In a further bid to distance themselves from a term that is now synonymous with web piracy, BitTorrent Inc has once again denied their ecosystem has anything to do with piracy.
In a direct response to recent news story which pointed out that the season finale of the hit HBO show Game of Thrones broke "BitTorrent" records, Matt Mason, VP of marketing at BitTorrent Inc, posted a blog entry to explain why these stories are misleading.
In fact, as Mason explains, piracy doesn't even exist on the BitTorrent ecosystem. That is the software ecosystem that is directly under the control of BitTorrent Inc.
"We don't host infringing content. We don't point to it. It’s literally impossible to 'illegally download something on BitTorrent.' To pirate stuff, you need more than a protocol," Mason writes.
The confusion comes from the fact that BitTorrent is a protocol, the name of a San Francisco based company, and one of the most popular protocols for sharing illegal content on the Internet. This has led the term 'BitTorrent' to become a shorthand for referring to pirated traffic transmitted using the protocol.
And Mason doesn't want to see the use continue on for much longer.
But critics will say that while what Mason writes is technically true, trying to redefine the colloquial meaning of the term 'BitTorrent' at this stage may just be far too difficult. Or as copyright news website TorrentFreak puts it: "Our advice to BitTorrent Inc. is either to stop complaining about the fact that the term BitTorrent is often associated with piracy, or just change the name of the company."
Critics will also note that one of the most popular BitTorrent client for downloading pirated content, uTorrent, is also owned by BitTorrent Inc.
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