Internet Archive adds 1,000,000 legal files to the world's store of BitTorrents

The Internet Archive has partnered with BitTorrent to publish over 1,000,000 of its books, music and movies as legal torrents. It's a huge whack of legal content in the torrentverse, and a major blow to the schemes of entertainment execs to have the whole BitTorrent protocol filtered away to nothing on sight. From the Internet Archive's blog:

BitTorrent is the now fastest way to download items from the Archive, because the BitTorrent client downloads simultaneously from two different Archive servers located in two different datacenters, and from other Archive users who have downloaded these Torrents already. The distributed nature of BitTorrent swarms and their ability to retrieve Torrents from local peers may be of particular value to patrons with slower access to the Archive, for example those outside the United States or inside institutions with slow connections.

Over 1,000,000 Torrents of Downloadable Books, Music, and Movies

I write books. My latest is a YA science fiction novel called Homeland (it's the sequel to Little Brother). More books: Rapture of the Nerds (a novel, with Charlie Stross); With a Little Help (short stories); and The Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow (novella and nonfic). I speak all over the place and I tweet and tumble, too.

MORE: bittorrent • Copyfight • happy mutants • libraries • public domain • web theory

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Susan Carley Oliver

Doing my happy dance!
- https://twitter.com/PhoetrySlam Cyran0
  
  Me too!
  
  What a wonderful way to help build credibility for P2P and the BitTorrent protocol!
  
  Now, all that’s left is to spread the word.
  - ocker3
    
    I’ve long simply pointed to the fact that WoW uses BT to send out updates, can you imagine the uproar if millions of WoW users couldn’t get their patches?
    - https://twitter.com/PhoetrySlam Cyran0
      
      I did not know that, seeing as how I’ve never played it.
      
      Thanks for the info.
  - digi_owl
    
    And watch it be saturation bombed by *AA lawyers…
http://deansli.st/ Dean Putney

I’m almost surprised this hasn’t happened before. It seems like BitTorrent is a perfect solution for a lot of these big stores of legal data. Or even streaming data. Can’t we all just share?
- digi_owl
  
  No, because the “artists” will starve! /s
- Jorpho
  
  Actually, it seems to me a rather poor solution. BitTorrent really only seems to make sense if a lot of people are seeking to download something very large at the same time. Even if these 1,000,000 legal files are packaged in such a way as to be reasonably large collections, how many of them could possibly have enough broad, long-term appeal to support a decently large swarm of seeders?
http://claimid.com/tracey_pooh tracey jaquith

thanks, cory!
https://launchpad.net/~zak-mckracken Zak McKracken

Very very nice.
Now I wish they had a decent search function or something. I have no idea whether anything of interest to me is on there, and if yes, what …
http://profile.yahoo.com/7PQIQI2V2KZGKPGV26YFNQZBHA Peter

Wow, so much movies I can download now! Hope my torch browser will handle this J
Sparg

Looks like it didn’t take long for the spammers to hit the archive with crap books.