Here's Nina Totenberg's coverage of the Grokster case for NPR news (wma format).

By Gary Lerhaupt, 04:25 PM in general | Comments (0)  

I've added the ability to apply Creative Commons Sampling Licenses on your Prodigem hosted content.

I'm still playing around with my idea for Copyright Plus Prodigem and also settled on the metadata scheme to call out licenses within torrents (Instead of describing it with an "about" entry, it'll be under a "url" entry which is more natural).

By Gary Lerhaupt, 02:12 PM in prodigem | Comments (0)  

On a couple of occasions, people have expressed hesitancy to post content on Prodigem as the only licensing option made available is the Creative Commons. Sure, we may all love the Creative Commons and I might even be blogging right now in my creative commie t-shirt, but sometimes it just doesn't fit (the license, not the t-shirt). It could be that the content can't necessarily be cleared for Creative Commons, or it could be that they're not quite ready to make the leap, but it is apparent that I need to make some alternatives available.

So, I'd like to float the idea of what I'm calling Copyright Plus Prodigem for specific use on my site. The basic premise is that you declare your content as still under Copyright, but you make a licensing allowance specifically to Prodigem and its users such that they can redistribute your work only through the bit torrent session that you make available. In effect this allows you to go the extra step of letting people redistribute while realizing the wonders of peer-to-peer, but without giving up the control you might not be willing to give (eg. with the creative commons, you can't control where and how people redistribute your work). From my perspective, this might be the exact kind of thing you might be looking for if you wanted to sell your content through Prodigem :).

And to that end, I've been in a few discussions with the Creative Commons people about the possibilities and feasibility of something like a "Delayed" Creative Commons license. The idea here would be that you'd setup a date in the future where your work would automatically transition to a Creative Commons license. So, for example, you could initially use something like Copyright Plus Prodigem allowing you to possibly derive income from the content, and then after a year (or 5 years, or 10 years) the work automatically transitions to a Creative Commons license of your choosing enabling the general public to do with it what they may. The possibilities abound.

By Gary Lerhaupt, 12:21 PM in prodigem | Comments (0)  

I spent last night shoe-horning in more metadata in the .torrent files that Prodigem creates for its torrents. Dovetailing on the effort started by Thomas Winningham, I accomplished this by adding some new dictionary entries within the bencoded torrent format. My main goal was to add information about the license associated with the content delivered by the torrent, but along the way I decided to throw in tag info for good measure. Below is a basic example of data that will now be added to all Prodigem torrents (tabbed formatting added here for clarity):

7:license
d
     3:url
     43:http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/ 
e
4:tags
l
     11:hello world
     10:folksonomy
     11:another tag
e

The previous discussions linked to above on how to properly go about this were not quite definitive, so this is more of my best effort based on that. It's very much fluid so please send your feedback if you think this is all wrong (or if you think it's all right). With the license entry, I decided to make it into its own sub-dictionary to allow for larger, more precise, future descriptions. I described the URL under an "about" heading so as to match example RDF over at the Creative Commons After some feedback, the URL will be described by the keyword "url". The tags entry is straight-forward enough. It's just a list of folksonomy-enabling entries. Given recent interest I thought this might lead to ... well, who knows what...
 
UPDATE 3/24/2005: Given some feedback I've received, instead of using an "about" entry I'll be using a "url" entry.
 
By Gary Lerhaupt, 11:54 PM in prodigem | Comments (1)  

You can now pick up Torrentocracy version 0.0.11 (tgz):

* The app now properly displays regardless of your screen resolution. This was based off of Joshua Ebel's patch and has consistently been one of the biggest problems people report. Thanks Josh. Specifically, it has settings for 1.33 (eg. 640x480, 1024x768) and 1.5 (eg. 720x480). So, it still might not be perfectly lined up on PAL displays which run at 1.25 or on Widescreen. If you let me know numbers to get it to perfectly line up, I'll add code to make it work.

* Added support for BitTorrent 4.0.0. The torrent statistics now show up, but BT 4 doesn't include the remaining download time within its btlaunchmany stats so this can no longer be displayed. It also buffers output to the log file and only dumps upon reaching a threshhold. This means that if you're only downloading 1 torrent, torrent stats will generally update every 5-10 seconds.

By Gary Lerhaupt, 04:27 PM in changeblog | Comments (1)  

Last night on Prodigem, the master torrent seeding process died, so I used the opportunity to upgrade to BitTorrent 4.0.0. What a difference. It looks like Bram fixed it so that when you are starting up multiple torrents at the same time, instead of them all trying to resume simultaneously, it instead starts them one at a time. For Prodigem this is huge, because with the previous version it would try to simultaneously compare hashes on over 100 torrents which would cause me to start thrashing and completely hose the server until the startup completed. Better yet, 4.0.0 caches these hashes so I now only have to pay for this startup cost once instead of each time I'm forced to restart btlaunchmany (not often).

