May 29, 2005 | Filed under:

Bittorrent is entering a difficult new phase of its history and it will be interesting to see how it plays out. In phase 1 it was the cool and powerful new protocol that was adored by the geeks and eventually adopted by the mainstream.  Being free and open source as well as powerful it grew in popularity very quickly.  Now, in Phase 2, it has to:

• Make money.
• Protect it’s users’ privacy while some want to invade it.
• Protect its generic uses while they are technically attacked.

Freedom to Tinker wonders if the bittorrent.com initiative to release a search engine for torrent files is misplaced. He argues that, while it may be difficult to legally demonstrate contributory infringement or similar, the opponents of Bittorrent may well use it as weapon to argue infringing conduct. Whilst the bittorrent company that manages the website is a different entity to the bittorrent protocol that is open source and ‘owned’ by nobody, the entertainment alliances will argue that the search engine is the indexing component of a larger system that is designed to induce users to infringe their copyrights.  They will demonstrate search results like this to make their point:

http://search.bittorrent.com/search.jsp?hitsPerPage=10&hitsPerSite=3&query=star+wars

The Bittorrent protocol of course has no native search capabilities and in its first phase depended on a great many websites which provided links to torrents which in turn triggered Bittorrent downloads. Many of these websites linked to potentially infringing files and have recently been shutdown as part of a campaign from the entertainment alliances. This has created a problem and an opportunity for Bittorrent.com. 

The problem is immediately less people will be using Bittorrent. Stats indicating usage will immediately drop and create a PR issue.  The opportunity is the window to create a search engine that can contain advertising to generate revenue for the company.  In taking this opportunity they must take a risk and become easier to attack.

Of course, it is perfectly reasonable technical need to create a search engine that trawls the web for a particular file format. It is a logical progression of the technology but if they had not needed the money, it may have been better created by another company.

Bittorrent has always had another weakness in its tracker technology.  Trackers reside on servers and maintain a list of which IP numbers are uploading and downloading the file.  Trackers are a barrier to entry for ordinary people to share their stuff (e.g. sharing a family video), an easy target for attack (e.g. DOS or legal attack) and a privacy concern as it would be very easy to slightly change the open source code to log all users trafficking certain files.  The benefit of this low-tech solution has been that websites have curated the stuff available via Bittorrent and ensured that their is no pollution.

Now they have introduced a more advanced solution that allows the clients to become trackers, removing the need for the centralised trackers.  Now ordinary people can publish more simply (on their blogs for example) and the trackers become less of a easy target for attack. But…

Now distributed trackers face the same issues as the distributed p2p technologies which use Fasttrack for example becoming an opportunity for pollution. There is now the possibility that bad players will flood the internet with bogus torrents which do not require trackers to ruin the bittorrent experience for everybody.

I will watch with interest. Good luck on your journey Bram, but sail carefully for these are treacherous waters…

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