On Fri, 18 Jul 2003, Britt Blaser wrote: > BitTorrent is receiving a LOT of negative press.
Good point. That angle hadn't occurred to me. > If we include it, people will use it to move copyrighted files That's not necessarily true. The BitTorrent client installed on a particular site isn't available to users in general; it would be launched by our code when a media-download link is clicked. Yes, a site administrator could run BitTorrent on the site, from the shell command line, to download whatever he wanted, but installing our whole system would be a lot of trouble just to download TV shows, compared to installing BitTorrent by itself. And an ordinary user could install BitTorrent himself to download whatever he wanted... but that's what they can do already anyway. BitTorrent doesn't include a search capability, so to find files people would have to go through the media database first. It would be reasonable for a moderator to look through the database periodically to remove inappropriate or illegal content. (That's probably something we want to do in any case.) So i don't think there's much danger of our network turning into an illegal file-sharing network. (If we are really worried about that, we could even introduce a trivial protocol incompatibility.) I think your point about the potential PR harm of the BitTorrent name would be the main concern. -- ?!ng
