BitTorrent may have a way for Sony to release The Interview

These past few weeks have been an absolute nightmare for Sony Pictures thanks to the recent hack by the group known as the Guardians of Peace (GOP), which the FBI claims is from North Korea. Not only has the company been slammed for its blatant disregard of cybersecurity, which put both the privacy and security of its employees at risk, numerous celebrities and even President Obama himself have come forward to call Sony’s decision to cancel the Christmas Day release of The Interview a “mistake”.

The Interview is a comedy starring Seth Rogan and James Franco that follows the story of two men who go to North Korea to interview Kim Jong-un, but are approached by the United States government and asked to assassinate the nation’s leader. Obviously a controversial film from the beginning, Sony claims it was forced to cancel its release after the GOP threatened violence if the film was shown in theaters.

Shortly after Sony announced the cancellation of the film, President Obama pledged that North Korea will answer for the cyberattack, but added that: “Sony’s a corporation. It suffered significant damage, there were threats against its employees. I am sympathetic to the concerns that they faced. Having said all that, yes, I think they made a mistake.”

This is a sentiment that many people share, and Sony has drawn a lot of criticism for its decision to pull the film from theaters. Even so, the company has announced that it’s actively pursuing “alternatives” to releasing the film on a “different platform,” but with just a few days until the film’s original Christmas debut, it’s still unclear how the company intends to release the film in a way that can be monetized.

That’s where BitTorrent believes it can be of assistance.

In an interview with VentureBeat, the San Francisco-based company claims that Sony could set the price of the film using the BitTorrent Bundle service, which allows you to put torrents behind a paywall. The company has billed its service as the most lucrative means for content creators to distribute their products, and has positioned itself as an alternative to streaming services such as Spotify and Pandora. Radiohead frontman Thom Yorke became the most famous musician to utilize this service back in September, with more than one million downloads since then.

“Like everyone else around the world, we’ve been following this egregious hacking of Sony’s servers over the past few weeks,” said BitTorrent in a statement to VentureBeat. “A trend has emerged among commentary in the days since Sony announced they would not release the motion picture, “The Interview.” There have been calls for Sony to release the film online. And many have contacted us asking: Would they be able to release the movie using BitTorrent?”

While BitTorrent is a legitimate business with legitimate products, many people and corporations associated it with online piracy due to the fact that the company’s self-named BitTorrent peer-to-peer protocol is used by millions of people across the globe to share files illegally. As such, it may be a stretch to think that Sony would ever do business with BitTorrent.

However, Sony does stand to lose almost $200 million on The Interview, and the BitTorrent Bundle service allows the owner of the product that’s being distributed to retain 85% of the revenue from the sales, far better than most distribution services out there. The only overhead for the owner of the product is a 10% slice of each purchase that BitTorrent uses to cover the cost of processing the payments through PayPal or a credit card company.

“This is bigger than Sony at this point,” says Matt Mason, BitTorrent’s chief content officer, as quoted by Fast Company. “We can’t let this go, and by we I mean the free world. When it comes to freedom of speech, what’s happening with this is really frightening. This film should come out, whether on BitTorrent or not, even if it’s the worst movie in the world.”

Unfortunately, with how Hollywood perceives BitTorrent, not to mention how the GOP has been using the BitTorrent protocol to distribute the files that it stole from Sony, it’s very unlikely that Sony will take BitTorrent up on its offer. Even so, this does serve as an excellent form of self-promotion for the company as it attempts to change people’s perception of it so that it’s seen as more of a legitimate business rather than a tool for illegal file sharing. The company even addressed this in it’s statement to VentureBeat.

“We disagree, however, with some that have suggested that Sony should make the film available through piracy sites. That would only serve to encourage bad actors. It’s also important to make the distinction that these piracy sites are not ‘torrent sites.’ They are piracy sites that are wrongfully exploiting torrent technology,” the company said.