Why is Bittorent making nice with MPAA?

BitTorrent

Are you surprised that BitTottent.com is launching a subscription service distributing MPAA movies? I’m not. It’s a freaking brilliant move! Let me break this down for you:

  1. sign a deal with MPAA
  2. use your technology to distribute their content
  3. break even, or make marginal profit
  4. next time MPAA wants to outlaw P2P, they end up looking like idiots because they use BT themselves

It’s a 4 step plan to make it much harder for MPAA to stamp out illegal Bittorrent use. Because most likely, the legal BT traffic will be indistinguishable from the illegal one. In fact, legal packets will happily swim in the sea of warez. And unless you do something really clever it would be difficult to throttle down illegal bittorrent activity without hurting legal downloads at the ISP level. MPAA doesn’t care about linux distros, indy movies and music and personal videos being distributed this way. But they are bound to care when their own legal content in torrented across the globe.

Would I subscribe to this service? Probably not. If they use DRM, forget it, most people will ignore it. No one likes crippled media. But then again, world is full of gullible idiots who like to throw away money by buying locked down files.

This is a smart PR move from BitTorrent. It shows that they are trying hard to be legit, and that their technology can be used in a good constructive way. This is what we call sticking it to the man, while letting the man think he is sticking it to you :P

[tags]bittorrent, mpaa, p2p, filesharing, legal filesharing[/tags]

This entry was posted in Uncategorized. Bookmark the permalink.



Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *