MPAA Enters P2P Wars; Is BitTorrent In Trouble?

Now that the MPAA has announced it will start filing infringement suits against P2P users, the FastTrack network, Gnutella, and eDonkey are likely targets, but is BitTorrent also in trouble? BitTorrent is a bit different from your usual suspects, in that a torrent file links you with other peers who have the file you want. BitTorrent will download bits and pieces of the file until the entire file is complete. The other peers don't need to have the complete file - they could send you the pieces they have, but at least one peer has to have the entire file for you to complete the download, called a "seed."

The strategy the MPAA will be using to find P2P users seems similar to methods the RIAA currently employs. From the MPAA's website:

A company that specializes in tracking the theft of copyrighted content on the Internet is working directly with our attorneys. This company connects to various P2P networks and searches for users offering one or more of our member companies’ motion pictures. This company uses the same core technical processes generally used by P2P users to identify each other and to search for files. Any relatively experienced user of these P2P networks can obtain the same information our contractor collects.

Once this company identifies a P2P network user offering for download one of our member companies’ motion pictures, this company obtains that user’s IP address. When available, it also obtains the user’s screen name and examines the user’s publicly available computer directory for other files that match the names of our member companies’ motion pictures. Just as any other network user could do, this company then downloads at least one motion picture the user is offering.

The surveillance software seems to be a filename-based search, of files users are sharing, and downloads at least one file to verify the contents, that it is a copyrighted movie file. It's nothing KaZaA users haven't seen before. The software will scan the shared directories of users. But how will this work with BitTorrent, where you don't have a shared directory? The only file you share is the file you're downloading. Getting the IP address would be no different, I would imagine, as the software monitors the IP addresses of packets it receives. But what about downloading the entire file to verify its contents? Downloading one file could come from 50 different users, each sending little pieces of it. The MPAA would have to verify the file contents, since filenames can be misleading or just plain inaccurate as to its contents. As one Slyck.com user, commenting on the MPAA's announcement, put it:

They must download the movie from you in order to make sure that it is the actual movie and not something i renamed. You know how when you were on fasttrack and you dled something that said spiderman and it ended up being gay porn? same thing. They dont know what it is, till they have it.

So it would seem to be a problem verifying the file, if no one user sent the full file. Or maybe not. BitTorrent's tracker will link peers with the same torrent running; presumably, they all have pieces of the exact file that is being verified as copyrighted. Despite these, and other potential problems with suing BitTorrent users, it will probably be a major target of the MPAA. While the RIAA hasn't sued any BitTorrent users, BitTorrent boasts fast and efficient file transfers for large files, optimal conditions for sharing movies. Information from the MPAA's website state that on average, it takes 12-18 hours to download a movie on KaZaA, but as few as only 2-3 hours with newer P2P clients (i.e., BitTorrent). And it doesn't help that BitTorrent is making news headlines as it now accounts for over 1/3 of all internet traffic.

In the end though, the way to fight movie piracy on BitTorrent may not be suing the users. For a movie download to be fast, many peers need to have the torrent running. And getting many users to download a torrent requires users being able to get the torrent files somewhere. For most BitTorrent users, torrent listings are available via websites dedicated to listing them. Shutting down sites that list illegal torrents, or at removing the links from the site, may be more effective than going after individual BitTorrent users.

Lastly, BitTorrent poses a problem with enforcement of California Senate Bill 1506, the bill requiring e-mail identification for sharing copyrighted music and movie files. The MPAA lobbied for this bill, which criminalized the anonymous sharing of copyrighted music and movie files, but only if one "knowingly electronically disseminate all or substantially all of that commercial recording or audiovisual work to more than 10 other people..." Putting aside potential problems of tracking dissemination to at least 10 other people, the "substantially all" requirement would be a problem, since any surveillance software would have to keep track of how much of the movie each peer uploaded. Chances are, no single BitTorrent peer is disseminating a very significant chunk of the ultimate file.   

Comments

[grey]

http://mute-net.sourceforge.net/ (MUTE) is designed with anonymity and encryption in mind from the start, and makes Big Brother (be it called MPAA, RIAA, CIA, etc.) tracking attempts on p2p transfers much harder to accomplish successfully. Bittorrent is great, but users need to stay smart if they're doing something that is considered illegal depending on what place or time they live.

[Chris Brand]

Seems to me that the other problem with suing bitTorrect users is that at the time you download part of the file from them, they may not have downloaded the whole thing. They may therefore not yet know what it is. It's quite possible that as soon as they have the whol thing and they see that it's a copyrighted work, they then delete the file because that wasn't what they intended to download.