In response to our offer to let our readers have their voices heard, FreakBits reader Ruslan from Russia has written an article which he hopes will provide the seeds for peace between BitTorrent users and content providers.
This is a guest post by FreakBits reader Ruslan Almukhametov. If you’d like your file-sharing, copyright or piracy related article to appear on FreakBits, please email it to us at [email protected].
Before Windows 7 I used a legal copy of Vista and I was OK with that since the price for the OS was included in the price of my Toshiba laptop. Other than that, I’d have probably used Ubuntu and Open Office or a pirated copy of Windows. Why am I writing these lines? Because our world needs to be changed, and that change can become a reality only with you participating.
It’s a well known fact that with the advent and development of computer technologies, the process of exchanging information between two or more net users has become that much more easy and convenient, it’s obvious that interested parties cannot control the process anymore.
Content producers, such as computer game developers, artists and movie makers (depending on their size and the amount of money they have in their pockets) have been found behaving differently. While some cannot stop sending court summons’ to copyright infringers, others simply close their eyes to the notion. The former usually do not get their money back, and the latter do not earn more due to their inaction.
Not until recently has anyone among content producers ever thought of what could they possibly do, in order to get “stolen” money back and start earning even more than they used to.
EA Games are a company who opened their eyes first and started to think of game creation, development and support processes from a quite different perspective. In retrospect, what EA did was a great step forward, even though we have yet to see the fruits of that move. EA bought PlayFish for some 400 million USD – a company which is one of the leaders in the social game development market. In fact, PlayFish was and is one of those successful companies which reports great profits from selling virtual goods in games released on major social networking sites such as Facebook and MySpace. Let’s examine EA’s move a bit closely.
In general, while developing a computer game the developers are hoping that their product will be actively bought, moreover they hope that the revenue from game sales will cover the development costs and bring in additional money to invest in future projects. There again, with the advent of broadband Internet and overall expanding global Internet penetration, it’s becoming a lot easier and faster for gamers to download games from the Internet, from file hosting servers and peer-to-peer networks etc.
Frankly speaking, ISPs in Russia allow pirated games, movies and software on their FTP servers for their clients for free use. As a result, developers aren’t getting additional money, even though their games might be hit of the season. Pay attention, I didn’t say developers lost their money or got robbed. They are just not getting additional money.
What PlayFish, Zynga and other companies did is what I call a money making revolution. They have started making money and I must say good money on an enormous scale, from what is free from the very beginning.
Consider this. They are releasing their product on a platform that has more than 300 million users all over the world, for free. They do not spend money on pre-promotion as we see it in the off-line world. Instead, once they have released a game they go all in advertising on the same platform. Then the platform acts quite the same as TBP’s top downloads list, the main difference however, is that it makes the game developer company cash flow positive. They are not getting money from every new gamer, instead they are selling particular items inside the game so that the gamer can advance more quickly.
As an employee of the same company operating in Russia I must say that this proves to be effective. Development spendings are reduced. Flash semi-casual games are easier to develop, require less “hands”, have low hardware requirements, hence can be played on virtually any machine.
“Social gaming, with its emphasis on friends and community, is seeing tremendous growth and this is the right time to invest to strengthen our participation in this space,” says EA Interactive’s senior VP and GM Barry Cottle.
A team of four to five coders, designers and game developers could make a decent game in two weeks, with development costs which would eventually be 100% covered. What amuses me now is why music labels and movie companies haven’t tried to implement the same approach.
Why threaten torrent sites when you can… buy them. And turn a part of their enormous user base into paying customers.And here is the part where we, as a user base come in.
It is high time we developed and offered a working system for content producers where the users get the material they want quickly and producers get additional money for that. I think we must collaborate to create the above-mentioned system. We should do that to prevent unnecessary court hearings and and get rid of excessive anger between downloaders and producers. Here are my 5 cents as I see it.
Seeders are those heroes who keep torrents alive. Rating or ratio, on some torrent sites requiring registration, is what motivates leechers to keep seeding after the download is completed. The less ratio a user has the less can they download. Or sometimes, particular hit and runners even get banned from the torrent site.
What I see is a torrent site and tracker, or even better – many of them, controlled by a group of content producers: music labels, movie studios and so forth. The site requires registration in order to count ones ratio, that’s the only thing the registration is used for.
Content providers then release their product on the site, setting a certain ratio rate on the upload – for example, users having ratio less than 1.25 cannot start downloading. Users are given two options – either support some previous upload by that particular content provider or purchase some ratio points, just as they might via donation at a regular site.
Some torrent addicts would rather help seeding previous uploads while others, who cannot wait to see the new episode of their favorite show in perfect quality, would gladly buy some points to be able to download.
The scheme is simple as it is, and i’m sure it could be developed. The main thing is not to think of torrent downloads as stolen money. CD sales aren’t dropping because of piracy, it is because the CD is becoming an outdated and inconvenient format. Millions of songs, on the other hand, are being successfully sold on iTunes and other sites where users can get what they want easily and in abundance. That proves that several monetizing models could co-exist.
I’m not stating that that my idea is perfect, all I want is to start a collaborative work aimed at making BitTorrent a place where technology is used legally and everyone is happy. If content providers could think of a way to build something which is working fine for both parties, we are the only ones left.
Yours sincerely,
Ruslan
Article from: FreakBits
So you’ve bought your 
Twitter continues to make the headlines all over the world in the mainstream media, much more so than Facebook despite being several times smaller. But for the past few months, it looked like the media attention wasn’t correlating to actual usage, and user growth has been stalling since summer, according to most analytics firms. Many have wondered why Twitter is … (
Today we pass 1100 apps, and today we also get easy access to Palm’s new open web distribution feed with the App Catalog release of AppScoop, an on-device app that is set up for on-device browsing of the new unfiltered feed. Right now there’s not a lot in there, but then again there wasn’t a lot in the App Catalog when it first launched either. But enough of that, there’s also plenty of new stuff in the official App Catalog, including more backgrounds, cheat codes, yet another Twitter client, and plenty of updates. Hit it all up after the break down below.
I sort of expected the nudist community to be a bunch of hardline civil libertarians or something, but that doesn’t change how wonderful this story is: Nudists? 
Amid rumors that there’s going to be tension between the Ferrari drivers prior to the start of the 2010 season – with Felipe Massa and Fernando Alonso having some history together since the 2007 season – team principal Stefano Domenicali once again insisted that this is hardly the case.
