Canada judge crosses line on file-sharing

The Canadians, who often consign the United States to the status of rogue nation, demonstrated last week that they too can thumb their noses at international law when the fancy takes them.

That's one way to read the ruling by Canadian judge Konrad von Finckenstein, who declared that citizens of the Great White North can swap copyrighted music over the Internet to their hearts' content. Canadian representatives of the recording industry had demanded that Internet providers hand over the names of file-swappers. Finckenstein could simply have turned down the demand, but he went further, declaring that the swappers were doing nothing wrong in the first place. Sharing files with others, he declared, was a legitimate personal use of the music, not a copyright violation. Which means that Canadians may legally pass around copies of their favorite music recordings or movies--even if these recordings were produced by US artists or firms.

But wait -- isn't there some sort of treaty covering that? Don't countries have to enforce each other's copyright statutes? Well, yes. Sort of. The World Intellectual Property Organization is the global body that's supposed to see to this sort of thing. It's supported by a long and grandiose copyright treaty, just the sort of thing that ought to be dear to the hearts of Canadian leaders.

But Canada hasn't ratified the treaty. The government says it's going to--just you wait. But till it does, Canada is a sort of digital Sunni Triangle, a place where file swappers roam wild and free and no American musician is safe.

Actually, it's not that bad. Finckenstein's interpretation of copyright may well be shot down on appeal. In the long run, it's in Canada's interest to protect the intellectual property of other nations, as a way of protecting its own. But for now, Canadians are free to fill their hard drives with pilfered tunes, while the Mounties look the other way.

Meanwhile, the file-swappers persist in hunting up new and better ways to practice their illicit hobby. How else to explain the growing popularity of BitTorrent, fast becoming the digital hipster's preferred swapping technology? In fact, BitTorrent is attractive more for its geek appeal than its practicality. Its inventor, Bram Cohen, insists he had no intention of helping people trade pirated files, and his program is a lousy tool for that purpose. But don't be surprised if BitTorrent technology ends up becoming an Internet standard for sharing large chunks of data.

With a normal file-swapping program like Kazaa, the user finds somebody on the network who has the file he wants. The two computers then link up and the data streams from one to the other. BitTorrent uses a more creative approach, in which a downloader gets data from multiple computers on the network.

Each shared file is reformatted as a ''torrent" by software that divides the file into pieces and assigns a digital fingerprint to each piece. Then the file is put on the network by a ''seed" computer which has a complete copy of the original. Other BitTorrent users download the file piece by piece. But they share the pieces they've downloaded with the other computers that don't have them yet. Every computer in the network uploads and downloads pieces of the file at the same time, sharing them until everybody's got a complete copy of the file. The seed computer isn't overwhelmed by download requests because all the other machines help out. This should result in faster, smoother file downloads.

That's the theory, anyway. Our tryout resulted in pretty unimpressive download speeds. But then, we were just scouring the Net for torrents to download, the same way a Kazaa user hunts around for illicit Beatles recordings. BitTorrent isn't well suited to this kind of piracy.

For one thing, it doesn't have a built-in search feature. You can't load up a piece of software, type in ''Beatles" and get a list of tunes all ready to be stolen. Instead, you have to visit websites that display lists of available torrent files. The information on these sites is often well out of date, and the files no longer available. Eventually, the movie and music companies will take legal action against operators of these sites and shut them down, making it very tough to find any illegal torrents worth downloading.

Besides, BitTorrent doesn't work fast unless you're downloading something that lots of other people also want. Say you're going after an illicit copy of ''Casablanca," but only one other person in the world is downloading it. In that case, it'll take forever.

So why so much interest in BitTorrent? Because it's a file-sharing technology that legitimate businesses can love. Valve Corp., creator of the hit computer game Half-Life, wants to use it to send massive file downloads to online gamers. Today, they have to buy or rent huge banks of file servers for the purpose. If they convert to BitTorrent, gamers will automatically share files among themselves, making upgrades much cheaper and faster. Valve is so interested in the idea that it's hired BitTorrent's inventor, Bram Cohen. Another gaming company, Blizzard Entertainment, also likes the idea. It's experimenting with BitTorrent upgrades for its upcoming online game, ''World of Warcraft."

BitTorrent could also be a powerful corporate tool, for sharing vital documents among teams of employees linked by computer networks. Giving each team member a BitTorrent program would let them download large files without overloading a central server.

It serves as a useful reminder that there's nothing innately wicked about file-swapping programs. There's plenty of good in them, when properly employed. Maybe that's what Judge Finckenstein meant to convey; a gleam of insight in his otherwise ridiculous ruling.

Hiawatha Bray can be reached at bray@globe.com.