A bit of bad, though, which I haven't really explored. With 4.0.0, the output statistics formatting has changed so I'll have to update Torrentocracy to handle this. It also seems like these statistics no longer include the download time remaining which would be a bummer.

By Gary Lerhaupt, 05:33 PM in software | Comments (0)  

Bram Cohen was on the cover of the 2.21.05 edition of Red Herring. The article is a view into the business of bit torrent, and the future directions there are from monetizing the tech. It seems Bram and some others are working on business plans to provide search services within the context of torrent tracking and have actually formed the Bit Torrent Corporation. The article mentions BlogTorrent, Hurricane Electric and also something I wasn't familiar with from Aelitis which appears to offer Bit Torrent consulting services for businesses. And, oh yeah, they've got a blurb on Prodigem as well:

Prodigem--run by lone-wolf Stanford graduate student Gary Lerhaupt--started a content distribution service for individuals in December. Mr. Lerhaupt's dedicated server acts as a "permaseed" for service users, hosting the full copy of a file that's necessary for a torrent download to continue. He fends off illegal use by offering service by invitation, a la Gmail. At press time, Mr. Lerhaupt doesn't have a PayPal account set up for donations from his happy customers.

By Gary Lerhaupt, 05:32 PM in prodigem | Comments (0)  

Enjoying the bit of free time I have this afternoon since my Operating System's class final was cancelled (my prof received tenure yesterday and in celebration, just up and cancelled it) (who says tenure doesn't corrupt), I've gone ahead and tweaked Prodigem such that if you want or need to put out torrents smaller than 5MB, it is now possible. Drop me an email and I can tag your account to allow this, but in general I should think its only a worthwhile thing to have if you think you have a small file that many many people are going to want.

By Gary Lerhaupt, 01:38 PM in prodigem | Comments (0)  

With my ongoing tribulations with the Panasonic SV-AV50 mini digital video camera, my final conclusion is that Panasonic is producing an ill-conceived and poorly tested product. Of course, it could just be that my unit is a lemon, but I doubt it. Besides the fact that it records its high quality video to proprietary formats, besides the fact that its terrible in low light, besides the fact its audio is sub-standard, my dumb little camera will now only produce corrupted videos once I record for more than 5 minutes.

I've tried a couple measures including reformatting my SD card to get it back in working order to no avail. The corrupted video started happening after I recorded with the unit plugged into a wall socket (plugged in because the battery only runs for about 40 minutes and that's quite useless). Weirdly, all video still continues to play fine on the actual unit, but what good does that do me? I must say, Panasonic pulled off quite the coup by getting the SV-AV50 on the cover of Wired Magazine's 2004 Gadget Edition. Don't buy this product.

By Gary Lerhaupt, 11:58 AM in general | Comments (0)  

Very cool stuff. A band called Thermal and a Quarter has posted their latest album up on Prodigem. I always enjoy finding good new music. Somehow when it comes from bands that get the idea behind open distribution, it's even better.

Definitely check this out. Lot's of good energy. They're a "fusion-rock" band out of Bangalore, India and are apparently pretty popular out there (as one can tell from the constant flow of traffic on their torrent). You can learn more from this NPR interview.

By Gary Lerhaupt, 09:17 PM in torrents | Comments (1)  

You can now pick up Torrentocracy version 0.0.10 (tgz):

* John Miller's patch to make DB changes for Myth version 0.17 compatibility

* The exit button on your remote now acts just like the left button (though the exit button will eventually exit out of the program).

* Shaun Jackman's patch to pull torent urls from <link> tags

I've also started a torrentocracy mailing list so bring your discussion there.

Update: 3/4/2005, forgot about the torrent from link tag feature.

By Gary Lerhaupt, 12:16 AM in changeblog | Comments (0)  

The Creative Commons amicus brief submitted by Lawrence Lessig in support of Grokster in MGM v. Grokster mentions both Prodigem and Torrentocracy:

These innovations in the use of p2p technologies to date point to obvious, and important uses of p2p technologies tomorrow. There is a wide range of speakers who could use p2p technologies to spread video content who could not afford such distribution without it...Political campaigns could enable the cheap distribution of campaign ads. Already, companies are beginning to offer p2p hosting to service precisely this type of demand. See, e.g., Prodigem, at link # 13.

and:

P2P technologies have also inspired creators to offer their creative work in new, and different ways. Filmmaker Robert Greenwald, for example, has made the source interviews for his latest documentary available for free download using Bit-Torrent technology. See Torrentocracy Blog, at link # 10.

By Gary Lerhaupt, 11:08 AM in prodigem | Comments (0)