BitTorrent is simply a good protocol for sharing large files with large groups-they are perfect for films, video games, music and of course software. Of course, that’s not really the point: you don’t look at the ratio of infringing use to legal use, but rather at the legal use by itself-if it’s substantial and meaningful, then you have to go after the infringing users, not the technology as a whole. Defenders of this kind of filtering don’t take such a forward-thinking stance, and their typical response in the torrent debate is to assert that the majority of BitTorrent traffic is likely infringing. Google endorsed this last year when they started dropping it from their search autocomplete results, and as Mike pointed out at the time, just imagine they had done the same with “mp3” a few years ago when that was supposedly synonymous with piracy. One of the many, many examples is the way the anti-piracy crowd treats “torrent” as a dirty word. The conflation of tools and technologies with the ways people use them is a big problem in the copyright debate. Wed, May 16th 2012 05:06am - Leigh Beadon
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