Bittorrent Goes Legit

So like its spiritual predecessor Napster, Bittorrent is apparently going to be reborn as a legal download service. While I’m happy to see progress being made in the realm of digital content distribution, I’m a little wary about a Bittorrent based pay-as-you-download service.

Here’s the thing: Bittorrent is a very different animal compared to a server based download services like Apple’s iTunes. Its strength comes from it’s distributed nature, illustrated by fancypants images like this. All those little blue circles feeding your new Harry Potter movie? Those are computers that belong to other users. More importantly, the bandwidth being used to deliver Harry Potter 10: Voldemort in Space is being paid for by those users.

So here’s the big question: will the prices of this movie service be subsidized to compensate for the user’s bandwidth that’s sapped to deliver content on the behalf of the service provider? I gotta assume that’s a big fat “not a chance in hell”.