BitTorrent is misunderstood...
 

Since many Bit Torrent sites have now been closed, there has (of course) been a lot of talk about it and one of the things I see a lot is that Bit Torrent's "flaw" is that it requires a centralized server (the tracker).

Now, anyone who says anything like this obviously doesn't understand Bit Torrent. Just in case such people exist on this board and have read this thread, I will say this now: Bit Torrent was never intended as a tool for mass copyright infringement. It is merely a tool to allow people to pay for their own bandwidth.

An analogy can be made with online shopping. Online shops must remain competative but it will be extremely hard to do so if they have to pay for the shipping of their products to their customers. It's rather expensive to ship physical objects across the country (or the world!) and this would raise their prices too high to remain competative. How do they overcome this? By asking the buyer to pay for their own shipping.
This is exactly what Bit Torrent does. It's a method for the downloader to pay for their own bandwidth, because the server (uploader) can't afford the bandwidth of uploading all their data to all those downloaders. With this goal in mind, it's not hard to see why having a centralized tracker is not, nor is ever, a problem...

it doesn't amtter that much right now because suprnova was just shut down so what people gripe about will be slowed untill about the middle of January when a nother major site develops

It became another case of "Lets comeup with another way to provide a service to the web using community to share the load of file transfers that got exploited to a warez community" Frist thing i ever downloaded via a BT tracker was Red Hat from Linuxiso. After that i was thinking ok i got all of red hat in about an hour this is great.

OMG! Suprnova is dead? I turn my back for a couple of weeks... :(

But yes, BitTorrent wasn't designed for pirates. It just works very well for them.

I really think its quite comical really. The same shit happened when napster was big. Except it was with music and the RIAA. Without Napster, where would the MP3 player market be right now? Would there be as many "legal" Mp3 services out there, (ie ITunes)? Where would the CD burner market be?? What about the DVD-R for that matter?

Granted these markets would have slowly made their way into the scene, but because Napster was such a great hit, it got those who had never thought to go to the internet to get music to do just that.

These people are brain dead if they think they are going to make a difference to the "piracy" that is going on around the US (it's legal in canada btw). They made an initial impact by shutting down sites such as Bittorrent, but they will be back. Money is still being made in the Movie industry, it is just being shuffled around to different people. COME UP WITH A LEGAL WAY TO DOWNLOAD MOVIES EFFICIENTLY!!!! Do it, Come up with a LEGAL version of BT. A way to buy movies online for dirt cheap. The american public can go buy DVD burners and dvd-r's and make their own dvd's if they want. I would be more willing to pay $10 to download a movie than pay $20 to go buy it in the store or have it shipped to me.

Any opinions??

bittorrent is legal....just the content being shared may not be. And just saying it has a lot of potential for legal uses. remember sp2? linux isos is another good use.

Even more so; wasn't it written in such a manner to ensure that the IP addresses of every user were obvious? I seem to remember reading that when I first researched BT, but now I can't find that quote. Anyway, BT will still be useful for the legal stuff.

That's the whole thing right there, there is nothing illegal about BT technology, just like there's nothing illegal about owning a handgun. It's what you DO with those things that defines whether or not you are using them legally or not.

BT just enables you to download flies quickly using your own bandwidth, and it works great. If you find a server that has the Matrix Trilogy in DivX format and you want to donwload it, go ahead, but know that you are stealing copyrighted material and also hurting the entire BT community who may use the technology for other activities, such as donwloading Linux ISOs or software patches, or scripts or ... whatever.

Anyway, ANY internet technology that enables file transfer will now remain a target for any group worried about copyright because any such technology will be hijacked by people who's only interest is in downloading music and movies that they did not, and do not want to, pay for.

Peace,

Pierre