Sony plotted to buy BitTorrent

Here's a strange little nugget: Torrentfreak has seen documents which show Sony was planning to buy BitTorrent in 2006.

There was a solid business idea behind the scheme (more solid than the botched attempts to turn Napster into a legitimate business) - Sony was going to use BitTorrent to provide a link between their film content and their physical products.

A little creepy, though, to admire a company's software but attempt to destroy the company through lawsuits before making an offer to buy it, isn't it?

Thom Yorke on the internets

It's lovely of Thom Yorke to to release a new record, but the format is a little odd.

Bittorrent bundles? That feels no less hipster-friendly embrace of a shall-we-say-specialised technology than Cassette Store Day.

This was supposed to be the year that BitTorrent Bundles went mainstream, but - although there's some interesting things going on there - the platform still feels very much like a small pool, albeit one that now has a killer whale languishing there. The Yorke album is probably the one chance Bundles has to break through and become a mass product, although there's two challenges here.

The first is whether enough people care about Yorke's solo work to go to the trouble of installing the software and getting past their nerves about things they may have heard about torrenting. It's not entirely clear that Yorke has that heft.

Secondly, even if people do embrace the idea of torrents-you-pay-for, it's going to always be a hard sell to the major labels, who might not unreasonably think that encouraging the take-up and normalisation of torrenting might encourage experimentation beyond the licenced part of the service. Viewed from Sony HQ, selling records through Bittorrent might seem a bit like suggesting that drug dealers also carry aspirin and Calpol - you can see the advantages, but the risks might outweigh them.

Where be pirates?

The BBC got quite excited by the MusicMetric Digital Music Index. Very, very excited, although it somehow neglects to mention in the BBC News report that the MusicMetric work has been done apparently as part of a BBC project. The MusicMetric page does reveal the link:

As part of the BBC BitTorrent trend visualisation we have released the largest ever public data set showing trends in music on BitTorrent around the UK.

I say "reveal", although it doesn't really explain what that might mean.

On a different page, the BBC does start to suggest there could be a link:

The data, collected independently by Musicmetric and seen exclusively by the BBC, is believed to be the biggest analysis of its kind to be conducted.

If it's a BBC project, then you'd expect the data to be seen exclusively. Although MusicMetric have published the data under a Creative Commons licence so it's not that exclusive.

If the BBC is commissioning work like this, why would it pretend it's just some stuff that happens to be out there?

Anyway, that BBC excitement. There's excitement over the sheer volume of downloads in the UK:

Globally, the research suggested that the UK is a significant player on the world stage as a country of illegal music downloaders.

The country was placed second in the world in terms of pure volume of illegal activity, with Musicmetric logging 43,263,582 downloads in the first six months of this year.

The US topped the list, with 96,681,133 downloads tracked in the same period.

Italy (33,158,943), Canada (23,959,924) and Brazil (19,724,522) made up the remainder of the top five.

However, as the reports point out elsewhere, in many countries the most-torrented artist is Billy Van, who has made a choice to share his music via BitTorrent. So these figures, clearly, don't track "illegal music downloaders" at all; they mix up licenced and unlicenced downloads. And that's before you have to swallow hard at the conflation of all "illegal" downloads and activity solely on the torrents.

If the language is vague, the figures seem suspicious, too. Really? Britain is the second best at torrenting, although outstripped only two-to-one by the US?

It might be true, but I'd be more keen to accept that data if this had come from a different place - British survey finds British people (second) most active could be down to the methodology, or a cultural bias. Would a team sat in Lahore have found identical data?

When we get down to a town and artist level, things get cloudier still:

The data suggests that Ed Sheeran - with his album + - is, so far this year, the most illegally downloaded artist in 459 of the 694 cities, towns and villages covered by the research.

No. No, it really doesn't. The data tracks the most - let's use their terms - illegally downloaded albums and, certainly in the data released, that's all.

So you can say that if you take this data, +- is the most torrented album, but you can't say anything about artists. (For example, if just over half of people downloading +- download two Pink albums, too, Pink would outstrip Sheeran as most popular artist, but that wouldn't show up on this data.

And we're talking about tiny, tiny numbers here - Sheeran "won" Bath with just 57 copies snaffled; that was 0.01% of all the Bath torrents. That's pretty slim figures to build a claim on.

That's even if you accept this town-level data at all. The internet is tolerably good at knowing what country you're in, but anyone who has seen the attempts to localise adverts for dating sites and that one about the woman with the strange old trick to look younger will know, when it comes to guessing your town, the internet has all the pinpoint accuracy of a NATO strike.

So when the BBC claims:

Unlike the most recent boat race, Oxford (8,511 downloads on average per month) and Cambridge (7,217 downloads) find themselves pretty close in the piracy stakes.

It's possible all those downloads could actually have been located in Bedford.

So, pretty much dubious claim stacked on category error set upon rather thin data. Still, it's a news story, kinda, right?

The BBC Online reporting, though, is better than that spotted on South Today by icod:

lookyfrog.us/1qzvcdzmmgvbuu…

— iCod (@icod) September 17, 2012

Yes, that was Sheeran being called a "naughty boy" for, erm, having been the victim of downloaders.

Google sets out to frustrate would-be filesharers with short attention spans

The headline on the Zeropaid report is quite eye-catching:

Google Begins Filtering Cyberlocker, BitTorrent Search Results

Except, actually, it isn't. What Google has done is stopped the autocomplete "guessing" when you type the name of some sites that help people share files into the search box.

Google have also gone about drawing up the names that don't autocomplete in a very half-arsed way, too, which suggests this is the anti-piracy equivalent of telling your colleagues about a New Year's Resolution: sure, it sounds good to think it might be a positive action, but really it's just a gesture designed to look better than it actually is.

"I was going to go on Bittorrent to see if I could download every record ever made" says Fandango Gibbons, 21, "but I didn't know the address. So I went to Google to see if I could find it, but I had to type the whole name in the search box. It didn't suggest it or nothing. Keystroke after keystroke after keystroke. It was too much, you know? And even after I'd typed 'bittorrent' in, it still did nothing. Just sat there waiting for me to press 'enter' or 'return' or something. As if! Like I'm a robot. So I went into town and bought all the records ever made instead. Much better than typing a whole word."

Torrent's business head falls off

Ashwin Navin, who has attempted for ages to find a way to make money from BitTorrent, is throwing in the towel and quitting as BitTorrent Inc's President. Navin is planning on setting up something in partnership with one of the YouTube guys. We'd check which one, but by the time we'd done the search, the company will have failed.

Torrent admin banged up

We've reached the verdict in the last of the trials sparked from the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement taking time out of its busy war on terror to infiltrate a Bittorrent operation - like in Spooks Code 9.

Daniel Dove had been the only target netted through expensive use of US government resources to plead not guilty; he's just been handed a $20,000 and eighteen months in jail.

The operation had the desired effect of reducing the number of files being shared without permission on the bit-torrent network, assuming you count 'being removed from American servers and placed on overseas machines instead' as an actual reduction.

Bittorrent not keen on all sharing

Valleywag's story that Bittorrent was laying of twelve staff proved to be slightly flawed - there was a last-minute decision to save some of the employees. The original generated a huffy official statement, but also a surprising request from Bittorrent's PR person Lily Lin, who tried to persuade Valleywag to offer up the name of the original anonymous tipster who told them about the job losses.

"Any chance?" begged Lin, alongside the sort of threat that even Slartybartfast would have thought a bit weak - "I've heard rumblings of legal implications".