After Monday’s Supreme Court decision that companies that create
peer-to-peer applications could be held liable, BitTorrent could be in
potential danger. However, unlike Grokster, BitTorrent has far more
convincing case for it. The creator, didn’t create BitTorrent for the
explicit reason of file sharing, in fact, he advised people not to use BitTorrent for illegal purposes.
What can, and probably will be attacked very soon are the tracker
sites. The sites that distribute the .torrent file, and then “tracks”
all the people that are downloading the file. In May several sites
where shut down, elitetorrents – this was shut down mainly for
distributing Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith, before it aired, and
btefnet – this provided television shows a few hours after they first
aired.
In response to this weakness in BitTorrent, there are several
attempts to create a “trackerless” system. A system that doesn’t need a
central tracker to manage the downloads. This programs are still in
development, but will play a major in the months to come.
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