The legality of BitTorrent

File sharing, and the BitTorrent protocol in particular, have become a significant issue to both copyright organizations and Internet service providers over the past several years. First, the protocol and the programs that use it have grown quite popular, resulting in the fact that BitTorrent traffic accounts for between 18% and 25% of all Internet traffic worldwide (as of 2004), depending on the source and tracking methods. Furthermore, despite its legitimate uses, much of this traffic is made up of pirated movies and illegal MP3 downloads.

In October, the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) continued its seemingly unending battle against piracy by sending a letter to the presidents of each of twenty-five universities that had been identified as the top locations for downloading pirated movies. In addition, they provided the universities with a toolkit to help them monitor campus network traffic. In effect, the toolkit was little more than an Xubuntu installation with a few extra packages-such as Snort and ntop-designed to track network traffic.

There were a few problems with the MPAA’s approach however, including the fact that the source code was not made available for the portions of the project licensed under the General Public License (GPL). As mentioned in a previous issue of The Rose Thorn, this was the leverage that Ubuntu developers used to force the MPAA to remove the toolkit from their website.

Despite this success for open source software, a number of legal issues still surround the use of BitTorrent software. As mentioned earlier, much of the traffic using the BitTorrent protocol today consists of copyrighted material, such as MP3s and pirated movies. Many of the trackers from which such content was being offered have been taken offline by way of legal action; however, many are still available.

Yet one cannot merely block all BitTorrent traffic as some universities seem keen to do; there are a number of perfectly legitimate uses for the protocol that break no copyright laws. One example is the distribution of the install CDs/DVDs for many Linux distributions. Due to the size of a CD or DVD image, the ability to lessen the bandwidth requirements on the servers and spread it out to a greater number is beneficial to everyone. Another use comes from relatively unknown artists and musicians that choose to release their new albums on BitTorrent sites. I have listened to a number of these albums that I would likely have never heard about had the artists not done so.

All together, the BitTorrent protocol represents a significant advancement in downloading files on a large network; however, like all technologies, it is possible to use it for illegal purposes as well as legal ones. One can only hope that as organizations like the MPAA continue to fight against the sharing of copyrighted material, they will do so without breaking the copyright laws themselves and that the legitimate uses of BitTorrent software will not be infringed.