Over the last two weeks, two interesting copyright-related stories have appeared in online news reports. Both involve big media companies and small users, but not in the way we usually expect. In both instances, the large media companies “pirated” content instead of the users, and they seem to get away with it. This begs the question; is copyright only for the Big Guys?
In a beautiful twist of irony, New Zealand parliament member Melissa Lee has been caught in a copyright quagmire. It turns out that just hours before she spoke out in support of the controversial new copyright law being rushed through parliament, she tweeted how pleased she was with a compilation of K-Pop songs a friend copied for her.
BitTorrent Inc. has released a new App for uTorrent that allows users to find out what others people are saying about a torrent they’re downloading. Users can also join the discussion and use uTorrent to tweet about torrents. With the new App, BitTorrent Inc. hopes to streamline discussions about torrents on Twitter, and encourage torrent sites to adopt the new standard to make it a success.
Some of the biggest Internet brands have declared their love for BitTorrent in recent months. Both Facebook and Twitter are using BitTorrent to update their networks and not without success. In Twitter’s new setup the BitTorrent-powered system has made their server deployment 75 times faster than before.
Twitter has suspended the accounts of at least two torrent sites and removed all of their followers. No reason for the suspension has been given other than that the sites in question “abused” Twitter’s service. Both sites were updating their accounts with newly published torrents daily.
Twitter is calling in the help of BitTorrent to deploy files across its many servers in a more efficient way. The project dubbed ‘Murder’ is based on the Open Source BitTornado BitTorrent client. Aside from assisting Twitter it is available to other developers at no cost.
Twitter has published an announcement on its blog where it attributes a recent phishing attack to an unnamed torrent site script. Twitter is blaming a torrent site developer for intentionally installing backdoors into the code he sells to people who want to run a torrent site of their own. The big question is, who is behind this attack?