A Torrent or a Trickle?

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HOLLYWOOD -- Hollywood's copyright police and the maker of the most potent movie piracy software of all time took the stage here Tuesday and solemnly declared détente.

It's all but certain the deal between the Motion Picture Association of America and BitTorrent creator Bram Cohen won't dent the file-swapping epidemic, let alone stop it.

Find local technology jobs. No. As pronouncements droned on of an epoch-making moment in the history of digital media, the most important outcome could well turn out to be something much less significant, though equally priceless: The picture of MPAA chief Dan Glickman in a BitTorrent T-shirt.

"We don't anticipate any major effects from this announcement," declared Mark Ishikawa of file-sharing traffic-analysis firm BayTSP, one of the deal's numerous skeptics. "Pirates are transport-agnostic. They move wherever they can get and transmit content with the least interference.

"Unless you eradicate the current BitTorrent protocol and make it stop working, you can't stop people from using it for both legal and illegal purposes," he added.

The MPAA and Cohen announced Tuesday that they had reached a deal under which unlicensed copyright movies will be expeditiously nixed from BitTorrent.com's recently launched search engine. As first reported by Wired News, BitTorrent developed a search engine this spring as an initial step in building a more potent business around its technology.

In a comical moment sealing the deal, Cohen gave Glickman and the heads of seven supporting studios an offering of BitTorrent T-shirts -- one the few sources of BitTorrent's revenues to date.

Not that the freebies could make them even. BitTorrent is widely seen as the most virulent source of movie piracy on the web, thanks to its ingenious method of spreading the work of moving enormous video files among dozens or even hundreds of users at once.

A report from network-monitoring vendor CacheLogic last year found that BitTorrent was by far the most popular file-sharing tool, accounting for 53 percent of all peer-to-peer traffic.

Tuesday's agreement essentially promises that the BitTorrent search engine won't be allowed to develop into a significant piracy tool. But experts said the deal will have little practical impact on movie piracy in general.

For one thing, the takedown requirement isn't new. It's already specified under the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act (.pdf). Peer-to-peer services including Napster and Grokster have either offered or been asked by industry groups to enforce it. But according to Cohen, requests that previously had to be issued in writing can now be issued in "an expedited manner."

Searches for video or music files on other torrent-specific search engines -- and via all-purpose giants such as Google -- are not affected, because BitTorrent.com does not control them. While Cohen said the BitTorrent.com engine sees nearly all publicly available torrents online, an unlimited number of pockets can exist unseen if publishers take steps to avoid detection.

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