BitTorrent Inc: We Don’t Index Illegal Torrents
Written by Smaran on January 01, 2007In a recent interview with InfoWorld, the co-founder of BitTorrent Inc, Ashwin Navin made an interesting statement, one we just couldn’t help but question. He says BitTorrent.com filters out illegal content.
Published today, InfoWorld’s interview with Mr. Navin is about BitTorrent Inc’s new relationship with Hollywood as they try and build a content delivery system using BitTorrent, and DRM (we’re pissed about the latter). When asked about the illegal torrents that BitTorrent.com indexes and if the company was planning to remove them, Ashwin Navin said, “Absolutely. BitTorrent.com is filtered so that we will not surface links for unlicensed content.”
It’s interesting how BitTorrent Inc’s focus has shifted to include DRM and be restricted to only legal content. The initial goal of BitTorrent.com was to index all the various movies, music, TV shows and other files available over BitTorrent. Wired News reported in 2005 on the upcoming launch of the site that was going to be “an advertising-supported search engine dedicated to cataloging and indexing the thousands of movies, music tracks, software programs and other files for download.”
We recently wrote about how BitTorrent.com was helping game developers distribute demos. In that article we profiled the strategy game Disciples II: Dark Prophecy. It was only a demo. But if you type “Disciples” into the search box on BitTorrent.com, you’ll find both the demo and a pirated version of the full game. Or try searching for “Prison Break” and see what you find. Each one of the 29 results you get is a copyrighted file. How exactly do these “filters” work?
How does BitTorrent.com get all this illegal content? It obviously doesn’t have an active uploading community like The Pirate Bay or Torrentspy. Instead, it indexes other torrent sites like The Pirate Bay, Meganova, Torrent Portal and TorrentReactor.
So, our question is, How is BitTorrent.com different from any other so-called illegal torrent site that indexes copyrighted content? Btmon.com does exactly the same thing! Sure, BitTorrent.com’s frontpage is full of game demos, legal music downloads and movie trailers, but one little search query away is just about every popular movie, TV show, music album and computer game.
In our minds, and according to US law, what BitTorrent.com is doing is not illegal. The DMCA clearly states that websites are only required to take down files if the copyright holder or a representative files a complaint. But why does the MPAA sue sites like Isohunt and Torrentspy (who also respect the DCMA), while they’re in bed with BitTorrent?
Dan Glickman (MPAA) and Bram Cohen (BitTorrent)
Previously: 2007: BitTorrent Predictions
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25 Responses
An idea:
The MPAA and RIAA want to find “illegal” files. So they enroll BitTorrent.com and their search engine to find those files so they can shut them down.
Heck, they can even write scripts to do it automatically. Anything with “Prison Break” and what looks like a season/episode number generates an automatic “remove this torrent” email.
The solution in this case is for torrent sites to prevent BitTorrent.com from indexing them.
Awesome! :D
Well this has begun… My PeerGuardian 2 is going crazy… SwifticAB is comin up and guess what its Bit Torrent LOL… DHT doesnt work in my Utorrent unless I allow it ofcourse which im not going to do anymore… I am gonna keep on using Utorrent til a new version comes out.. Im doing some cleanup anyways so less torrents for me…
Well… As far as I can tell, none of the 29 results for “Prison Break” is really a video of the series. There are some subtitles, thats all.
I have no idea how they pick up content. For instance the files - http://www.bittorrent.com/users/punkcast/ - picked up from my punkcast.com site are totally random.
Not that I mind at all.
just don’t use the default client, use any other client.
I think that picture at the bottom shows exactly why the MPAA doesn’t like any form of digital distibution they don’t have control of. Look at Dan Glickman, he looks like hes staring at the camera confused as to why someone is pointing that thing at him.
The author of this post didn’t bother looking at the 29 results. The fact that something says “prison break” does not make it illegal! None of the files returned are the TV show, most of them are tiny text files or completely unrelated.
In fact, it does look like BitTorrent is taking great pains to ensure that no episodes of Prison Break are indexed. Contrast with the THOUSANDS of results for the same query on TPB or Mininova.
Try typing in “axxo” and see how many illegal downloads are on bittorrent.com. Nice filtering job guys.
Holy bejeesus!
I’d steer clear of the bittorrent site if I were you and I’d certainly not create an account there thinking you can download movies. I foolishly did this and find now that (a) I cannot cancel my account; (b) I cannot delete my CC info. from their site; and, to make matters worse, you need windows to run any of their stuff. I DONT RUN WINDOWS!
So, Bit-torrent is grat technology, but the commercial service itself sucks; it’s all bait and switch.
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just use a program to block them from indexing you and dont use BiTorrent
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