EXPERT DISCUSSION ON USE OF TORRENTS

Torrents – the apple of discord between internet users and creators of intellectual products – again became the hot topic of the day on 3^rd of February. The government’s proposal for ratification of the international Beijing Treaty on Audiovisual Performances sparked sharp reactions from internet users, because of interpretations that the sites for video and audio files sharing might be banned. The Ministry of Culture however refuted this information.

The future of torrent sites and the border between users’ rights and authors’ rights were discussed in the BNT morning programme ‘The Day Begins’. The guests in the studio invited to debate the topic were Georgi Damyanov, the Director of Directorate “Copyright and Related Rights” in the Ministry of Culture and Petar Petrov, a judge at  Sofia City Court and author of the book “Selected Hunt for Internet Pirates” .

The expert Georgi Damyanov said that the destiny of torrent sites could not be solved through a law, treaty or other acts and added that torrent sites were a technology which users needed and would continue to exist as long as users needed them. He underlined that the Beijing Treaty was not at all the new AСТА (The Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement).

The judge Petar Petrov explained that the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) recommended a standard which gets incorporated at European level and state level. He added that the Beijing Treaty made no mention of torrents or authors and it only referred to performers.

Another participant in the discussion, Boyan Novanski, a lawyer of one of the owners of a big torrent site, said that the ratification of the Beijing Treaty was not worrying as it did not require introduction of restrictions or changes to national legislation of the countries which were party to that treaty.

According to the online expert Plamen Rusev, the filed of such discussion should be moved to the field of business models, because technologies change the way we do business and the legal aspect has a lot to catch up.