RSSBitTorrent to Crackdown on Trademark Use
By Ed Oswald | Published February 8, 2006, 11:59 AM
In an effort to clean up its image, BitTorrent creator Bram Cohen is now looking into a plan that would begin to clamp down on the hundreds of sites and software programs using the trademark without permission.
Cohen is pushing for legal uses of the technology these days, and the open source license to use BitTorrent's work needs to change, the Inquirer reported Wednesday. Because of this policy, a large number of software titles have emerged who claim compatibility with the technology, which BitTorrent has little control over.
The company signed a deal last November with the MPAA that added technology to the search engine used by bittorrent.com that effectively removed content owned by the studios that make up the organization.
On Monday, the network strengthened its ties with Opera, announcing that the technology would be included in Opera 9. Also, the browser would be the first to qualify for a program that would allow the company to use the BitTorrent trademark.
BitTorrent President Ashwin Navin told the Inquirer in an interview that it is only considering the crackdown in the best interest of its users. He noted that several titles bundled with malware are apparently using the network's popularity as a method to gain more popularity and spread the malicious software around.
Under the new policy, a nominal fee would be paid to BitTorrent and the software would be subjected to a round of tests to ensure its compliance with security policies for software wishing to use the trademark.
I checked Bram Cohen's BT website and he removed all email addies from his website. LOL!
Guess he doesn't want the flames or already gotten flamed for bowing down to the pressure of RIAA/MIAA and kissing their arses.
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|Hmm... What about opera browser? They have bittorrent protocol in their software.
Why Bram Cohen even care about this?
He's going to have many enemies with this move!
About 2-3 years and you godda buy BT... This is nonsense.
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|This is like Cingular putting a patent on emoticons...this is such worthless point to be making (about trademarking the BitTorrent technology).
BitTorrent is a word that will be appended to all technology-related dictionaries...if it hasn't been all ready.
If he is intending on cracking down on malware clients, thats fine.
But Azureus, uTorrent, BitComet? yeah...the day!
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|Good for Bram Cohen! BitTorrent has made a huge impact on the net and much like DiVX, is a standard that is stronger when legitimized and standardized. There's a difference between a protocol and its uses.
Even though DiVX's original use was dominated by movie pirates, the format is now on many DVD players and emerging as a potential contender against Quicktime and WMV. It has a long way to go sine people are still more familiar with Real Networks, but it's picking up market power.
With BitTorrent, I'm sure that we could see BitTorrent used in enterprise solutions, software mirror solutions, and integrated into browsers as an intelligent standard.
One last thing - may BitTorrent clients violate some of the give/take principles of the protocol and can result in a high volume of leeching, which slows things down for everyone. The proposal to clamp down on the BitTorrent trademark being used without permission would certainly help fix this.
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|The whole arguement that the tool is somehow responsible for the use is daft.
It would mean that every shop selling knives (including camping, cutlery, catering) would be held responsible if the knife was used to harm.
I often see people claiming that P2P and file sharing is illegal - IT IS NOT ILLEGAL.
Many companys use P2P to distribute items free of charge.
The copying and distribution of items without the copyright owners concent is a "breach of copyright", in many countrys that is still a civil matter and not a criminal one.
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If I could buy a licence from a company that gave me the consent to copy any item they have the copyright on - I would actually be helping them distribute their product, save them money, and save the planets resources.
Why cant we simply be sold the permission to copy?!
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|distributing their material "yes", but you would be hurting their revenue and therefore they would go out of business and you would never see another product or an update to the ones that you giving away for free.
You are also right in that P2P is legal, but in the context that people use the 3 letters these days is illegal. They are assuming that the trading of copyright material is legal, rather than the act of P2P.
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|3letters? somebody needs to go back to second grade
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|Owned.
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|lmao...
This would be v2 of the BT network. All others would simply continue to use BT v1.
They can't kill the network when there are this many clients out there. The best he could do is just drop out of it. Remove his client and name from the game.
We'd probably do better without him.
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|Agreed!
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|Once they released an earlier version of the program under GPL, they can't change the license of their earlier version that is floating around, so this will have no impact at all, as most people use 3rd party BT clients.
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|They are talking about use of the name "BitTorrent", not anything else.
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|Well, that's too bad, bye bye BitTorrent!
Hello µTorrent!
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|Who uses BitTorrent anyways.
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|I use BITCOMMET for almost 2 years i think.. not sure.
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|Nobody hardly does anymore, BitTorrent has gotten bloated over time. uTorrent is much smaller and kicks a@@ to boot.
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