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Legal BitTorrent Communities for Class Presentation?

Posted by Cliff on Sat May 06, 2006 08:52 PM
from the it's-not-the-technology-but-who-uses-t dept.
Education The Internet
OnBeyondBeing asks: "A few of my friends and I are taking a class at a local university called 'Internet and Society' and we have to do a 'Technology Tour' on innovations that have social aspects or uses (like Google Maps, Kiko (an Internet-based calendar), LiveJournal and Frappr). We chose to do our presentation on BitTorrent. As part of our presentation, we have to do a lab in which the students and teachers use BitTorrent in some way. I was thinking of having people join some BitTorrent community that interests them and join a torrent, but most of these communities contain material that is not suited for an academic presentation. Aside from places like CommonBits and Etree (and others that were mentioned in a previous Slashdot post), what sites have you found that use BitTorrent as the basis of a community that are clean and legal enough for a class presentation? Alternatively, what other interesting, legal uses of BitTorrent have you found?"
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[+] News: Legal Torrent Sites Help Legitimize BitTorrent 257 comments
Jeff writes "In today's Seattle Times, technology columnist Paul Andrews highlights how legal torrent sites such as CommonBits may lead to wider adoption and acceptance of BitTorrent. With reports that illegal torrent usage may be more than a third of Internet traffic, sites like LegalTorrents, Torrentocracy, Prodigem and bt.etree may offer a compelling defense to future legal attacks while simultaneously promoting fair use rights. Andrews goes on to argue that the future of television may be no further away than integration of podcasting, RSS, tagging and BlogTorrent."
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  • There are always Linux Torrents [linuxtracker.org]

  • Cringely's NerdTV (Score:5, Informative)

    by headkase (533448) <pickett.bill@gmail.com> on Saturday May 06 2006, @09:00PM (#15279318)
    Cringely offers NerdTV [pbs.org] as a bittorrent download. As it is legal there's usually a ton of seeds on each download - nothing better to demonstrate the speed possible with bittorrent.

  • Anime (Score:1, Interesting)

    by Bob535 (639390)
    Animesuki.com Fansubs of a good deal of asian programming that has never been licensed in North America (and therefore legal)

    • Re:Anime (Score:3, Interesting)

      by kinzillah (662884)
      Not legal, but the companies look the other way because they recognize the advertising value.
        • Thanks - interesting article. But the last line reads: "In the end, regardless of ethics, or motive, fansubs are technicaly illegal." - that doesn't seem to support your argument, or have I misunderstood?

        • Re:Anime (Score:4, Informative)

          by PylonHead (61401) on Saturday May 06 2006, @11:08PM (#15279724) Homepage Journal
          Wow, did you even read the article you linked to? Let me post the conclusion for you:


          Conclusion

          Legally, there is no difference between "fansubs" and "bootlegs". In the eyes of the law, both could be seen as damaging to the market. Regardless of whether or not a title has been technicaly licensed in North America, it is illegal. Lack of enforsement of copyright laws in terms of unlicensed fansubs maybe the result of several different factors. Some companies may believe that the early introduction of the title to North America is beneficial. Others may simply tolerate a "fan-activity" as long as it does not become too damaging to sales. And yet other companies may not want to or be able to invest the time and money necessary to prosecute foreign violations of their copyright.

          In the end, regardless of ethics, or motive, fansubs are technicaly illegal.


    • Re:Anime (Score:2, Informative)

      by theNetImp (190602)
      Them not being licensed to an american distributor DOES NOT MAKE THEM LEGAL. They are still protected by international copyright law. Use some common sense.
        • There's nothing technical about it. It "is" copyright infringment. I'm not saying I disagree with the fact that the Anime industry overlooks it. Whether it tracks licensed or not, it is not an example of legal torrent downloads, they are still illegal. I may be biased because I have gone to Japan and spent $200-$300 for a series that I could have downloaded for free, and that my DVD collection in toll is close to 500 discs, including the region2s from Japan and the UK.
        • the owning companies have never expressed any desire to ban fansubs
          That's not quite true: Anime company Media Factory ('Kimi Ga Nozomu Eien', 'Akane Maniax') asked [animesuki.com] animesuki to stop listing fansubs of their works, even though there were no US-licenced versions.
        • the owning companies have never expressed any desire to ban fansubs

          Yes they have. Media Factory is one that has actually threatened litigation, but think about it. All the creators speak Japanese and live in Japan. International litigation is expensive (plus Japanese lawyers are even more expensive than ours), and most don't seem to know this is going on anyway. Whenever the fansub issue does come up at conventions, the Japanese guests are shocked and often outraged. And what do you even mean by "b
            • (2) "most don't seem to know this is going on anyway"

              Are you sure? I'm no expert on this kind of stuff (only started downloading anime recently, although been buying it for a while), but it was my understanding that the whole fansubs thing was difficult to miss. It's been going on since the mid eighties, it can build up huge support for titles to be released over in america and europe (Azumanga Daioh being the obvious example) and it's not exactly hidden (a search on google brings up around 2 million re
    • It's not legal. It's less unethical.

