23 Jan
2012
23 Jan
'12
6:58 p.m.
On Jan 23, 2012, at 1:26 PM, Chuck Guzis wrote:
Sorry, Alexandre, but I don't do
torrents--they've gotten a very bad
reputation here in the USA for a means of pirating intellectual
property. If you could upload this to one of the file-sharing sites,
that would be better for a lot of people.
Which is a shame, because it's otherwise a perfectly legitimate means of distributing
large files (e.g. Linux distributions). I see the same organizations badmouthing
BitTorrent as were badmouthing CD burners in the '90s; what I found especially ironic
about that situation was that Sony was one of the major record labels pushing for things
like excise taxes to counteract piracy on writeable CDs, while they themselves were
producing burners and discs.
There's nothing intrinsically wrong with BitTorrent, reputation or not. Does your
organization flag all torrent connections as illegal downloads? I know a number of
universities that do. It's a problem, because a number of legitimate sources
(Blizzard's game update mechanism comes to mind) use it as an underlying protocol and
get unfairly flagged as a result.
- Dave