Mark Lyn­der­say

Patrick Ho­sein, the ad­min­is­tra­tor for the .tt do­main, was ap­proached a cou­ple of months ago to be­come part of the glob­al stream of tor­rent­ed files.

Ac­cord­ing to Dr Ho­sein, Maik Schultz ap­plied to him for the do­main ka.tt, which the do­main ad­min­is­tra­tor soon dis­cov­ered would host pop­u­lar tor­rent ag­gre­ga­tor Kick­ass Tor­rents.

On re­al­is­ing this, he drew Schultz's at­ten­tion to the poli­cies of the na­tion­al do­main (https://www.nic.tt/rules.shtml) and the site was re­moved.

Most re­cent­ly, the tor­rent­ing site used the ka.tt do­main to redi­rect to a new na­tion do­main orig­i­nat­ing in Ton­ga. Patrick Ho­sein has since de­ac­ti­vat­ed the do­main, pend­ing fur­ther dis­cus­sions Mr Schultz.

"They were asked to re­move the as­so­ci­a­tion with KT," ex­plained Dr Ho­sein, "since that site points to sources of copy­right­ed ma­te­r­i­al."

So what's a tor­rent and why is it caus­ing all this fuss?

The Bit­Tor­rent pro­to­col for shar­ing files on the In­ter­net was cre­at­ed by de­vel­op­er Bram Co­hen and re­leased to the world in 2001.

It's a pow­er­ful way to share files that takes ad­van­tage of the dis­trib­uted na­ture of com­put­ing pow­er on the web. It al­so avoids the cen­tral­i­sa­tion of files that even­tu­al­ly killed Nap­ster.

To cre­ate a tor­rent, one per­son seeds the file from their com­put­er, of­fer­ing it through a Bit­Tor­rent client. Users con­nect to the file us­ing a tiny text link that de­scribes where the file is. Such users can be peers who al­so share the file, or leech­ers who on­ly down­load the file with­out shar­ing it.

In an In­ter­net of shar­ing, seed­ers are valu­able but peers are the re­al lu­bri­cant of tor­rents. For that rea­son, many tor­rent clients are de­signed to act as peers un­less users specif­i­cal­ly turn off the func­tion.

When tor­rents work well, peers abound and files are trans­mit­ted very quick­ly. Pop­u­lar­i­ty counts for a lot on tor­rent sites. That's why grab­bing a new sin­gle by say, One Di­rec­tion, takes a mat­ter of sec­onds but an ob­scure al­bum by Miles Davis can take days, if not months to down­load.

Tor­rent­ing re­quires three things to work well.

Some­one, prefer­ably sev­er­al peo­ple, to seed ex­act­ly the same file, all de­scribed by one, end­less­ly du­pli­cat­ed on­line text link and many peers will­ing to up­load the file while they down­load it.

Then there needs to be a web­site to host the text links that de­scribe the files that are avail­able for down­load. That's what Kick­ass Tor­rents does.

These tor­rent sites, the most fa­mous of which is The Pi­rate Bay, claim that they host no copy­right­ed ma­te­ri­als, but their list­ings abound with thou­sands links to tele­vi­sion shows, movies, mu­sic, pornog­ra­phy and books, none of which will earn their cre­ators a cent in in­come.

Tor­rents fer­ry hun­dreds of thou­sands of ter­abytes of con­tent be­tween com­put­ers every hour and most of this da­ta is il­le­gal­ly ob­tained en­ter­tain­ment in dig­i­tal for­mat, but is this all that tor­rents are good for?

Sev­er­al in­de­pen­dent film mak­ers have used tor­rent seeds of their work as a dis­tri­b­u­tion mod­el. Jamin and Kiowa Winans, who were hit­ting a stone wall with their quirky film Ink in tra­di­tion­al dis­tri­b­u­tion chan­nels, found a whole new au­di­ence on tor­rent net­works (http://ow.ly/ny­D­vO).

