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Angry Artists Attack BitTorrent With Spoofed Billboards


Matsuda

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bittorrent-nsa.jpg

An anonymous group of disgruntled artists have launched a banner campaign spoofing the billboard promotions BitTorrent Inc. ran last week. The banners, which suggest that BitTorrent doesn’t care about artists, appeared on several popular websites including Rollingstone.com, The Drudge Report, Mashable, GrooveShark and MediaFire. “Instead of paying artists, we spent money on banners” and “All your content are belong to us,” the ads read.

Last week BitTorrent Inc. shocked friend and foe with a clever marketing campaign.

The company, best known for its file-sharing applications uTorrent and BitTorrent, put up billboards in three major metropolitan areas.

Initially the billboards displayed slogans such as “Your data should belong to the NSA” and “Artists need to play by the rules,” but they were later updated to signal the reverse.

BitTorrent’s goal was to raise awareness of issues related to Internet freedom, privacy and artist rights. However, not everyone agreed with the somewhat confusing messaging, and some artists were flat-out offended.

In a direct response to the billboard ads, a group of anonymous artists have launched a banner campaign spoofing BitTorrent’s slogans, while directing people to a website filled with statements showing various downsides of copyright infringement.

Over the past year BitTorrent Inc. has tried very hard to distance itself from piracy, but the artists in question are having none of that. The banner below appeared on the popular music site Rolling Stone earlier this week and suggests that BitTorrent is depriving artists of income.

“Instead of paying artists, we spent money on banners,” the banner reads, crediting it to the misspelled “BitTorent” alongside a fabricated logo.


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Another banner ad spoofs BitTorrent’s anti-NSA billboard. Instead of “Your Data Should Belong To The NSA You,” it reads “All your content are belong to us.”

The banners went live earlier this week and have been spotted on Rollingstone.com, The Drudge Report, Mashable, FileHippo, GrooveShark and MediaFire, among others. All banners were linked to the Right The Music website which is registered by Swedish companyMycketMusik AB.


belongbittorrent.png

Thus far little is known about the mysterious group behind the ads but information received by TorrentFreak suggests that this the first of a series of anti-piracy campaigns the anonymous coalition of artists has planned.

Whether BitTorrent Inc. is the right target for these campaigns is doubtful. While millions of pirates use the company’s software every day to download copyrighted material, the same can be said about Mozilla’s Firefox or even Windows.

That, however, may be a little nuanced for the disgruntled artists, who have clearly made up their mind about the company. Luckily for BitTorrent there are also plenty of artists who are supportive of the company, including Madonna, Moby and Plain White T’s, all of whom have collaborated with the company in recent weeks.

To be continued.



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"All your content are belong to us"?

I don't think they even know how torrents work :P

Edited by Sat
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"All your content are belong to us"?

I don't think they even know how torrents work :P

I remember reading somewhere that BitTorrent Inc.'s offerings use DRM. If that's the case then obviously you don't truly own the copy you downloaded and cannot use it indefinitely on any device you choose.

Edited by janedoe
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I remember reading somewhere that BitTorrent Inc.'s offerings use DRM. If that's the case then obviously you don't truly own the copy you downloaded and cannot use it indefinitely on any device you choose.

Not that I know. They do not install any plugins or anything that could be used as DRM. And all their offers are free to copy.

If you have a source, please post it, I'm interested to know >_<

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Not that I know. They do not install any plugins or anything that could be used as DRM. And all their offers are free to copy.

If you have a source, please post it, I'm interested to know >_<

I wasn't able to locate the exact article, but perhaps I got my facts slightly mixed up. Found other articles that talked about how BT Inc. planned to offer movies that would use Microsoft's DRM, be playable only in WMP on a single PC and expire after 30 days. If they gave up on that and are truly offering DRM-free content then that's good news. At least someone working there seems to have understood what a stupid idea DRM is.
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