Legal issues

BitTorrent, like any other file transfer protocol, can be used to distribute files without the permission of the copyright holder. BitTorrent has received some criticism ^{[ citation needed ]} for its ability to distribute copyrighted files illegally.

Copyright enforcement

There have been many cases of BitTorrent sites distributing copyrighted content without authorization being shut down by organizations. Some of these shutdowns are performed by industry associations, such as the MPAA , and some are performed by government organizations.

In December 2004, the Finnish police raided a major BitTorrent site, Finreactor ^{[15] [16]} The charges have been dropped.^{[ citation needed ]} Suprnova.org , one of the most popular early BitTorrent sites, closed in December 2004, supposedly due to the pressure felt by Sloncek , the founder and administrator of the site. In December, 2005, Sloncek revealed that the Suprnova computer servers had in fact been confiscated by Slovenian authorities.^{[ citation needed ]} LokiTorrent , arguably the biggest torrent source after the demise of Suprnova, closed down soon after Suprnova. Allegedly, after threats from the MPAA , Edward Webber (known as 'lowkee'), webmaster of the site, was ordered by the court to pay a fine and supply the MPAA with logs (the IP addresses of visitors). ^[17]

Webber, in the weeks following his receipt of the subpoena , had begun a fundraising campaign to pay lawyers fees in a legal battle against the MPAA . In news reports, Webber said he would stand up to protect the rights of file sharers, which he did not.^{[ citation needed ]} Webber raised approximately US$45,000 through a PayPal -based donation system. It is unclear how much of that money went to the MPAA, but taking into account the amount of damages he most likely had to pay, probably much of it.^{[ citation needed ]} Following the agreement, the MPAA changed the LokiTorrent website to display a message intended to intimidate filesharers. ^[18] Webber did not comment on this change.

On May 25 , 2005 , the popular BitTorrent website EliteTorrents.org was shut down by the United States Federal Bureau of Investigation and Immigration and Customs Enforcement . At first it was thought that a malicious hacker had gained control of the website, but it was soon discovered that the website had been taken over by the US government. Ten search warrants relating to members of the website were executed.^{[ citation needed ]}

On October 24 , 2005, a 38-year-old Hong Kong BitTorrent user Chan Nai-ming (陳乃明, using the handle 古惑天皇 Lit. The master of cunning , while the magistrate referred to him as Big Crook ) allegedly distributed the three pirated movies Daredevil , Red Planet and Miss Congeniality , subsequently uploading the torrent file to a newsgroup (See HKSAR v Chan Nai Ming ). He was convicted of breaching the copyright ordinance, Chapter 528 of Hong Kong law.^{[ citation needed ]} The magistrate remarked that Chan's act caused significant damage to the interest of copyright holders. He was released on bail for HK$ 5,000, awaiting a sentencing hearing, though the magistrate himself admitted the difficulty of determining how he should be sentenced due to the lack of precedent for such a case. On November 7 , 2005, he was sentenced to jail for three months but was immediately granted parole pending an appeal to the High Court.

On November 23 , 2005, the movie industry and Bram Cohen , the creator of BitTorrent signed a deal they hoped would reduce the number of pirated films shared on the downloading network. The deal covered films found via the bittorrent.com website run by BitTorrent, Inc. It meant BitTorrent.com had to remove any links to pirated films made by seven Hollywood movie studios. As it covered only the BitTorrent.com website, it is unclear what overall effect this has had on net piracy. ^[19]

ThePirateBay.org is another popular BitTorrent website which was formed out of a Swedish anti-copyright group. The site contains many torrents which point to copyright protected material. The Pirate Bay is notorious for its "legal" section ^[20] in which letters and replies on the subject of alleged copyright infringements are publically displayed. The replies are written in a humorous manner and a hardcopy of one was even sold on eBay for USD $255. As of May 31th, 2006, however, ThePirateBay.org's servers have been raided by Swedish police and the site owners might be facing charges for copyright infringement. (No charges has been made so far) However, after securing new servers and using a recent backup, ThePirateBay.org was back online in less then 72 hours. Some online tech-journals report that ThePirateBay.org is moving its site to Holland.

Legal defenses

There are two major differences between BitTorrent and many other peer-to-peer file-trading systems, which advocates suggest make it less useful to those sharing copyrighted material without authorization. First, BitTorrent itself does not offer a search facility to find files by name. A user must find the initial torrent file by other means, such as a web search. Second, BitTorrent makes no attempt to conceal the host ultimately responsible for facilitating the sharing: a person who wishes to make a file available must run a tracker on a specific host or hosts and distribute the tracker address(es) in the .torrent file. While it is possible to simply operate a tracker on a server that is located where the copyright holder cannot take legal action, this feature of the protocol does imply some degree of vulnerability that other protocols lack. It is far easier to request that the server's ISP shut the site down than it is to find and identify every user sharing a file on a traditional peer-to-peer network

BitTorrent is the name of a peer-to-peer (P2P) file distribution client application and also of a file sharing protocol , both of which were created by programmer Bram Cohen . BitTorrent is designed to distribute large amounts of data widely without incurring the corresponding consumption in costly server and bandwidth resources. CacheLogic suggests that BitTorrent traffic accounts for ~35% of all traffic on the Internet, ^[1] while other sources are skeptical. ^[2]

The original BitTorrent application was written in Python . Its source code, as of version 4.0, has been released under the BitTorrent Open Source License (a modified version of the Jabber Open Source License). There are numerous compatible clients, written in a variety of languages and running on a variety of computing platforms .