DHT Support

[BlackLion]

Well thought out post you've got there, Seth, but there's a simple solution that's been mentioned almost *too* many times already. This problem can be solved using the 'private' flag. If a client doesn't respect the flag, ban it.

Problem solved.

[sethg]

Well thought out post you've got there, Seth, but there's a simple solution that's been mentioned almost *too* many times already. This problem can be solved using the 'private' flag. If a client doesn't respect the flag, ban it.

Thank you, and sorry if I've missed past discussions. With regard to the solution you propose, how does a tracker know if a client hands a DHT table to another peer? When joining a swarm, the client can tell the tracker it has DHT disabled, but that can be a lie. When you're dealing with paid content distribution, the incentive to lie is built-in, esepcially if it can't be detected.

So my question is, can a private tracker detect if a client says it won't use DHT, but then goes ahead and provides DHT to to other peers who ask for it?

[paritybit]

So how is that different from having a file and using a different tracker to distribute it. Puts a bit of a hole in your content distribution idea.

[Ultima]

A tracker can't tell if a client uses DHT. They have to be able to identify clients. Anyway, if the movie industry is going to be releasing their content over the internet, they'll undoubtedly use DRM to protect their files, in which case it doesn't really matter if the content leaks. If the files are unencrypted, anyone can just download the files and rerelease it on another tracker, at which point worrying about DHT is kinda pointless.

Edit: Heh paritybit got to that part before I did =P

[sethg]

So how is that different from having a file and using a different tracker to distribute it. Puts a bit of a hole in your content distribution idea.

Anybody can take content they bought and redistribute it with their own tracker. They can also burn CD's and DVD's and hand them to their friends. Short of the Neanderthal ideas in the DCMA, or creating a police state, there is no way to stop this. People will do what they will, and if they feel content providers are ripping them off, as a lot of people do today, this will become more common.

My notion was that if prices were reasonable from the consumer's POV, more people would be willing to pay for content. If the behavior of clients in the original paid distribution torrent made that unnecessary, there is no way for an artist to publish their work using a fee-per-download model with a torrent. Since the torrent is the lowest cost distribution method yet devised, because it uses primarily the peer's resources that they have already paid for, it could be the best hope for coming up with a system that allows artists to sell their work without large media companies keeping most of the revenue. It wouldn't work for everything, but the current system is so broken that other solutions are badly needed.

The shareware model is interesting, but it's hard to see how to apply it here. As people who have published shareware know, unless you forcibly disable the application after a trial period, after which you need an unlock code to use it, most people don't contribute. For content that you only use once or twice, that's not applicable. I'm hoping, naively perhaps, that if prices can truly get low enough, and the torrent makes that possible, people would begin to feel bad for not chipping in their $0.50 for content they enjoy. The cost has to be so low that it's not worth trying to avoid, particularly if it goes directly to the artist.

People can and will always try to get around any requirement that they pay for something, even if fairly priced. You can't stop that as the cure would be worse than the disease. There's nothing stopping you from taking a paperback book that you bought and running it through a copier for a friend. You could also scan it and send them a digital copy. If paperbacks cost $100 a piece, more people would do that. This doesn't go on much because many people will pay $10 at the bookstore, while others go to the public library or simply borrow it from a friend. There are still enough people buying the paperback to keep the publisher and the author in business.

Now, if content distribution was drastically less expensive than printing paper books and putting them on trucks, the publisher becomes somewhat extraneous. A lot more authors would have the opportunity to publish their own works. They would also get more revenue than they do under the current system and consumers would pay a much lower price. Everybody wins except the publishers.

I can't help it if technology has made many publishers obsolete. They can either accept that and creatively find a way to add some value to the process or they will be history. The RIAA and others with similar mindset are not going to win this one. The best they can hope for is to delay the inevitable.

As the torrent is a large step beyond traditional file servers in terms of low-cost, mass distribution with nearly unlimited peak capacity, it is just one more nail in the coffin of the conventional content distribution model that abuses consumers and artists alike. You don't need printing presses the size of a building, you don't need thousands of trucks nor thousands of retail stores. You don't even need an AOL-scale server farm. All you need is a tracker on a relatively low-bandwidth server, depending on how popular your work is. Hopefully, there is some way to ask the consumer to pay a fee that they consider inconsequential so the artist can get paid for their effort. That would be a real accomplishment.

[aspirine]

Thats failry easy Sethg ,

if ia company wants to distribute its content for payments , they can make their own client , that does't support DHT , and make this client code highly secure .

