Dave Winer talks about the growing importance of Bittorrent, mentions how Opera (still my favorite browser!) now supports it, and asks for “more non-infringing content.”
Hollywood hates Bittorrent because some people use it to redistribute illegally copied movie and music files. In the case of music, you can use Bittorrent to move around large libraries very quickly.
But the most common use of Bittorrent I see out there is not trading humongo MP3 libraries but instead much-higher-quality (.flac, .shn, etc.) recordings of live shows by bands that support such trading. These “lossless” music files are much bigger than MP3s; Bittorrent makes it possible to download them in a reasonable amount of time. The file traders are religious about preferring the higher-quality compression scheme — many will include little notices begging you not to convert the files to the “lossy” MP3.
Personally, I consider these recordings “non-infringing,” though I don’t know what the lawyers would say. Largehearted Boy does a daily “Bittorrent Brunch” pointing to new postings, many at Dimeadozen.
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