  • (From my bookmark list) (Score:3, Informative)

    by TheDarkener (198348) on Saturday May 06 2006, @09:08PM (#15279342)
    http://www.legaltorrents.com [legaltorrents.com]

    ETree - Legal Bootleg Torrents [etree.org]

    Open Source Torrents [filesoup.com]
    • filesoup has moved to filesoup.co.uk. But I wouldn't recommend that for an educational setting (especially if the OP intends for the teachers/students to join as a member of the community). IIRC, they even have a red light district.

  • Legal Torrents (Score:4, Informative)

    by Bullet-Dodger (630107) on Saturday May 06 2006, @09:14PM (#15279359)
    Legal Torrents [legaltorrents.com] is quite good. Creative Commons-licensed music, movies, books, and such.
  • The Electric Sheep [electricsheep.org] server uses BitTorrent to distribute results of aesthetic evolution. Get the torrents of the RSS feed of torrents here [sheepserver.net]. It's currently delivering about 150GB daily by torrent.
  • Let them install World of Warcraft on their computers as Blizzard use BitTorrent to distribute patches. Then if they are good studens you can let them play abit afterwards. :-)
    • Blizzard's servers buckle under the strain of just keeping the game running; I imagine if they actually had to provide direct downloads to all however many million subscribers, then several serverfarms across the country would spontaneously explode on patch days. Bittorrent was really the perfect solution, although in the beginning some users complained that they shouldn't have to give their upload bandwidth to others. The Blizzard Downloader also does something different from normal torrents; my universit
  • I like ETree for all my music needs. http://bt.etree.org/ [etree.org] is a free tracker for free music. The bands, who's music appears on this site, allow and encourage people to make tapes of their live shows and share them with their friends. It is this general philosophy that lead to the large followings of The Greatful Dead and Phish and Linux.
      • Dimeadozen: not legal (although they do have standards, i.e. no official releases/commercial material).

        Tradersden: similar to dimeadozen

        COTapers: Now we're getting somewhere! Legal, but (mostly) limited to Colorado shows. Very tiny compared to Etree. There's a similar site for New Orleans, but I lost the link, unfortunately. There are also small sites devoted to particular bands (e.g. FishboneLive.org [fishbonelive.org].

        But if the original poster doesn't think Etree is "suited for an academic presentation", then I doubt i

        • Why is dimeadozen "not legal" and etree & cotapers legal? They all seem to follow the same standards (nothing commercial, bands must be taper friendly, etc). From the dimeadozen FAQ:

          • No torrent may distribute any official material. This includes:
            • OOP material and the separated audio part of VHS videos, Laserdisc videos, and DVD videos -- even if the recording is from a different source than the officially available material;
            • Alternate recording sources of any officially released performance, unles
  • Pure Pwnage uses BitTorrent to distribute their shows. That's legal and it has a cult-following of nerds to boot.
  • Legal Torrents [legaltorrents.com].
    Note that you could have used Google for that one. :)

    And if you want to call SXSW a community, here [citizenpod.com] is a link to their free MP3 archive torrent for 2006. There's a 2005 you can Google for, too.

  • Damn! (Score:3, Informative)

    by Zadaz (950521) on Saturday May 06 2006, @09:41PM (#15279448)
    When I was in school I had to do research for papers by my self.

    But then again, we had Gopher, not Google, so I'll shut up.

    Anyway, off the top of my head, Democracy player [getdemocracy.com] is a combination video player, RSS reader and torrent client that hooks up a community of legal (well, most of it) video distribution.

    It was also announced this week that Steven Soderbergh will be releasing a short through BitTorrent. (I'll let you find the link, you hard working student.)

  • Xandros and Suse both had torrent downloads.. I'm sure others do to but I only got those.
  • OpenOffice.org distributes their software via BitTorrent in order to help save bandwidth. You can get it other traditional ways but this is an example of where P2P can be used legitimately.

