BitTorrent crosses the line
p2pnet.net news:- Bram Cohen and his colleagues are one Big step nearer to achieving the American dream. To become billionaires.
With the Oscars out of the way, and Martin Scorsese’s The Departed as best picture, BitTorrent, which became one with Hollywood back in 2005, says today it becomes ‘legal’ with DRMd movie rentals available the from four of the Big Six studios, and video, games and software, on board.
It’s moved solidly into corporate territory or, as Variety sums it up, “After over a year of negotiations with Hollywood, the biggest name in piracy is going legit.”
But it’ll only be ‘legit’ as far as people using Windows are concerned. Because BT downloads are polluted with DRM (Digital Restrictions Management) consumer control, courtesy of Bill and the Boyz, Mac and Linux users are out of the picture.
Says Holland’s Torrentfreak, “Marc Brandon, Vice President Anti-Piracy Internet Operations at Warner Bros., one of the content partners of BitTorrent Inc, told TorrentFreak that it is virtually impossible to make sure pirated copies don’t slip through, but that both Warner and BitTorrent Inc are trying hard to remove these unauthorized DVDrips. And indeed, over the past month more and more illegal DVDrips disappeared from the search results.”
“BitTorrent.com’s library will contain more than 3,000 movies and TV shows, rivaling the selection found at CinemaNow and Movielink, legal sites that have long had the blessing of the entertainment industry,” says the Mercury News. “Among the movies available for rent for $3.99 are Oscar nominees such as ‘Little Miss Sunshine’ and ‘An Inconvenient Truth’,”.
Both titles are also readily available for free on the same p2pnet works which first rocketted BitTorrent to fame and ended up with its striking an accord up with the Big Six’s MPAA (Motion Picture Association of America).
“Older catalog titles will cost $2.99,” says the story. TV shows will be available for $2.00 each and high-definition shows will cost $3.00.
And BitTorrent will soon start offering ‘free’ TV shows carrrying advertising.
Meanwhile, the BitTorrent protocol is free and still used by hundreds of millions of people around the world for downloading not only songs and movies, but also applications and in fact anything which needs to be moved from A to Z quickly and efficiently.
Also See:
became one – BitTorrent, Hollywood team up, November 23, 2005
Variety – BitTorrent goes legit, February 25, 2007
Torrentfreak – BitTorrent.com Launches Video Store, February 24, 2007
Mercury News – BitTorrent to sell films legally, February 26, 2007
If your Net access is blocked by government restrictions, try Psiphon from the Citizen Lab at thIs the end (of the Net) nigh?zze University of Toronto’s Munk Centre for International Studies. Go here for the official download, here for the p2pnet download, and here for details. And if you’re Chinese and you’re looking for a way to access independent Internet news sources, try Freegate, the DIT program written to help Chinese citizens circumvent web site blocking outside of China. Download it here.
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Tired of being treated like a criminal? They depend on you, not the other way around. Don’t buy their ‘product’. Do bug your local politicians. Use emails, snail-mail, phone calls, faxes, IM, stop them in the street, blog. And if you’re into organizing, organize petitions, organize demonstrations and then turn up on your local political rep’s doorstep, making sure you’ve contacted your local tv/radio station/newspaper in advance. Don’t just complain. Do something!
February 27th, 2007 at 12:22 pm
Right . . . .
MPAA, the only way Heracles managed to defeat the hydra was by way
Heroic Age Greece’s “extra legal” measures”; something the likes of which I am sure that even YOU do not have the testicular fortitude for doing.
The hydra of this Age shall, eventually, win. Scarred, bloody, but triumphant nonetheless.