July 4th : Independence Through Decentralisation

Hollywood Wants BitTorrent Dead

Hollywood movie studios launched new legal action against operators of sites that help connect people ... In the United States and the United Kingdom, the Motion Picture Association of America, the main lobbying arm of U.S. film studios, filed civil lawsuits against more than 100 operators of BitTorrent "tracker" servers.

MPAA anti-piracy chief John Malcolm said the trade organization's actions were not aimed at criminalizing P2P technology itself, citing "legal torrent" services that specialize in public-domain material as examples of the technology's non-infringing potential.

Source: Wired News, 14 December, 2004.

Then came this, and this, and this, and this, and all of these which sort of indicated that the above statement was a little misleading.

Then came this development a few weeks ago. From the BitTorrent Trackerless information page:

As part of our ongoing efforts to make publishing files on the Web painless and disruptively cheap, BitTorrent has released a 'trackerless' version of BitTorrent in a new release.

Suppose you bought a television station, you could broadcast your progamming to everyone in a 50 mile radius. Now suppose the population of your town tripled. How much more does it cost you to broadcast to 3 times as many people? Nothing. The same is not true of the Web. If you own a website and you publish your latest video on it, as popularity increases, so does your bandwidth bill! Sometimes by a lot!

Now it's new, improved BitTorrent Trackerless - with added Trackerless Support - which turns the 100 IP addresses targeted in December's round of the global media's "Which impoverished individual can we sue to keep ourselves rich" into a multiplicity of anywhere up to 4,294,967,296 IP addresses. And this isn't even up and running properly yet with its 3,400,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 possible moving-target-trackers.

The Antagonist hates to say, "I told you so", but in light of this, this, this, this, this, this, this, and this, what next?