US Supreme Court to Decide P2P Legality

<span style="color: lightblue">I think we're about to see BitTorrent rise in popularity... torrentially, even.

Bittorrent is good, but it is nothing like Kazaa and CO.
The people and the fiels just arnt there.

<span style="color: lightblue">But it does have obvious benifits over them. The main one being that because it is distributed, and the seed servers can be identified, RIAA et al have explicitly said they have no interest in shutting down the system.

The poeple and the files not being there is exactly what I mean by it becoming more popular soon. Although, I do imagine a future where illegal copyrighted stuff is much harder to find, and where more legal online shops exist. The shops could easily distribute their stuff via BitTorrent - and it will always be used for distributing Linux, since there's no better system. [img]smile.gif[/img]

The main thing that File sharers (most) had over Bittorent was their "file sharing" technique, they were able to split the files up so that each file you were getting was comming (generally) from multiple users, this prevented the current laws from pinning the piraters down becasue they were not exactly sharing that file, unfortunantly with Bittorrent, it is still possible for them to arrest and fine certain users.
Sure they probably will never shut Bittorent down, but they can still make an impact by fineing kids hundres of thousands of dollars, even millions in some cases (I think I saw something like that happenening, wasn't there that article in our english classrom lennon?)

<span style="color: lightblue">The spllitting files up so it coems from multiple users isn't a Bittorrent thing. It's a P2P thing.
The thing with BitTorrent is that the "we don't control our users" argument doesn't hold, because for each file there has to be a "tracking server" which keeps a record of all going transfers. In other words, it is possible to identify the initial contributer of an illegal file easily and sue them rather than the entire system. The Wikipedia article says this in a better way than I can manage.

<span style="color: lightblue">I've seen this before, I think (did someone post about it about... 2 or 3 months ago?), and I honestly think it is a very big step back. It basically turns BitTorrent into a slightly advanced KaZaA or iMesh. It goes back to the idea of having almost no quality control of what is being spread... and that control is a near necesity for the legal applications of P2P (eg, a linux distro - P2P removes alot of the server stress, but the way BItTorrent works ensures that what you are downloading is still the same file that the tracker sends). And removing the accountability of the individual servers means that it will become another target for MIAA...

But I think the main benifit of core BitTorrent over alot of others is simply that it integrates into the Web, meaning it can be used logically and happily by a webbrowser. And therein, I think, lies the future.

I know, thats what I said...

<span style="color: lightblue">Oh, right... I have to stop posting so late at night...
Warning: this is rather rambly...

Anyway, Bittorrent can - and always has - split files up so they're coming from multiple users. So, no program has ever had that over BitTorrent.
BitTorrent can be seen as basically extending the meaning of 'downloading from a server' so that you can also be downloading from other people downloading the same file, meaning that more users = faster downloads, not slower downloads (which is the norm in non-P2P).
Kazaa and iMesh do the same, except they have one big tracking server, which tracks every file. And the way the files get there is simply by being in a user's shared directory, rather than by being put on the tracking server.

This gives BitTorrent, in my opinion, an advantage in that it can integrate into existing technologies.

BitTorrent is almost at the stage now where it can integrate right into the web. Let tracking servers integrate with web servers (possibly having torrent as a MIME type or some such), and let webbrowsers also be BitTorrent clients. No more .torrents, no more standalone BitTorrent clients, and suddenly we can see BitTorrent integrate transparently with the web.
And from there, I think we can see it going further. I think the internet (but not necesarily the web) will integrate right into our normal file management, and that things like FTP will be handled transparently as network shares. And from there, it makes sense to have P2P integrate into this aswell. This will obviously take more work, but I think that this is where it is going.

And this is why I think BitTorrent wll become more popular - the way it works is such that very soon, we may be able to use it without necesarily knowing that we are doing so. These lawsuits will help with that - if things like iMesh and Kazaa are killed off, people won't just stop file sharing. They will have to look for other ways of doing it. And that I think will speed up this process phenominally.

What I'm talking about has already been started - see, for example, Plan 9 and MozTorrent.