Monday, January 14, 2013

A bittorrent box

A bittorrent box has hit the market.  It is perfectly legal.

However, it is the first time that I know of of a box dedicated to bittorrent.  You plug it into your tv, choose something to download, wait, and watch.  Very convenient.

Obviously, some streaming video players have supported bittorrent before (like my WDTV) but the beauty of this is that it is a) legal (there are plenty of legal things to torrent) and b) people may not even realize they are "pirating".  So yes, you can indeed infringe copyright with it, but you don't have to.

One of my main themes is the whole ridiculous notion of "good bits" and "bad bits".   With so many trojans and botnets out there, I think it's nonsense to hold people responsible for all the bits that their computer accesses on the internet, anyway.

I do think there are situations that merit that level of scrutiny, but they should be few and far between.  So anything that popularizes torrenting and abstracts it from the user is a good thing, to my mind.

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