Napster Is Dead, Long Live Torrent --Linux Insider

By Samiran Chakrawertti
The Economic Times
07/27/05 7:00 AM PT

Torrent, in contrast to P2P networks like Grokster, is simply a software that breaks down a file and pieces it together again. Action can be taken against Web sites that act as forums for users putting up links to torrents -- such as the one that infamously hosted a copy of "Star Wars" six hours before it released in theatres -- but such closures do little to stem the tide.

Napster was nothing. Free sharing of movies, music, games and software now accounts for two-thirds of all traffic on the Net.

Driving the trend is the new "badshah of bandwidth," BitTorrent, an innovative software that allows users to share files online more efficiently and now accounts for 35 percent of all traffic.

'Torrent'-ial Growth
According to Cachelogic, a British Web research firm, in Asia, BitTorrent accounts for more than 50 percent of all Internet traffic. Viewing Web pages accounts for no more than 11 percent of global Internet traffic.

In India, Torrent forums have mushroomed. At one of them, desitorrents.com, apart from the latest movies and music, you can also download hard-to-find classics like Ray and Ghatak movies.

Vikram, a movie buff who has been downloading movies for years, says, "Torrent links are the easiest way to find the newest movies and music these days. While earlier it would take days to download movies from peer-to-peer [P2P] networks, it's a matter of a few hours now with the much higher speeds that torrent files make possible."

BitTorrent is a big step forward from the old generation P2P software, which only allowed you to download a file from another user.

Torrent breaks up files into really small pieces, and as soon as you've downloaded the first few kilobytes of the file, you'll simultaneously start uploading that part of the file to other users.

No-Drag Download
This is significant because in the earlier situation, several people downloading the file from the same source at the same time would slow down the process immensely.

With BitTorrent, each user is downloading different parts of the file from several others while simultaneously uploading to other users.

Further, downloads aren't sequential, so you don't download files beginning to end. In fact, even with five users on a particular torrent, all of whom have incomplete files, BitTorrent could piece together one complete copy of the file from different sources and complete the download.

Estimates vary, but the total number of users of P2P networks today is placed at tens of millions. Cachelogic estimates that at any given point of time there are around 8 million users logged on to P2P networks and the total size of the data they're sharing is 10 petabytes, or 10,000,000 gigabytes. When Napster shut down in 2001, it had a maximum of 1.5 million users online.

So why aren't the movie and music labels suing Bit-Torrent and getting it shut down?

Individualized Risk
While other P2P networks have been brought to their knees -- Napster to Gnutella to Grokster -- there's a crucial difference with BitTorrent. Earlier P2P software enabled users to search for files that they wanted, and hence could be accused of indirectly abetting piracy.

Torrent, in contrast, is simply a software that breaks down a file and pieces it together again. Action can be taken against Web sites that act as forums for users putting up links to torrents -- and action has been taken on the torrent forum that infamously hosted a copy of "Star Wars" six hours before it released in theatres -- but such closures do little to stem the tide.

In fact, BitTorrent is widely used for legal purposes too, like distributing free versions of Linux to a large number of users. And it is undeniably the most effective tool to distribute anything, legal or illegal, to a large number of users.

© 2005 Knight Ridder/Tribune Business News. All rights reserved.
© 2005 ECT News Network. All rights reserved.

BitTorrent will wind up being persecuted the same as other P2P as long as people keep pulling stunts like this.

It is a great utility to get large files like Linux or the DVD version of Star Wars: Revelation.

There was a comic strip, User-Friendly, a couple of weeks ago, where Bill Gates was trying to convince an employee that open source was the same as copyright infringment.

Hate to double-post and run...

I was wanting to put a torrent tracker on my site but decided against it at this time due to the current climate and the fact that too many tards want to put things on there and are well aware that it could ruin me personally and what the site stands for.

I'm too small and busy to make this about filesharing.

Give us links to all the things you alluded to above Gothic-Angel...

If you perk our interests about stuff, then run away without a link because you are afraid of being blamed for your 'word of mouth' promotion due to the percieved copyright restrictions and fear...

sigh

I'm unclear what you want a link for, Mike.

If it is my site, the link in the friends and partners section here is enough. My purpose in my comments weren't for self-promotion although I wouldn't deny that I'd appreciate the calibre of posters that Boycott has. I made the comments about the Torrent tracker at my site simply as one with an interest in Torrents and some of the worries that hosting Torrents would bring to a site admin. All it would take is one torrent of an RIAA album to get the C&D's or worse flowing. Then there would be the guilt of promoting an RIAA artist.

The home page for Star Wars: Revelations is at http://www.panicstruckpro.com/revelations/revelations_movie.html

There is a group that are developing a tracker for the CMS I use and it is supposed to allow for filtering. I'd hack one out myself but I suck at PHP.