Courses/Computer Science/CPSC 203/CPSC 203 2007Fall L04/CPSC 203 2007Fall L04 TermProjects/Torrents: Downloading of today!

Bit Torrent: Downloading of Today!

Team McLovin

Ali Kesmiri

Brent Sembinelli

Craig Gurash

Initial Project Statement

What is a torrent and how does it negatively and positively affect users of the internet and corporations involved in the production of media? What is being incorporated in society to hinder the negatives and allow progression of the positive aspects of torrents.

What Is Bit Torrent?

Diagram of Torrent Communication Protocol

To first understand what problems peer to peer file sharing and torrents pose to the internet, we must first understand what exactly torrents themselves are.

Torrent is usually defined as a stream with rapid and violent water flow. Torrent has many definitions, but all these definitions have two things in common which are fast speed and overwhelming amounts. Bit Torrent has this same idea. It is a peer-to-peer (P2P) communications protocol that distributes transfer of files at a fast rate. You no longer have to wait for a busy/slow FTP or website to download files. Bit Torrent forces people who download files to upload at the same time which continues the spreading of the files. The person that started all of this was Bram Cohen, a Python-language programmer that debuted Bit Torrent in 2001 and its popularity has exploded since 2005. At the rate that it’s going, Bit Torrent will be the largest P2P file-sharing community with in the next year.

Common Terms

Client

A client is a bittorrent program. For example Azureus is one of the most commonly used due to its user friendly capabilities.These client's assist in connecting seeders with the user. A complete list of clients can be found here: [1]

Leechers

A leecher is a peer who is in the process of downloading a torrent file(s), and may only have anywhere from 1% - 99% of the file(s). Some clients use the portion(s) of a file already downloaded to connect to another leecher, so the process becomes even more efficient.

Seeds

A seed is a peer that has 100% of a specific torrent file(s). The more seeds a leecher has, tends to speed up the downloading of the file.

Peers

Peers are a community of seeds and leechers on a client. The larger the amount of peers the more quickly your download may complete. This is due to the increased probability that your specific torrent request has a greater amount of seeds and leechers.

Tracker

A tracker is a server or database that holds many available torrents. A tracker is usually a web-portal or website that holds a certain database of torrents. Peers may access torrent files or even upload their own. The most common tracker used today for example is http://thepiratebay.org/.

Uploading

Uploading is the term used to describe the action of creating a torrent, and putting it onto a tracker. Peers upload torrents for many different reasons, often receiving credit from the tracker they use, or other peers.

Why is Bit Torrent so Special?

Bit Torrent’s primary purpose is to distribute large media files to private users just like other file sharing networks. But there are 5 main reasons that distinguish Bit Torrent from the others.

Bit Torrent networking is NOT a publish-subscribe model. It is a true P2P networking.
Bit Torrents filter out corrupted files which ensures 99% quality control.
Torrents encourage users to “seed” their complete files, and punish users who "leech".
Downloading speeds can go as high and over as 1.5 megabites per second.
Its code is open-source, advertising-free, and adware/spyware-free.
IT IS REALLY EASY TO USE

How do I Get/Use Bit Torrent?

How easy is it to use? We have a video here that will show you. [2]

Legal Issues

Copyright Laws

A copyright is the right to the original work that the author produced. A copy right allows the original author to do the following:

Allow or deny the reproduction of their original work
Allow or deny the distribution of copies of the original work
Allow or deny the work to be presented publicly (in the case of the arts. For example, a copyrighted play such as hamlet)

USA

In the United States it is illegal to upload or even download work from peer to peer networks such as bit torrent. Since works usually found on these types of networks are copyrighted, downloading them would violet the type of protection provided by these laws. Penalties involved with these types of crimes based on peer to peer networks range from fines of $30 000 - $150 000 dollars for each work infringed.

Canada

In Canada it is not technically legal to use p2p networks, upload and even download files you can find on p2p networks, however in 2007 the head of the copyright theft investigations of the RCMP, Noël St-Hilaire, released a statement stating basically that if you are only using the p2p networks for personal use you will not be targeted, since it is nearly impossible and not worth the polices time to investigate every person who downloads music, video or even software.

