Hong-Kong court becomes the first to pass a conviction in a BitTorrent piracy case against unemployed 38-year-old Chan Nai-ming, who distributed three copyrighted films online without the owner's licence. Mr Chan pleaded not guilty but was convicted after four-days trial.

BitTorrent is a file sharing network similar to Kazaa against which already many orders have been passed from US to Australia. No doubt, the file sharing networks have always been subject to controversies, as any one using the network can download any copyrighted movie, music, software, etc without paying any fees and can similarly distribute the files without a licence.

But BitTorrent uses a new concept of file sharing. It employs small files named 'Torrents' with extension '.torrent', whose size mostly varies from 50 KB to 100 KB, but when opened through a BitTorrent software like Azureus, it downloads the complete file which may be 1 MB or 1 GB and allocates complete space initially.

The main disadvantage of BitTorrent softwares lies in the fact, it forces the user to share the file, i.e. while you are downloading a file on to your PC, you are required to seed the same to the other users upto the extent you have already downloaded the file, which from the copyright point of view can be deemed as you are transmiting the copyrighted file to other persons. Whereas, Kazaa allows you to disable the sharing and enjoy the downloads only.

Though in any case both violate copyright laws of most of the countries. But India is still to take strict view of such file-sharing softwares like other countries. To take an example, in US, Police tracks the IP addresses of the persons using softwares like Kazaa and pays a surprize visit at the violater's residence, which has brought the use of file-sharing softwares to minimal in US and European countries.

Even it has been reported that after this BitTorrent conviction, the use of such softwares has started going down. And as we know Kazaa is already on the verge of closing down like Napster after Australian Court Decision last month, already reported here.

Read the judgement - HKSAR V. CHAN NAI MING at
http://www.smlawpub.com.hk/cases/2005/1024.htm