Cohen Signed Deal on BitTorrent

[MartyMcFly]

Bram Cohen, the creator of bittorrent.com has signed a deal with the Movie Industry, that is hoped will reduce the number of pirated films, shared on the Internet, via the website. The deal means that BitTorrent must remove any links to pirated films.

The deal between the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) and BitTorrent is the latest in a line of moves to limit the illegal sharing of films via the Internet. Mr Cohen has raised $8.75m to turn the BitTorrent Inc into a commercial download service, similar to Napster, who made a likewise transition.

"We are glad that Bram Cohen and his company are working with us to limit access to infringing files on the BitTorrent.com Web site," said Dan Glickman, chief executive of the Motion Picture Association of America, which represents Hollywood's major studios and signed the deal with BitTorrent.
"They are leading the way for other companies by their example," Glickman added.

The deal is hoped to stem the number of illegal downloads, although it is not known how much impact the deal will make, and is seen by both as an “early experiment. This comes, after a conviction by a Hong Kong court, of a man trying to illegally distribute films using the software.

[alc6379]

I'm not advocating Piracy or anything, but it's a good thing the open-source nature of the program can be forked, and that we're not stuck using this new version.

Case in point: What if suddenly a government wants to block seditious media being transferred via bittorrent? Could this same anti-piracy measure be used to subvert it, as well?

[Ooble]

It's not the actual client that's filtering copyrighted works, but the search engine on BitTorrent.com. You can use the client for anything available via torrents.