AFTER working for a parade of doomed dot-com startups, a young programmer named Bram Cohen finally got tired of failure.
“I decided I finally wanted to work on a project that people would actually use, would actually work and would actually be fun,” he recalled.
Three years later, Mr. Cohen, 28, has emerged as the face of the next wave of Internet file sharing. If Napster started the first generation of file-sharing, and services like Kazaa represented the second, then the system developed by Mr. Cohen, known as BitTorrent, may well be leading the third. Firm numbers are difficult to come by, but it appears that the BitTorrent software has been downloaded more than 10 million times.
And just as earlier forms of file-sharing seem to be waning in popularity under legal pressure from the music industry, new technologies like BitTorrent are making it easier than ever to share and distribute the huge files used for video. One site alone, suprnova.org, routinely offers hundreds of television programs, recent movies and copyrighted software programs. The movie industry, among others, has taken notice.
What Mr. Cohen has created, however, seems beyond his control. And when he was developing the system, he said, widespread copyright infringement was not what he had in mind.
Rather, he was intrigued by a problem familiar to many Internet users and felt acutely by friends who were trading music online legally: the excruciating wait while files were being downloaded.
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