BitTorrent In Negotiations with Hollywood Studios, MPAA
Bram Cohen, inventor of BitTorrent (the software that you use to pirate movies unless you have been living under a rock) is in secret negotiations with two unnamed Hollywood studios and the MPAA mothership herself:
``There is a whole new market that’s being developed with filtering tools, ways of allowing these technologies to develop while preventing copyright infringement,’’ said Dean Garfield, the MPAA’s legal affairs director. ``We’re hopeful that Bram will be a partner in moving BitTorrent in that direction.’’
Negotiations between the MPAA and BitTorrent are continuing, talks that Cohen characterizing as `friendly.’’ BitTorrent is also in discussions with two studios he declined to identify.
The article is a curious PR puff-piece because it attempts to portray the recent Supreme Court “Grokster” ruling as working in BitTorrent’s favor. For those of you who are not asleep at the wheel, the recent Grokster ruling said the following:
“For the same reasons that Sony took the staple-article doctrine of patent law as a model for its copyright safe-harbor rule, the inducement rule, too, is a sensible one for copyright. We adopt it here, holding that one who distributes a device with the object of promoting its use to infringe copyright, as shown by clear expression or other affirmative steps taken to foster infringement, is liable for the resulting acts of infringement by third parties.”
Translation: if we can prove your P2P software is used for piracy, then we can sue your ass out of existence. At this point, BitTorrent has probably jumped the shark. We wish Bram well but we just can’t picture him meshing well with studio-types. He’d show up at the parties and everything would get kind of awkward…
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