I could rip your entire post to shreds, but I\’ll keep with one paragraph in the interest of time.

Point #2 is flimsy — at best. You suggest that if Average Joe knew that BT clients were uploading as much as they download he would be deterred from using the protocol. What you obviously fail to understand is that 99.999% of broadband users consume about 00.001% of their monthly bandwidth allocation. (By \”available\”, I mean the amount of bandwidth that one could squeeze out of his ISP if he left his BT client open all the time — encrypted across the board — and didn\’t throttle-down the upload speed.)

You may be arguing, \”That is precisely the reason that consumer networks are so log-jammed; if everybody only used 00.001% of his available bandwidth each month, the problem would be solved!\” Well, yeah, but Comcast would be raking in hundreds of millions of dollars per month in subscription fees without actually having to do any real work. That\’s how \”successful\” corporations operate, Mark.

I also have to point-out a complete oversight on your part. You were under the impression that the BT protocol/clients \”save bandwidth\”? What ever gave you that impression? There\’s no such thing as a free lunch, Mr. Cuban. SOMEBODY has to bear the burden of the information transfer (\”cost of bandwidth\”). The point of the BT protocol is not to \”save bandwidth\”; the point is to DISTRIBUTE the seeds (\”master copies\”) as widely as possible so no one seeder is choked by innumerable peers.

The other purpose of the BT protocol is to send massive amounts of ENCRYPTED data so scumbag pieces of trash can\’t dictate reality to the masses. We\’re going to send whatever files we like to one another and that\’s that. And, frankly, we don\’t really give a sh*t what kind of impact that has on your checking account, Mark.

The fact of the matter in this game is that the \”illegal\” users can never be sorted out from the \”legitimate\” users, and that is precisely the tactic that hackers, crackers, and pirates use to assimilate and then conquer. How do you think the Windows Vista OEM crack functions? It makes it impossible for Microsoft to sort out the pirated versions of Vista from the legitimate versions. (Yes, the cracks work for Vista Ultimate, if you want to go out and save $400 without committing any crime; it\’s not illegal to install a BIOS emulator on your machine.)

Lastly, you appear not to realize that market demand (for \”pirated\” content, in this case) dictates the pace of technological and intellectual growth. In other words, to answer your seemingly sophomoric question as to what will happen when BT data accounts for an even greater percentage of traffic, the providers WILL increase the load-bearing capabilities of their hardware. Either that or go out of business. In case you didn\’t notice, America (and the rest of the world) are hungry-hungry-hungry for all their binary desires — smut, games, movies, software, and probably some sick digital fetish that I don\’t even know about. We\’re all criminals, buddy, and this train ain\’t stoppin\’.

You can conjure up all the paltry arguments you like. The BitTorrent protocol, and Internet \”piracy\”, for that matter, are not going away. But perhaps you acknowledged as much in your post.

1) TV Media content right now is controlled by the Big Cable Companies (e.g. COX, Rogers, etc). What you want to watch is dictated by them. Yes there is Video On Demand, but you don\’t have any flexibility to watch other content produced by users, popular websites, or simply stuff that is not on TV any longer (i.e. first episodes of Prison Break, older movies). Even with VoD you don\’t have the option to buy it and watch it later or burn it to a DVD.

2) The reason we\’re stuck having TV media content spoon fed to us, is that these Cable Companies control the _distribution_ of content. If you, me, or anyone else wants to distribute their own TV contents, it\’s not possible unless you have $$$ and those Cable companies approve it.

3) Internet as the new distribution medium. YouTube is taking advantage of this: it allows anyone to post and _distribute_ video content for _free_. It\’s like your own channel to publish stuff to the world v.s. being limited to what the Cable companies want to show. This I believe is the essence of YouTube.

4) The problem with using the plain old internet and http interface is that high quality/long-length content is too bandwidth intensive, as such only small clips or low-quality long episodes are available from media providers. No one provider can serve a content spanning gigabytes to hundred of thousands of clients.

This is what BitTorrent Protocol solves — making the internet into an efficient distribution medium for content by distributing the traffic load with other peers.

However the _implementation_ of the bittorrent protocol sucks, because:

a) The clients available are too complicated. You have to munge around with too many settings, ratios, etc. that can have a profound effect on your dl/ul speed. It should be easy to use as a web-browser.

b) content deliver is to my computer. This isn\’t really the fault of the bittorrent protocol, but all bt clients are implemented as computer programs. This means, I can only view content content on my 20inch monitor. This pales in comparison to my 50inch+ TV. Yes, I can proceed to burn the content on DVD, but that is another manual process. Or I can stream the contents to my TV, but I need yet another device that interfaces both to my TV and the computer located in my bedroom.

c) I have to spend a lot of time to _find_ content amongst all the noise, download it, and then open a program to watch it. I mean after a long-day at work, I come home to my wife and kids. The last thing I want to do is poke my nose in a computer and waste 30 minutes to an hour trying to _find_ good content.

d) Finally, bittorrent is only really good for _popular_ content where a bt client as a lot of peers/seeders to download from. The minute you have only a couple of seeders, you have to fall-back to a centralized distribution model…which is not good if many users are requesting unique content from a single seeder.

Granted most of these implementation warts can be solved by anyone who utilizes bit-torrent to make content a) easy to use, b) integrates with their TV as a Tivo-like settop box, c)finding content is easy, and d) and ensuring their BT architecture can still fall-back to a single seeder using a highbandwidth server (or a couple of BT servers distributed geographically in major cities and countries).

And making things easy & integrated is where the real Money is, and the first companies to do this Right will succeed I think.

In fact, I\’m involved in a startup that is solving these problems now.

Bandwidth, wireless, ISP TOS, and last mile issues aside (I think Mark covered those beautifully), Bittorent needs a proper business model to succeed. The only way I see that happening is if the content sellers came up with an iTunes like store front interface and used Bittorent (with private trackers) as the delivery system. So what is holding it back? Once again, as Mark frequently points out, DRM is the killer here. I would be more that happy to pay for high-quality HD versions of my favorite media, but I wont start doing that until I am free to use them as I wish. When I purchase something, I should be able to port it to my iPod, stream it to my HDTV over my Xbox, burn it to DVD to play on a Divx-enabled player, and make un-restricted backups to protect my investment. This is why I don’t use iTunes or buy DRM-enable media. Oh yeah, and it has to be easy enough for my parents to use if you want to attract users and make any real money

as for the proliferation of clients, most people gravitate towards a particular client – the ones their friends use/recommend, or the one that they find usable.

usefulness is the final arbiter for technology. if people find something useful, they use it. otherwise they don’t. (not that this prevents people doing phds1 or selling marketing surveys that demonstrate this

usability affects which version of a tech people use, along with cost and so forth. but it doesn’t stop them. vcrs sold quite well in spite of being considered the epitome of difficult-to-use tech.

microsoft would not exist if ‘a ton of challenges’ was a killer.

1. one of my colleagues, for example.

Bittorent technology is aging pretty fast. The RIAA, while not taking it down completely has managed to make a dent in the bittorent beast. Sadly, this technology is no longer ‘underground’ and is being used by many regular ‘Joes’ now.

Newsgroup is accessible, faster downloads, and complete anonymity. For a price of course. But its totally worth it.