14 DAY TRIAL // BitTorrent is often used for copyright infringement. That's no fault of BitTorrent, but it's something that plenty of people will criticise. BitTorrent is used for a lot of legitimate purposes as well. But when asked for examples, you can't really go beyond Linux distributions which helps the case of anyone trying to throttle or block the technology entirely.
Unfortunately, the Internet Archive creating almost 1.4 million torrents is not going to change things, but it's a big step in the right direction.
The group aims to preserve all of mankind's digital creations, be them books, websites, movies or audio.
But it's not just purely digital creations, older content is being converted into digital form for better preservations. And, of course, more recently, the Internet Archive started preserving actual books.
Most of the things it stores is in the public domain but not always. Still, in essence, the Internet Archive is nothing but a library for the modern age. Not that it's without its critics.
Creating a backup of the entire internet, all books, all video and audio recordings and so on can be incredibly expensive, as you can imagine, especially for a non-profit group.
So BitTorrent is an obvious choice in making sure that the content it hosts is made available to as many people as possible.
Using BitTorrent instead of traditional server hosting means that downloads will be faster for the users while at the same time using up much less bandwidth for the Internet Archive. It's win/win.
The only question is, why hasn't this happened sooner? Unfortunately, the answer, or at least part of it, is simple, because of the stigma BitTorrent has.
"The Internet Archive is now offering over 1,000,000 torrents including our live music concerts, the Prelinger movie collection, the librivox audio book collection, feature films, old time radio, lots and lots of books, and all new uploads from our patrons into Community collections (with more to follow)," the Internet Archive wrote.
If you've used BitTorrent before, you known that a torrent is useless without seeds, i.e. people sharing the files in full at any given time. In this case, the Internet Archive has both of its data centers seed all of the torrents. On top of that, anyone who downloads any particular torrent and then continues to make it available will act as a seed.
It's going to take a while for 1.4 million torrents to get seeders, outside of the official ones, especially files like this, which generally are of interest to few people at any given time.
Still, for those interested in the files preserved by the Internet Archive, the development is a great one. At the very least, they'll be able to download any file they want at potentially double the speed, if the speed is not limited by their connection but the server's available bandwidth.
But there are problems though. Many in academic circles will not be able to access the files via BitTorrent since the protocol is banned altogether. Schools and universities take the shotgun approach since they are afraid of any lawsuits that may stem from copyright infringement.
On top of that, BitTorrent is generally a big bandwidth consumer, since large files are shared. Add to this the fact that many students and faculty will use BitTorrent to share copyright infringing files, and it's easy to see why the decision is made.
But it's a shame. Not only will these schools make it harder for students, professors or researchers to get files from the Internet Archive or Linux distributions and other large open source projects. But they're also denying their members the opportunity to share large files, research results, studies, course material and so on, fast, efficiently and cheaply.