Bram Cohen, creator of BitTorrent, says there’ll soon be a torrent search engine on bittorrent.com. There’ll be sponsored links mixed in with the search results, which isn’t anything new. They’re going to index all types of torrents I guess, even ones that help people obtain copyrighted material. I think this is pretty neat, the MPAA and RIAA might not be too exited about it though. And they have good reason not to be.
Here’s a little bit from the Wired article:
Whiz kid inventor Bram Cohen and a small cadre of developers and entrepreneurs are in the final stage of launching an advertising-supported search engine dedicated to cataloging and indexing the thousands of movies, music tracks, software programs and other files for download over Cohen’s popular BitTorrent protocol.
I originally read this at Slashdot. It’s supposed to launch within 2 weeks. I’m excited to check it out. I wonder if the MPAA or RIAA will be purchasing any advertising space on the search engine…
UPDATE: Tried going to search.bittorrent.com and was presented with a “Test for apache installation” page. I’d guess the search engine will show up at that address once it’s ready. So keep an eye there if you’re interested in trying this out once it’s available.
Well, now what?
Work with Me
I'm available for hire and always taking new clients, big and small. Got a project or an idea you'd like to discuss? Startup plan but no developer to make it happen? Just get in touch, I'd love to see if I can help you out!
Leave some Feedback
Got a question or some updated information releavant to this post? Please, leave a comment! The comments are a great way to get help, I read them all and reply to nearly every comment. Let's talk. 😀
Longren.io is proudly hosted by DigitalOcean
There’s really nothing unique about this “plan”, other than, perhaps, financial gain for Cohen. However, I don’t think advertising through search results will really work, especially for torrent sites. The audience will already know what they’re looking for.
It’ll also open another messy front for Cohen to deal with… expect all kinds of cease and desist letters, threats, lawsuits, etc. from RIAA, MPAA and BSA (among others).
If I were him, I’d just concentrate on the technology. Let the end-users play around with the implementations.
Yah, I fully agree with you Azmeen. I was very suprised that he’s doing this. He’s definately going to face some legal issues over this.
I’m afraid we’re witnessing the downfall of BitTorrent as we knew it. Bram should have focused on the legitimate uses of BitTorrent such as Linux ISO distribution. Even using it to distribute movies people pay for would be better.
In my opinion, he’s just getting himself into a whole bunch of trouble. After this the MPAA and other groups are going to be able to direct their actions directly against Bram and BitTorrent. Where previously, only sites actually distributing the torrents were threatened.
Hmm, it might be a good thing, since we don’t really have a ‘comprehensive’ bittorent search engine for legal software. It may be the ‘download.com’ for bittorent.. O.o
I guess Bram Cohen will be working together with MPAA to make a system that filters illegal torrents from the searchengine…
That could be. Didn’t sound like it from the articles I’ve read. I hope he does though for the sake of the BitTorrent protocol.
It would suprise many but there are legitimite reasons for using BitTorrent. Every time a major release of Dropline Gnome comes out, I download it with BitTorrent. Same thing with Slackware. It’s really been useful in the online trance music community. Darrell Domminey and I started using BT for DJ Pi and DJ Gt . There’s more and more DJ’s using it all the time to get their music out. A lot would like to get their mixes on DJ Gt’s tracker, some do.
I’m afraid we’re witnessing the downfall of BitTorrent as we knew it. Bram should have focused on the legitimate uses of BitTorrent such as Linux ISO distribution. Even using it to distribute movies people pay for would be better.