• Current Events & Politics
    Welcome Guest
    Please read before posting:
    Forum Guidelines Bluelight Rules
  • Current Events & Politics Moderators: deficiT | tryptakid | Foreigner

Torrents - can someone explain?

Kyk said:
I don't buy this notion that all good music and movies would cease to exist if album or DVD sales are eliminated. What's more likely, is that it will eliminate the Michael Bays and the Avril Lavignes, while making way for those with actual substance. I look forward to the day when the richest artist is truly the most passionate and hard-working, and not the one with the most focus groups and product plugs, or cheap hooks and watered down lyrics.
Click to expand...
That's a really good point, Kyk. When you think about it, copyright and IP laws are a huge intrusion on people's liberty.... You have the government granting a monopoly to the artist, and then to enforce it, they have to go around and tell you what you can and can't write or talk about, what types of work you can and can't create, what music you can or can't listen to, etc.

The whole reason for this intrusion is to get people to create music & movies & etc. The idea being that without the monopoly, people couldn't make enough make money off of it to make it worthwhile for them to create stuff. But as you said, that just doesn't seem to apply to music! There's zero shortage of people out there starting good bands and making good music. And does anyone imagine that even if no one bought music CDs or DVDs anymore, there wouldn't still be tons of bands? Popular bands can still make an assload of money, for one thing. And plenty of people just want to make music even without the lure of huge riches, for another.

Most of the time when I hear people talking about copyright law & file sharing they seem to completely miss this point. The whole reason for copyright is to ensure good (or at least popular) works get created. It's not there to give people control over their imaginary "property" -- since when does coming up with an idea give you a right to ban everyone else from talking about it? And it's not there because pop artists have a "right" to earn a zillion dollars on record sales. It's there to make sure that popular works get created. Without any evidence of there being not enough music being made, there's no reason to think there's any problem with copyrights & file sharing.

</rant> :)
 
High praise coming from you, zorn. I'm delighted we are of the same mind on this. :)
 
I'm a little confused about Torrents and their legitmacy...

Say if I pay for a service, to stream vids or dload/upload content -- is this considered less-illegal/gray area/or just plain still against intellectual prop. rights?
 
It really depends where the service stops, and the content begins. The provider will no doubt stipulate that you're paying for the service, and the content (trackers and all) are the customer's domain. So no, simply paying a company to use their software isn't illegal. Think of them like a cell phone provider. They give you the cell phones and the signal, and whatever business you decide to conduct with that is your own.

Also, just like a cell phone, if you're intercepted doing something illegal, you can personally be held accountable.

Now in the past, record and movie companies have tried (very very hard) to put the onus on the provider for what content is shared with their software. Torrents are a very tricky technology to use this line of reasoning with however, because the files themselves (aka copyrighted material) are not being stored for distribution, nor is having the entire file necessary in order to start sharing.

Most recently, the opposition in their desperation, have tried everything from seeding viruse that changes the file extension of your media, to starting rumours such as, "The Pirate Bay has been shut down" to flooding attacks on the tracker search engines. I like to think of these as death throes.
 
off a link from a link from this thread, i found
3.BitTorrent is unsuitable for small files, even if they are extremely popular.
The BitTorrent distribution network is predicated on clients sharing pieces of the file during the download period. But if the download period is small, the opportunity window for sharing is also small; at any given time only a few users will be downloading. This is another scenario where you're unlikely to find any peers, so you're better off with traditional distribution methods.
Click to expand...
when you are done downloading,you automatically start uploading. so, bit is even better than traditional. you download it for 5sec, then, you're uploading at a high rate until you finally get back to the program and turn off the torrent (which is a long time in most cases, considering the size of the file). it basically means all peers turn into seeds for an amount of data that is WAY more than the total file size itself, unlike huge files where if you leave it seed for several hours, you might upload that file only two or three times over. so bit's efficiency still wins out i'd say :) or am i missing something?

it's from this list, http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2007/02/everybody-loves-bittorrent.html
 
I really don't know why you didnt search google. There is ALOT of information out there waiting to be seen annnnd you would've gotten your answer faster.
 
often people want knowledge explained to them in a conversational style, maybe so that further misconceptions/questions can be asked as well (dialogue). and then they get bashed for not googling :)
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Top