Netherlands

[NL] Public Broadcasting Organisations Interested in Peer-To-Peer Technology

IRIS 2006-5:1/37

Brenda van der Wal

Institute for Information Law (IViR), University of Amsterdam

The Delft University of Technology has launched a new peer-to-peer system, based on open-source software, which can be used to distribute television programmes through the internet. Public broadcasting organisations, as well as commercial television stations and cable and telecommunications companies, have shown keen interest in this programme called Tribler. Tribler was developed by a group of scientists in a project supported by the Dutch Ministry of Economic Affairs. The software allows users to download television programmes from the broadcasting organisation’s server, and then to distribute the content to other interested users. This avoids the high costs broadcasting organisations face with the current method of separately distributing content from the server to each viewer. Another aspect that interests the broadcasting organisations is the use of communities, called “tribes”. Lists of “friends” enable viewers to share programme recommendations with like-minded viewers. This presents the public broadcasting organisations, who already offer personal television guides, with new opportunities. To avoid breaches of copyright, the public broadcasting organisations have commissioned the Instituut voor Beeld en Geluid (Institute for Image and Sound), the administrator of the public broadcasting organisations’ archives, to buy out as much archive material as possible. All material whose copyright is owned by the organisations, can then be offered for downloading. Another option to safeguard copyright could be the use of Creative Commons Licences. The team of scientists has developed the software in order to monitor the use of peer-to-peer technology, and to discover patterns. Unlike the anonymous BitTorrent, all users will have their own identification number. For the time being, this will not be used for copyright management.