BitTorrent Accounts for 35% of Traffic

Pranjal writes "According to a reuters article on Yahoo, BitTorrent accounts for an astounding 35 percent of all the traffic on the Internet -- more than all other peer-to-peer programs combined -- and dwarfs mainstream traffic like Web pages." The article goes on to talk about how BT is no longer beneath the radar of those who like to sue file sharers.

Prediction: The creators get sued anyway

At least under U.S. law, it's a bit more difficult to find the makers liable as long as the software is capable of being used for innocent uses, which I think (BitTorrent) surely is."

But that doesn't mean that they won't be sued into bankruptcy anyway. Anybody want to bet that is (MP/RI)AAs next move? Sue the creator and coders of the various BitTorrent applications to bully people who might consider writing useful P2P software in the future?

Of course I don't have a whole lot of sympathy for anybody caught infringing on software/movie/music copyrights with BitTorrent. It's not anonymous by any means -- and the trackers provide a nice centralized target. Isn't it clear that BitTorrent wasn't designed with copyright infringement in mind?

Re:Prediction: The creators get sued anyway

Doesn't look like they can bankrupt Bram Cohen much more than he was some time ago...

Re:Prediction: The creators get sued anyway

The answer in in the question itself: don't develop/store in USA.
This kind of software is not ilegal here in Brazil, for instance.

Re:Prediction: The creators get sued anyway

The answer in in the question itself: don't develop/store in USA.
This kind of software is not ilegal here in Brazil, for instance.

It's not "illegal" in the United States either. I was saying they would be sued not charged. Huge difference. Anybody can sue you for anything. Unless they are grossly abusing the system (and the Judge orders them to pay defense costs) it is going to cost you money to mount your legal defense.

And the "just write this software overseas" argument is old. Most of us aren't willing to give up our American citizenship and move overseas just to escape legal liabilities. I'm not saying that to flame -- it's just the truth. There are more constructive suggestions then "do it elsewhere".

Re:Prediction: The creators get sued anyway

without backrupting anyone.

You misspelled "while bankrupting everyone"

Re:Prediction: The creators get sued anyway

As I recall when they were suing the other P2P users, they were using a formula that took the number of songs being shared by some dollar amount. That was why people with huge libraries that were being shared, were being sued for astronomical amounts. With torrent users, there is only the one song that the user is currently downloading that is easily discoverable. So for the average user, how will they generate the large damage figures.... oops I forgot, they can just make up a figure for damages.

Re:Prediction: The creators get sued anyway

For the first time in my life I wrote a useful program: a BT client! The protocol is very easy to understand and the client easy to write. I would hate to be sued for just writing some stupid code on a keyboard and I know now what is the real difference between creating tools and using them to infringe on copyrights. Unix is a tool, someone could use it to wreak havoc across the earth but it's still a great tool. BT works great for big files which can be either Linux ISOs or DivX. Of course I don't expect the justice of my country to understand between a Linux and a DivX...

C&D time?

Given that BT requires a link to a .torrent, how hard is it for companies to send a C&D to the ISP/owner of any site hosting illegal .torrent links?

Re:C&D time?

easy.

how easy it is to host it somewhere where you can post such files/links(torrents) without fear? just about just as easy.

for example, piratebay gets such threats regularly. here's one of their responses http://static.thepiratebay.org/sega_response.txt [thepiratebay.org].

how easy it is for a litigation company to milk a publisher for money, by offering them a service that they'll scan the net for infringiments and then bill them (the publisher) for every c&d they send(and sell it to the ceo's as if this created automagically more income for the publisher, however, conviently for the litigation company the effect of these c&d's on sales can't be measured at all so they got a good milking cow right there without any means for the client to measure their 'performance' ).

so little HTTP bandwidth?

I'm confused. Are they saying that mainstream web traffic accounts for far less than 35% of the bandwidth the internet consumes? By saying that BT is "dwarfing" the web traffic, that would make me think that something like 5-10% of traffic is HTTP. Am I wrong in finding that hard to believe?

Re:so little HTTP bandwidth?

Well, I would say it is safe to say that the average file traded over BT is, say, 1GB. That's about typical for the stuff I download via it. Mostly (legal) live concert recordings. A typical webpage is perhaps 100kb. So that's 10,000 webpage views (Probably a weeks worth for even the busiest net addict, probably more like 3 months worth for a typical home user. I often pull 10GB a week via bittorrent (http://bt.etree.org/ [etree.org] is your friend...)

