An article over at Wired announces the development of a BitTorrent search engine developed by none other than BitTorrent’s inventor, Bram Cohen.
The article roams around some of the obvious copyright issues and MPAA lawyer concerns as you might imagine, but the sting in the tail is the quote from Mark Lemley, a law professor at Stanford University Law School and expert in intellectual property and internet law:
But in the end, the content industries may find the BitTorrent search engine too useful to mess with. “The copyright owners can now identify the most-trafficked materials that are infringing their copyrights and go after them in a more efficient way,” says Lemley. “It’s kind of ironic.”
The other irony is that the search engine will be advertising-supported, so the very people that normally pay for production of TV shows will perhaps be supporting the search engine for pirated versions. Looks like Mark Pesce’s prediction is getting closer - after all, why not pay extra advertising dollars to get your hyperdistributed version of the show (with your logo in the corner) ranked at No. 1 on the search results?