Tuesday, February 27, 2007

Bit-Torrent Goes Legal. So What?

The media business still doesn't seem to get it. Everyone was making a big deal this week about BitTorrent finally offering legal downloads.

Well, great.

But as PC World and many others helpfully pointed out, the new service is pretty lame. Even apart from having to pay, the new service turns out to be nowhere near as good as downloading the unlicensed content you can find all over BitTorrent for free. The selection is relatively tiny, you can play it only on two computers (no mobile devices or TVs), and movie downloads last only 30 days and can be played only during a 24-hour viewing period. Sheesh.

You're trying to get people to "do the right thing" and pay the copyright holders, and then you hit them over the head with restrictions worse than iTunes and other "legal" download options? Yeah, that'll work!

The only real upsides are the fact that you won't get sued or go to hell, and that the image quality is likely to be reliably high. (Oh, and apparently you actually "own" TV show episodes that you download.) Still, if you ask me, if they want to charge for something, it ought to be way BETTER than what you can get for free. Appealing to downloaders' better nature simply isn't enough.

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