Lin­ux dis­tri­b­u­tions are al­so made avail­able us­ing the pro­to­col.

When the Trinidad and To­ba­go Com­put­er So­ci­ety (TTCS) be­gan pro­duc­ing a CD and lat­er a DVD of free and open source soft­ware (http://ow.ly/ny­D­Pw) they be­gan ex­plor­ing tor­rents as a way to share a dig­i­tal disk im­age of the col­lec­tion.

The ISO (named af­ter the file ex­ten­sion of the disk im­age for­mat) was seed­ed first on TTCS founder De­vanand Teelucks­ingh's home com­put­er.

"It posed some chal­lenges do­ing it my­self," Teelucks­ingh said.

"Be­cause of the size of the OS­S­WIN file and be­ing the main seed­er, seed­ing the file from home would con­sume my up­load band­width when I first tried around 2006."

There were al­so too few peers serv­ing the file so the tor­rent­ing (or tor­ment­ing, as Teelucks­ingh's au­to­cor­rect help­ful­ly in­sert­ed) didn't work out.

The TTCS has since tried sev­er­al ways of shar­ing the file us­ing tor­rents, most of which cost mon­ey that the non­prof­it doesn't have.

"I nev­er got the feel­ing that tor­rent­ing just worked and I could ig­nore it," Teelucks­ingh ad­mit­ted, "I felt I had to babysit it and watch it all the time, look­ing back."

The hefty disk im­age is now host­ed by a Ger­man soft­ware site, Chip.de (http://ow.ly/nyEaV) and via file shar­ing ser­vice GE.TT.

Like most dig­i­tal techonolo­gies, tor­rent­ing as a way of mov­ing da­ta be­tween com­put­ers is as in­no­cent as FTP or HTTP, pro­to­cols that un­der­pin the suc­cess of the In­ter­net.

But tor­rent­ing has be­come in­ex­tri­ca­bly linked with dig­i­tal pira­cy and the con­se­quences of that are a dig­i­tal un­der­ground of shared files and con­stant­ly mov­ing web­sites list­ing tor­rent de­scrip­tors and a sti­fling of the of­fi­cial de­vel­op­ment a per­fect­ly use­ful way to dis­trib­ute large files be­tween com­put­er sys­tems

As Patrick Ho­sein said of his ex­pe­ri­ence with Kick­ass Tor­rents, "The .ph reg­istry (Phillip­ines do­main) had to seize kat.ph be­cause of le­gal ac­tion tak­en against them by the mu­sic in­dus­try. I did not be­lieve that .tt should get in­volved in sim­i­lar ac­tions."

For com­pre­hen­sive news cov­er­age of tor­rents vis­it http://tor­rent­f­reak.com.

MORE IN­FO

Even if you've nev­er down­loaded a sin­gle tor­rent, chances are that you've viewed one. The cy­cle of movie tor­rents co­in­cides al­most ex­act­ly with lo­cal re­leas­es of pi­rat­ed films through lo­cal video out­lets.

A CAM tor­rent de­scribes the shaky first re­lease of a new film, cap­tured on a home video cam­era. Next comes a TS or telescine re­lease, an en­ter­pris­ing pi­rate's mix of the best video and the best au­dio avail­able as tor­rents.

Next comes a DV­Drip, which is usu­al­ly an ear­ly DVD re­leased for Os­car con­sid­er­a­tion with the usu­al use­less an­ti-pira­cy warn­ings and then a Br­Rip, a "clean" file tak­en from ei­ther a DVD or Blu­Ray record­ing of the film.

Fi­nal­ly, the largest tor­rents ap­pear, full 1080p Blu­Ray rips and DVD ISO im­ages of ac­tu­al disc re­leas­es.

Most lo­cal video hous­es have their own de­scrip­tions of these qual­i­ty shifts that are less techy than the on­line de­scrip­tors.

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