Someone has to say it

What the FUCK does this have to do with my rights?

Thank god....

... that I live in Canada where this is still legal. [com.com]

And you guys though that America was the home of the free.

So let me add this up...

35% of internet traffic is BitTorrent
50% is pr0n
10% is SPAM
4% is actual content
And the remaining 1% is slashdot talking about the 4% of legit websites

35% bittorrent

My medium:
35% bittorrent
64% web
1% other

By content:
99% p0rn
1% Slashdot

It's easy to track down bit torrent downloaders

BitTorrent wasn't designed to hide your identity unfortunately.

It's only a matter of time until they seriously crack down on Bit Torrent which is too bad because it's the only p2p app that will pull down 160KB/sec for me.

The secret is to allow for unlimited d/l and u/l but then create a perl script to monitor netstat -na and kill those connections via iptables which have a high recv q. Otherwise they'll suck down all your upload bandwidth.

Great legal BT links?

How about some torrent sites with great legal content?

This [archive.org] site is excellent.

If you have never used BT and watched how it consumes bandwidth, you really ought to check it out. Pretty neat.

Tools like Etherape [sourceforge.net] will draw funky realtime network connectivity maps. Watching your computer talk to that many other peers makes you feel pretty exposed.

Azureus [sourceforge.net] is my preferred graphical client under Linux. Any other favorites?

Has Major ISP started to throttle BT?

I'm experiencing this and I'm not alone as evidenced here [dslreports.com] and here [dslreports.com].

Sandvine's [sandvine.com] product is being speculated as the culprit. More details here [gnomeblog.com]. Is there anyway around this? I don't want to be stuck downloading new distros (which are coming soon) with slow BT.

Television Shows

I know the RIAA can bust you for downloading music, and the MPAA can bust you for downloading movies... is there any large organization (other than HBO, CBS, etc) that is looking to bust people for downloading television shows?

I have in the past downloaded shows when my VCR or DVR crapped out and didn't tape them so I was curious of the legalities of this.

Someone figure this out for me...

Can someone tell me how many percentage points there are in all the internets? I'm pretty certain that about 70% is pron, 50% is spam mail and at least 85% of all internet traffic was in the form of mysterious, partisan, hard to prove or disprove, statistics about internet traffic.

Darn those furriners!

In reference to Suprnova [suprnova.org] "They're doing something flagrantly illegal, but getting away with it because they're offshore," said (Bittorrent creator)Cohen. He is not eager to get into a battle about how his creation is used. "To me, it's all bits," he said."

I've always liked Cohen's attitude, and his transparency about Bittorrent's lack of privacy. I do though wonder if Slovenian law might differ from that of the United States.

Re:I'd love a breakdown of legal vs. illegal files

Presidential Debates, funny commercials

You put a comma where "aka" should be.

Re:I'd love a breakdown of legal vs. illegal files

Porn? I mean, isn't that what this whole crazy internet thing is for?

Re:Do those uses make sense?

Cynical, aren't we?

Doesn't it make more sense to get these from "the source"?

In case you haven't been paying attention, the "source" is usually providing the torrent. (Go to any major Linux distribution to check. I dare you.)

The gutenburg mirrors seem like the best place for this.

But God-aweful slow. Distributing the bandwidth allows for a larger number of files to be moved faster.

Might as well add that with BT there is a chance that your GTA demo is really a mis-labelled Halo demo.

Again, many of these torrents are now provided by "the source". Since they seed the torrent, you can be sure that it's properly labeled. Improper labeling is usually a side-effect of getting it from "questionable" channels.

Google would be better for most of this.

Poppycock. Google only caches HTML. It's difficult to say if even they have the bandwidth to cache multimedia files.

For most of this, it makes more sense to get the files elsewhere. For now, BT makes the most sense for copyright infringement materials, where for the most part no-one dares to host them on typical static web pages or download sites.

Again, this is poppycock. PDF files can be *huge* for freely available information. "The BeFS FileSystem" and "Mozilla Platform Developers Guide" are just two examples off the top of my head. And only a few months ago, I mirrored creative commons PDFs for Slashdot, although I don't remember what they were.

Sad day for file sharing?

BitTorrent was intentionally designed not to hide IP addresses as its developer, Bram Cohen, openly acknowledges. That's because his goal wasn't to develop a P2P tool that could be used to share content illegally but to develop a P2P tool that reduced bandwidth for legally shared content, such as Linux ISOs, etc.