This is an article from MTV.com, inadvertently noticed when chortling at the buffoon from Death Cab For Cutie who claims he’s being persecuted by the Man. It’s not as if I expected insightful and penetrating journalism from the online arm of that great engine of juvenile vapidity, but this is technical idiocy on a par with “They’re stealing the Internet!” Alec was going to write about this, but he determined that it would interfere with the necessary triangulation of the interests of large and small businesses to more fully enhance the moderating power of the vital center. You know, I’m getting worried about him — in the posting queue here at It Is *Dancing*, he has a ten-page article that consists entirely of the words “Thanks, Ralph.”

BitTorrent To Serve Up Fall Out Boy, ‘Harry Potter’ Legally

Imagine if, back in the day, record labels had said to Napster, “Sure, take our stuff,” instead of bringing down the big legal hammer and crushing the pioneering peer-to-peer service. Times have certainly changed.

It truly is a brave new world, in which media companies have recognized that distributing promotional material for free can increase their profits. Such an unprecedented revolution of media distribution is certainly worthy of note, and it has absolutely nothing to do with the fact that BitTorrent, Inc. has a partnership itself with MTV. Why, that piece of information would suggest that the media business is an incestuous, oligopolic orgy of “co-opetition”. In fact, it’d suggest that the media industry is a sort of sodomistic Ouroboros, where titanic media conglomerates slurp each other off into increasingly staggering levels of profit.

Over the past week, the popular BitTorrent site has posted a short documentary from major-label band Death Cab for Cutie, as well as songs and videos from a bunch of current and former Sub Pop Records acts, including the Postal Service, Hot Hot Heat, the Shins, Iron & Wine and Band of Horses. And within the week, there’s going to be content on the site from Fall Out Boy too.

In reading this, mentally translate ‘Sub Pop’ into ‘Warner Music’, because Warner essentially owns Sub Pop’s ass. All of these wonderful indie bands are essentially signed to one of AOL Time Warner’s many proxies. In case any Pitchfork readers happen upon this, please refrain from tossing any of these bands into a volcano as punishment for their sell-out perfidy. We’ve got enough problems without turning the Earth’s mantle tepid.

The 5-year-old site — which distributes a piece of file-sharing software that makes it easier to distribute and download big files containing movies, games, software and music by breaking them into smaller, more manageable packets — is the world’s most popular peer-to-peer service, according to spokesperson Lily Lin. With 90 million people downloading BitTorrent to date, its users account for 40 to 60 percent of all Internet traffic, Lin said, and soon they’re going to be able to get a lot of that material legitimately.

By the way, whenever they say BitTorrent, they mean BitTorrent.com, which is a for-profit enterprise operated by Bram Cohen, creator of the BitTorrent protocol. The material on it primarily appears to be the offal of major media companies; some is free, some is not, and all is legal. I was only able to figure that out by searching for Lily Lin on the great Gazoogle; turns out she shovels dung for BitTorrent, Inc. As a result, there’s literally two pieces of true information in this paragraph: that BitTorrent.com distributes a piece of file-sharing software (more precisely, they distribute a client for the BitTorrent file distribution protocol), and that the BT protocol accounts for around half of all Internet traffic by volume.

The main lie in this paragraph is a result of cleverly conflating BitTorrent the protocol and BitTorrent.com. BT may account for 40 to 60 percent of Internet traffic, but I guarantee you that the vast majority of that traffic is not related to Cohen’s shitty little shill site. That enormous parenthetical aside conceals a blatant falsehood: “The 5-year-old site is the world’s most popular peer-to-peer service…” Yeah. I think The Pirate Bay might take exception to Ms. Lin’s assertion.

While much of the trading that goes on now is illegal swapping of copywritten material, BitTorrent is working on changing that. The Death Cab material marks the first time a major label has voluntarily offered its artists to BitTorrent. Also, the site signed a deal in May with Warner Bros. to legally sell copies of such Warner hits as the “Harry Potter” movies in a BitTorrent store that is slated to launch later this year.

“Copywritten” — ? What th’ — Of all th’ ! !

The urge aside, I note that the phrase “voluntarily offered its artists to BitTorrent” summons up images along the lines of Chris Walla being ritually sacrificed on some sort of altar in front of a hooded and sinister Bram Cohen. And that would be awesome.

That means taking down all the infringing material, but Lin said that’s a good thing. “Publishers realize and recognize the importance of BitTorrent,” she said. “It wasn’t intended, but BitTorrent ended up being used as a facilitator of Internet piracy, but we’ve partnered with the Motion Picture Association of America to make sure we’re cracking down on it.”

Yes, BitTorrent.com will be taking down all of that infringing material. You know, the stuff that’s distributed through other sites through a decentralized protocol that has nothing whatsoever to do with the commercial BT venture. They’ll be taking all of that down.

I’m actually pretty sympathetic to the concern that BitTorrent is being unfairly characterized as a piracy tool. Certainly, people who should know better have implied that it’s somehow shifty to use it for distributing large files to many people at once, which, you know, isn’t the entire point of the protocol or anything. But it’s tremendously disingenuous for Cohen to claim (through an intermediary, natch) that he didn’t expect it to be used as a facilitator of Internet piracy. Gnutella became a piracy tool, Freenet became a slow and horrible piracy tool, and so on with any distributed filesharing protocol.

Why did I just spend an hour picking apart an article on MTV.com about BitTorrent? For two reasons. First, I’m a computer programmer, so technology is something I feel qualified to comment upon. The same laziness, ignorance, and corporate greed that generates such utter bullshit about technology applies equally well in media coverage of the environment, the economy, medicine, science, or politics. The breadth of human endeavor that concerns us becomes greater with each generation, but the human capacity for understanding and comprehension doesn’t. Fundamentally, I don’t know anything more about, say, China than my father did at my age, or his father, and so forth. We all rely on external intermediaries to provide us with information about the things that we don’t directly experience in our daily lives.

Shouldn’t I have picked a more prestigious media outlet than MTV, then? Shouldn’t we expect the quality of journalism from such outlets to be low? Well, sure, if we’re talking about features on the guy who carries Fall Out Boy’s hair gel. But a great number of people rely on secondary media outlets like this for essentially all that passes for news in their lives. I can’t say I blame them, either. I’ve watched Access Hollywood and I’ve watched CNN Headline News, and the main substantial difference between the two is that Access has better hairstyles and a friendlier tone.