![\"Copyright\"](\"http:\/\/www.digital-digest.com\/blog\/DVDGuy\/wp-content\/uploads\/2008\/04\/copyright.gif\" "\\"Copyright\\"")
<\/p>\nHappy Easter! May you have success hunting for the chocolate flavored seeds of a\u00a0perculiar non-mamalian species of\u00a0Lepus curpaeums. Another slow week, I guess Easter had something to do with it.<\/p>\n
So let’s get on with it then.<\/p>\n
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![\"BitTorrent](\"http:\/\/www.digital-digest.com\/blog\/DVDGuy\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/05\/bittorrent_logo.jpg\"){kind=logo}
<\/a>BitTorrent Inc under attack from “copyright monetization” firm Rightscorp<\/p><\/div>\n
Not content with the goodwill garnered from threatening downloaders with lawsuits in order to extract “pre-trial settlement” fees, “copyright monetization” firm Rightscorp\u00a0has again made headlines this week against after its COO\u00a0Robert Steele launched a broadside at BitTorrent Inc<\/a>. No, not the BitTorrent network and its piracy connections, but the company that invented the network, and also publishes the uTorrent client.<\/p>\n In a Facebook rant, Steele accused BitTorrent Inc of “driving and facilitating piracy” and says the company is profiting from piracy in the same way the now defunct Limewire and Napster were. Strangely, Steele also attacked the decentralized architecture of BitTorrent, in particular the use of trackers, which he says was a way for BitTorrent Inc to avoid the kind of legal trouble that came out of LimeWire and Napster’s centralized systems.<\/p>\n Of course, it’s BitTorrent’s decentralized and public trackers that allows companies like Steele’s own Rightscorp to make their money, money they could not make if piracy also did not exist on BitTorrent networks. Sounds like to be me they should be thanking BitTorrent Inc and the file transfer protocol they invented.<\/p>\n And that’s what BitTorrent\u00a0is – a file transfer protocol not unlike FTP or HTTP.\u00a0The latter two can also be used for piracy, and they are (and FTP was\u00a0certain the pirate’s choice back in the early days of the ‘net’). But uTorrent is really just a client for this protocol, not unlike the Chrome browser for HTTP and FileZilla for FTP. People download heaps of pirated stuff via Chrome every day, all un-monitored by the way by companies like Rightscorp, so where’s the outrage?<\/p>\n I’ll be the devil’s advocate for a second and make the argument that the proportion of legal data transfer via uTorrent is a lot lower than the proportion of legal data transfer\u00a0for Chrome or FileZilla, and that\u00a0despite there being tons of\u00a0legal stuff available on BitTorrent networks, most people use it to download pirated content. But at the end of the day, BitTorrent\u00a0just an unsexy file transfer protocol, and it’s silly to be so emotionally charged at something so boring, especially if you’re making money off people using it in the wrong way.<\/p>\n So it’s probably not great timing for BitTorrent Inc that another big\u00a0piracy story of the week was Game of Thrones\u00a0breaking yet another BitTorrent downloading record, with 193,000 simultaneous file sharers for one unique copy<\/a> of the second episode of season 4. The previous record, set by last year’s season finale, was around 170,000. The second episode, which features the heavily anticipated “purple wedding”, also easily beat the season premier’s 140,000. Remember, these figures are only for the most\u00a0active torrent, as usually there are dozens of different torrents for the same episode.<\/p>\n Australians were again the most enthusiastic downloaders, followed by the U.S., U.K., Canada and The Netherlands. The high\u00a0price of watching the show legally here in Australia not only makes it not affordable\u00a0for some, I think it also gives the rest (even those that can afford it) moral justification for pirating, whether rightfully or jofferily.<\/p>\n Is the Xbox One in trouble? Not in trouble as in “Wii U” trouble, but trouble as in Microsoft losing their grip on the only market in which their console is the dominant force? Titanfall was supposed to be the title that allowed the Xbox One to gain supremacy over the PS4, but while it was the best selling game for March, the PS4 still managed to retain its crown as the most popular console in the U.S<\/a> for the month (according to the latest NPD figures). That’s three month in a row.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n