Studios May Make Peace with File-Sharing Sites

Hollywood, which has been waging a costly but thus far unproductive war against file-sharing sites, may be on the verge of calling a truce with BitTorrent, the peer-to-peer technology most widely used for pirating movies and music over the Internet. BitTorrent developer Bram Cohen on Tuesday said that he had agreed to remove links on is site to pirated copies of movies as a first step toward a deal with studios to use his system to distribute movies online for a fee. Cohen appeared Tuesday at a joint news conference with MPAA chief Dan Glickman, where he said that he expected to be able to announce some distribution deals with major studios "in the future." The deals are expected to have little effect on online piracy for the foreseeable future, analysts noted, since BitTorrent, an open source program, does not rely on the links posted on Cohen's site. "Unfortunately, as many people as were swapping movies yesterday will likely be swapping them tomorrow," Eric Garland, chief executive of BigChampagne Online Media Measurement, told today's Los Angeles Times.
2005-12-20 17:37:42