[sethg]

I suppose that could work, though it mainly addresses high-value distributions. I was not so much thinking of television and movie companies, though I did mention that in my first post, but mostly print media and recorded music. The TV/movie case is much harder because the content, in most cases, is very expensive to create and takes a large organization to produce. I predict that the DRM model will not survive long-term, IMHO. If the people owning those rights continue to charge existing prices for the content, I think it is inevitable that this protection scheme will succumb to hacking. The U.S. may well pass laws supporting this, but past attempts to legislatively control communications channels through technological means have consistently failed. The Clipper chip debacle is perhaps the best example of this.

A secure, closed source client would be a temporary solution for this market, but I'd be willing to bet that it, too, would succumb to hacking. Why? Because I doubt that the current movie/TV studios would be willing to accept reasonable prices for their content. It will take some severe hits to their bottom line to get them to reconsider, and even that may not succeed. They are highly invested in an incredibly expensive and closed distribution system of movie theaters and TV networks which they are unlikely to abandon. In that respect, my mentioning these two industries as candidates for paid torrent distribution was probably not realistic. Now, it might make sense for Indie films and even low-budget serials, which would be an interesting alternative to the current media giants. As torrent technology develops and becomes even more widespread, I look forward to this possibility.

Newspapers and magazines comprise both large and small organizations, but they differ from movies/TV in that an unusually large part of their cost is in the distribution, even in small, local markets. This is a place that a torrent could drastically lower the cost to the consumer to the point that circulation might increase. With a cost structure turned on its head compared to today, it creates opportunities for different kinds of news organizations than presently exist. This sort of newspaper would require very little capital, the main cost being reporters, researchers, writers and editors. This puts the emphasis back on content rather than the size of the distribution channel to gain advertising revenue. Advertising would still be there, but with the distribution channel no longer their major focus, a very different kind of enterprise would thrive in this environment. Starting up a new venture would not take the enormous amount of money it does today. At the very least, it would allow for alternate news media that are not owned by large corporations, which would benefit all of us.

The situation is even more extreme when it comes to book publishing and music recording. An author needs a publisher, more to print, distribute and place a book in retail outlets than for editing or other creative services. Recording studio technology has come down in cost and is widely enough available that you no longer need a major studio to make a high-quality recording. Musicians can buy recording studio time and fully own the results.

You do still need a major studio or book publisher if you want your CD/book appear on store shelves. This is the market that the torrent would have the largest impact on. The studios/publishers/retailers add the least value to the end product but represent the largest cost and they keep the lion's share of revenue. As in the newspaper case, the large cost of creating and maintaining the mass distribution channel limits this to a very few large, powerful companies and discourages new start-ups. The torrent, if it can somehow produce a revenue stream, could enable authors and musicians to self-publish without the involvement of traditional studios/publishers. I think, again perhaps naively, that this might allow a larger number of talented artists to support themselves from their work compared to the present system, where a few super-stars become wealthy and everyone else needs a day job.

Perhaps what it comes down to is new or little-known authors, musicians, magazines or newspapers using the torrent and asking for voluntary contributions of a very small amount. With high-quality content and a very tiny asking price, the distribution could be extremely wide. The shareware experience suggests that people wouldn't contribute enough, but it is different in that the amount of payment requested would be tiny. It may have a chance. I hope so.

This alternative is far more democratic than the current system, and might lead to more and better content available at low cost, with some available for free as promotion. It would put content creators back in control of their work rather than giant media conglomerates. The interesting thing about all this is that if anyone gets too greedy, people will simply start to hijack their content as it trvial to do so. Capitalism finally eating its own tail.

[Apothos]

Thanks for all the info. Very much appreciated. 8)

[johntang2112]

so.. will you be adding this feature to future utorrent version or does it support DHT now?

[MechR]

so.. will you be adding this feature to future utorrent version or does it support DHT now?

No DHT yet, but it's planned for the somewhat-near future.

[BlackLion]

so.. will you be adding this feature to future utorrent version or does it support DHT now?

The answer for that is here.

edit: this link no longer works.

[johntang2112]

so how do you activate it?

[paritybit]

so how do you activate it?

It would need to be implimented. try reading what is posted.

Features for 1.2:

- Optional DHT Support: decentralized trackers (Mainline and BitComet compatible)

- Unicode support: the currently partial support will be extended

- UDP tracker support

Now you have been babyfed. We are at 1.1.6.1 at the moment.