BitTorrent turns ten

It happened completely by accident, but somewhere along the line, Bram Cohen became cool.
“It’s funny, when I first started working on BitTorrent, what I did was crazy,” Mr. Cohen, who serves as chief scientist at BitTorrent Inc., said in a telephone interview from his San Francisco office this week.
“I said, I’m going to go and work on this thing and I’m going to live off of credit cards and have no plan, no business model, no nothing. … Somehow I became cool. I’m not cool. I’m inherently uncool, but somehow the way I’ve lived my life is now considered very cool and the thing to do is to be an entrepreneur.”
Mr. Cohen had no idea any of that would happen when he released the first version of the file-sharing technology known as BitTorrent exactly 10 years ago. “This thing,” as he calls it, is now a technology that moves more data around the Internet than almost any other, one which ushered in a new era of video on the Web and touched off a series of heated debates over issues of copyright and network neutrality in the digital age.
But while his all-or-nothing approach to building the business may be lore around Silicon Valley, his celebrity doesn’t extend beyond the California technology community.

Financial Post

The name of the protocol, “BitTorrent,” is a household name for most people under 40, usually in connection with online file sharing and piracy. Yet what many fail to realize is that there’s a company behind the technology, BitTorrent Inc., which was founded in 2004 to monetize the service and which has no direct connection to piracy or illegal file sharing.
Despite a massive global user base of more than 100 million, BitTorrent is still wrestling with many of the problems that have dogged it since its creation. The company is still trying to shake off its connection to piracy and establish itself as a leader in digital content delivery in a world dominated by new entrants, such as Netflix Inc. and the Hulu service.
BitTorrent is an example of peer-to-peer file sharing, which means that instead of downloading a file from a single source like iTunes, users download fragmented files from other users. In the case of BitTorrent, by downloading parts of the same file from several — sometimes thousands — of different users at the same time, a full length movie can be obtained in a matter of minutes with a high-speed Internet connection.
BitTorrent software is free to download and many versions of the software are open source. The company itself generates revenue through advertising, through search inventory syndication and by licensing its own version of the protocol to consumer electronics companies, which can then embed the technology in everything from televisions to smartphones.
Because the company does not control the BitTorrent technology once it has been downloaded, it has no control over how it is implemented on the Internet. Today, BitTorrent is one of the most common technologies used for transferring copyright-infringing content, such as pirated music and movies.
As one might expect, this has led to perception of BitTorrent as a piracy advocate, which has caused problems for BitTorrent Inc.’s chief executive, Eric Klinker, as he attempts to build a brand around the protocol.
“It’s a continued challenge for us to get that message out,” Mr. Klinker said in an interview. “There are plenty of legitimate uses for BitTorrent. People are starting to see BitTorrent as a good way of moving their own media around, videos they might shoot with an iPhone, for example.”
There are a number of companies that use BitTorrent to distribute large files, including Facebook Inc., Twitter Inc. and even video game maker Activision Blizzard Inc., which uses a version of the technology to distribute software updates for the popular online video game World of Warcraft.
However, the perceived connection to copyright issues has led to Mr. Cohen being cast as a patron saint of copyright reform in some circles, a mantle he is decidedly uncomfortable with.
“I kind of view copyright as this fight I didn’t ask to be in,” said Mr. Cohen, who once claimed he has never used BitTorrent to download a copyright-infringing file for himself.
“People expect me to be some kind of copyright crusader or something, and I’m not. I’m a technologist. I build technology and I’ve been sucked into this crap, which on some level I don’t really care about all that much.”
BitTorrent accounts for about 21.6% of North American Internet traffic, and 94% of all peer-to-peer traffic, according to data from Waterloo, Ont.’s Sandvine Inc.
In fact, only Netflix accounts for more online traffic in North America, and the online streaming giant only recently surpassed BitTorrent to become the dominant video provider on the Web.
Still, according to Lee Brooks, product marketing manager for Sandvine, the fact that BitTorrent’s traffic has remained steady despite the rise of on-demand streaming applications such as Netflix shows that the technology has a dedicated user base and is here to stay.
“Globally, BitTorrent now is unquestionably dominant,” he said.
“In some regions it’s two-thirds of upstream traffic and in North America it tends to be a bit less, but only because in North America subscribers have really embraced on-demand streaming applications.
“That by no means has led to an extinction of BitTorrent, it’s just that it rose to a certain level and its plateaued there,” Mr. Brooks said.
 Source: National Post