BitTorrent recently joined the ranks of companies trying to rent and sell legal movies and shows online. On Monday, the 26^th of January, the service became available to the public, but, unfortunately, it doesn’t look too promising.

The plan is to offer movie rentals, which after purchase suffer from a 30 day download window before the user has to pay again. Upon completion of the download, the customer has 24 hours to watch the movie after he or she first clicks play. Besides full length features, the service will also be offering TV shows from a variety of mediocre broadcasters such as Fox, FX, G4, Nickelodeon, Speed, Spike, as well as from a few others. These shows will not expire, but, lo and behold, can only be viewed on a maximum of two computers. The movie rentals currently cost anywhere from $2.99 to $3.99, and the asking price for a TV show is set at $1.99.

Now, this all sounds really great, but why should the casual pirate be persuaded to hop over to the legal side of the fence, when all the material that he or she could possibly desire is at least just as readily available for free on the very same P2P network as the legal stuff? At this point there are actually more users sharing the illegal rips than the legal alternative. Not only are people being asked to pay for DRMed material that requires the use of Windows Media Player to be played, the content is currently only available to those within the US. International customers get nothing – except for the free alternative that is…

There are several problems with this service as it stands right now. First off, it’s DRMed! This whole notion of wanting to protect digital content might work for the average consumer, but this makes absolutely no sense whatsoever for the experienced BitTorrent user. Chances are that if you are familiar with BitTorrent and use it on a regular basis, then you probably know plenty of places that offer the content that you want without the restrictions, for free, and possibly even at a better quality.

Secondly, where is the incentive to actually share this content? You pay for the material, you download it, watch it, and then what? If you’re an average consumer who has never used BitTorrent before, then you’ll probably just shut down your torrenting application and that’ll be that. Computer novices will simply not appreciate the beauty of the sharing system as originally set up by Cohen. The average consumer will regard this BitTorrent service as just another distribution medium, without any regard for how it works, and the importance of keeping the files so that they can be seeded.

Apropos seeding, what happens when the DRM kicks in? The movie files will essentially kill themselves, and then there will be absolutely no reason whatsoever for the end user to keep that file. The user will delete the movie, and the sharing of that file will undoubtedly go with it.

So, what if you do understand how BitTorrent works, and want to share with the rest of the paying community? Is it worth it? After all, you’ve already paid for the movie, and now the expectation is that you’ll share a DRM-ridden file over your overpriced bandwidth. By the end of it all, you’ll have paid more than the original asking price of the movie. Surely, it’s only equitable and fair towards the community as a whole, so why not share? The problem is that the sharing concept was crippled as soon as movie industry decided to prevent us from sharing with their digital rights management systems. As iron as it is, if everyone does what the industry supposedly wants us to do, which is not share, then this system will fail.

Assuming that people will support this system, it works out great for the movie and distribution companies; they pay a little at the beginning of each new release to get the seeding process going and after that the community will be paying for all of the rest, and in the meantime the companies rake in all the money.

In order for this to actually succeed, there needs to be an incentive to share. For example, a price cut based on your overall download to upload ratio. Let’s say that you have uploaded twice as much as you have downloaded, wouldn’t it be more than fair if you were rewarded for this by paying less than those who merely leech? Too bad it’ll never happen. This entire concept probably looked golden on paper, but I doubt that it will have a lot of appeal to new or existing BitTorrent users.