There was an article I read in Yahoo News from the Washington Post on BitTorrents. It explains that too many legit uses exist for BitTorrent for the service to be shut down. The MPAA is admitting that there are good and bad uses for BitTorrent and that they will only go after people that are helping users to download illegal movies. It’s good to see a mianstream media outlet like the Washington Post understand the real concept and design behind BitTorrents.
This represents a shift from previous practices, in which the MPAA, the Recording Industry Association of America (news – web sites) and other groups have tried to have entire products — for example, the first Diamond Rio MP3 player or the networked ReplayTV (news – web sites) video recorder — taken off the market.One reason for this change of heart may be that in BitTorrent, unlike many other file-sharing programs, legitimate use doesn’t amount to a token minority. It’s central to this program’s existence.
Developers of versions of the Linux (news – web sites) operating system were some of the first to jump on BitTorrent as a way to ship out vast amounts of data. A Linux distribution can easily span four CD-ROMs; instead, companies such as Red Hat offer BitTorrent downloads of their work.