  • Fandom (Score:4, Interesting)

    by magefile (776388) on Saturday May 06 2006, @10:10PM (#15279520)
    I've found a bunch of fan movies on BT. Star Wars: Revelations is one, and I believe it's unofficially smiled upon by LucasFilms. Star Wreck: In The Pirkinning is another. Star Trek: The New Voyages. I suspect the Blender/Maya/3d-animation communities also have torrentable media available, as do various machinima communities. Another possibility is backup. Bittorrent is a semi-decent protocol for moving a shitload of stuff from one computer to another; in that case, you're not taking advantage of a swarm, you're just taking advantage of the fact that resumability, NAT traversal, etc., are made simpler (if you don't want to deal with, or have access to, something like rsync). I've moved my iTunes library that way a few times.

  • promotion of music (Score:4, Informative)

    by scum-e-bag (211846) on Saturday May 06 2006, @10:12PM (#15279526) Homepage Journal
    www.djmixes2k.com [djmixes2k.com]
  • You could find a Project Gutenberg torrent.
  • Don't forget the redvsblue episodes available on the net.
  • We used Bittorrent to host some of the larger Songfight [songfight.org] weeks. (Songfight is a semi-weekly music competition where artists / bands / etc compose a song based on a title chosen by the "Fightmaster". The following week, all the compositions are posted and voted-on.) Bittorrent was never used as the primary means of distribution for the songs, but in weeks that the 'fight was 100MB+ it was nice to have a torrent available.

    • Songfight is a semi-weekly music competition where artists / bands / etc compose a song based on a title chosen by the "Fightmaster". The following week, all the compositions are posted and voted-on.

      How did you make sure that none of your entrants subconsciously copied an existing work that they had heard 10 years ago on the radio? (See Bright Tunes Music v. Harrisongs Music, the "My Sweet Lord" case.) If you required all artists to warrant that they had done this checking themselves, what method did yo

      • How did you make sure that none of your entrants subconsciously copied an existing work that they had heard 10 years ago on the radio? (See Bright Tunes Music v. Harrisongs Music, the "My Sweet Lord" case.) If you required all artists to warrant that they had done this checking themselves, what method did you suggest that they use?

        I don't run the site, so I don't see it as my problem. Believe me, I'm as angry and frustrated by the silliness in the U.S. "intellectual property" law as you appear to be. It

  • Public Domain Torrents (Score:3, Informative)

    by optikSmoke (264261) on Sunday May 07 2006, @12:32AM (#15280003) Homepage
    Public Domain Torrents [publicdomaintorrents.com] has torrents of movies in the public domain in various formats. Some hidden gems in there, though I don't know how much of a "community" you could say they have.

  • AMPFEA.ORG (Score:2, Interesting)

    by torpor (458)

    We use Torrents on AMPFEA.ORG [ampfea.org], which is a community made for people who want a way to put their original-content (only) material online free of charge.

    If its free to the world, its free to use AMPFEA.ORG .. we discourage mis-use and abuse by active community audits, and we've got a veritable stash of interesting material - music, images, video - online for people to peruse.

    (Archives Made Persistent For Everyones Access..)

    • If its free to the world, its free to use AMPFEA.ORG .. we discourage mis-use and abuse by active community audits

      Once your audit turns up a work that a user claims to have created and believes in good faith that he has created but turns out to be substantially similar to a work published a decade ago, which is likely to happen by accident in the case of music [slashdot.org], what sanctions if any are imposed on the user? Or is the work simply removed? I couldn't find a Terms of Service on the site.

  • Don't forget NASA - http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=nasa+bittorre nt [google.com] ...now must be that time of year to be giving presentations, I just gave one on Bittorrent a few weeks ago...
  • TWiT [www.twit.tv] distributes their shows through bittorrent. Sometimes they even have video.

    Revision3 [revision3.com] also distributes their shows on bittorrent.

  • Compare the number of comments in the "Related Story", Legal Torrent Sites Help Legitimize BitTorrent, with this story--actually asking for legal torrent sites.
  • If your presentation is about the impact of bittorrent in society, what difference does it make if the use is legal or not? There are a lot of things that shape society that aren't legal.. For example, I'm sure any history class will teach you about the black market of alcohol created by prohibition, that was part of society.. There are current, technology-related examples too; Napster became pretty popular in its time, and I'm sure most of the stuff on those 60gb mp3 players people have now is not exactly
  • Over at mitosis.com we're about to launch a custom 'groups' system which gives users their own blog, user management tools, etc. etc. The interesting part is that we're also introducing a fully integrated torrents section along with it.

    An average visitor will view the 'torrents' page and be able to search, sort and/or download all the freeware, open source and copyright free/allowed 'community torrents' while a mitosis member that belongs to a group (or multiple groups) will view the torrents page and s

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