The FBI doesn’t like it. The Department of Homeland Security is so concerned that it has closed down websites related to it. The Moving Picture Association of America is waging a war against it. And every day millions of people around the world use it to share music, TV programmes and movies.
The “it” is BitTorrent – a computer program that’s the brainchild of the softly-spoken Bram Cohen. It is a super-smart way to share huge files over the internet, and one which, depending on whose side of the argument you listen to, is either an evil tool for those involved with copyright theft, or a work of genius set to transform the media industry as we know it.
Recent research has shown that, last year, BitTorrent was responsible for one third of all traffic on the internet. That’s one third. And this despite a wave of legal activity against the peer-to-peer technology (P2P) that underpins Cohen’s brainchild.
In essence, BitTorrent is just the latest in a line of programs that started with Napster and allows individuals to swap information with each other over the internet. An OECD report on digital music released this week revealed that at any one time there are as many as 10 million people exchanging files using all forms of P2P. Business Week has estimated that the total number of users could be as high as 100 million.
BitTorrent has become more popular than its competition because it is much more efficient. Systems such as Napster and Kazaa often used to grind to a halt because the files that were being shared sat on one computer, and could only be downloaded as quickly as the lines going in and out of that computer would allow.
Cohen’s idea was to break the files up into bits. Once someone downloaded a bit, they also became a source for that bit. As a result, more people downloading a file meant there were also more people uploading it, which meant it actually became faster rather than slower.