Anti-Use Groups

Government

FBI

Provides warning at the beginning of all motion picture films that are distrubuted on DVD and Video
Has teamed up with the MPAA to fight piracy

Non-Government

MPAA (Motion Picture Association of America)

Today many entertainment industries are using new technological methods to protect their films against theft. Some of the ways they try and do this:

DVD's that cannot be ripped onto a computer
Cable boxes sold by the service prodiver that allow you to play movies
Digital encryption in satelite signals that prevent someone from intercepting the signals and stealing the movie.

Can Corporations Use Torrent's to Their Advantage?

One of the largest internet gaming corporations in the world: Blizzard Entertainment, uses a form of torrent file sharing as a median to distribute game patches to its customers world-wide. Blizzard uses its version of torrent peer to peer technology to deliver the updates to its subscribed users due to its efficiency in delivery, and the speed in which the files are transferred. Blizzard’s most popular online role playing game World Of Warcraft which has approximately nine million subscribers world-wide uses this file sharing technology to deliver large game updates.

Microsoft releasing BETA versions of Vista on purpose to get interested buyers
Subscriptions to privatized Torrent hosts were you pay a monthly fee, for certain amounts of downloads, or fee per download.

The Pirate Bay

The Pirate Bay (http://thepiratebay.org/) is the most commonly, wide-spread used torrent tracker on the web today. The site (based in Sweden) was started by the anti-copyright organization Piratbyrån in 2003 to promote the free sharing of intellectual property (software, movies etc.). The group began this tracker as a protest to mostly American corporations such as Microsoft with the goal of limiting monopoly market share and profit. Many attempts have been made over the history of this website, to shut it down by many different organizations. Most recently in May, 2006 Swedish authorities consisting of 65 police officers raided the websites main servers confiscating thousands of dollars worth of equipment used to run the website. The raid came after immense pressure from US authorities and the MPAA who claimed that if Sweden harbored such "criminals", then consequences would soon arise. For the next couple of days the site displayed a message stating that it was temporarily shut down but would be back up as soon as possible. To the surprise of the bit-torrent community this promise held true as several days later the site was back up and fully functional. Later a site administrator stated publicly in an interview that the site was now operating on several servers in the Netherlands and Russia.

Since the raid on The Pirate Bay the website has taken many precautions in order to legally protect their activity. Their main defense is that they simply provide a grounds for peers to connect and share torrents (legal or not). The Pirate Bay also boasts a self-proclaimed disclaimer stating that they cannot be held responsible for any copyrighted materials found on the site:

"Only torrent files are saved at the server. That means no copyrighted and/or illegal material are stored by us. It is therefore not possible to hold the people behind The Pirate Bay responsible for the material that is being spread using the tracker. Any complaints from copyright and/or lobby organizations will be ridiculed and published at the site." -http://thepiratebay.org/about

Pirate Bay Facts

According to a popular Torrent tracker blog,as of January 2007 the website released the following statistics on its tracker:

Serving the torrents takes up 1.72 Mbyte/s
Apart from the torrents, 308 requests are made per second
These request take up 712 Kbyte/s
86 searches are made every second
The database server handles 1150 Requests per second
Including the tracker The Pirate Bay is good for 150-170 Mbit/s

Statistics

In 2005 Canada had the most file sharers per capita
In 2005 the motion picture industry lost $18.2 billion dollars from piracy.
In 2006 the world wide box office had an increase of 11% from the previous year making $25.82 billion dollars
In 2006 the 3 year trend of low box office ticket sales was smashed when it had 3.3% increase in ticket sales
In 2006 the price of the average ticket increased roughly 2% to reach $6.55 mark
In 2006 the number of films produce increase to 607 from 2005 where the number was previously 549
In 2004 the MPAA did a study and determine that the piracy rate of certain countries was highest in China at 90% followed by Russia and Thailand at 79%