THE PROB WILL LIE IN THE FUTURE WRITE-PROTECTED FORMATS
priyoban
,Kolkata, on Nov 24, 2005 05:01 PM
Whats the fuss theres absolutely no problem if bittorrent.com removes copyright material... there are like 30 different sites out there which will give you the torrents ure looking for... bittorrent.com only stores the links to such sites... so there.
Arjun
,Bangalore, on Nov 24, 2005 04:15 PM
BitTorrent is not really a P2P network as is mentioned in the article.... it is safer to call it a file sharing technology.
alok aka @R[A!N
,[HENNA!, on Nov 24, 2005 03:11 PM
abe kuch nahi band hoga yaar ... dekhte jaao kya hota ... ek bittorrent band hoga doosra sir uthayega ... inko yaad nahi hai ki napster ke baad morpheus, kazza, edonkey aur pata nahi kya kya aa gaya
frankmehta
,mumbai, on Nov 23, 2005 01:14 PM
this move sucks..... hello ground realities are different.... here in india you have to pay 300 rs to buy a dvd...whereas abroad u can watch a latest movie for $5 and that too...pay per view so u need not buy the disc...absolutely appaling
iday
,chennai, on Nov 23, 2005 03:34 PM
how much is $5 dear??? almost Rs.230 i guess :) not much different from Rs.300. but yeah - u cud rent DVDs here for around 50 - 100 bucks. dunno what u r trying to say...
Anonymous
,M, on Nov 23, 2005 04:17 PM
A english dvd price is Rs 800 to 500 not 300. It is double the price of vcd.
Tushar
,Mumbai, on Nov 24, 2005 01:27 AM
Hey iday ... u should also take into consideration the per capita income in US. $5 for them is less than Rs.230 for indians. That matters.
jOy
,Mumbai, on Nov 23, 2005 05:58 PM
dudes, i think this is a sucky step, this is 2005 and HOLLYWOOD should accept piracy and if they want to curb piracy they need to release their movies through net and earn profits through TRPs and advertisements in those movies.it will help

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