I’m downloading another Joi Ito BitTorrent file as a political statement, this one the Lessig talk about Free Culture from Helsinki that Joi blogged about (here is a link to the actual Bittorrent file.) This is another example of a file being traded via peet to peer sharing that infringes nothing, informs the public and has no “piracy” of any sort attached to it. In other words, more proof that these technologies are morally neutral, and thus don’t need our legislators clamping down on them with things like the INDUCE act. Regulate the behavior, not the technology.
I installed the Tomato Torrent client on my iBook for this stuff, and thus far find it the least annoying of all the BitTorrent clients. While technically what BitTorrent does is quite cool with the load sharing and making all downloaders also uploaders, the clients all are kind of hokey. The whole “leave the window open when your download is finished so you keep uploading” method of interaction is kind of ridiculous. Don’t we have better ways of doing things like this than leaving windows open all over one’s computer? How about a little checkbox that says “keep uploading this file for X hours|days after download finishes” and then the window goes away and the uploading happens in the background. That would have the same effect without the window litter, would automatically stop at some point without you having to remember to do it, would allow you to be a good citizen and upload for a while, all while being a less annoying UI experience.
