Bram Cohen arrives in San Francisco’s Mission District, his hair disheveled, his face stubbled with a day’s growth of beard and his black BitTorrent T-shirt proclaiming him for what he is — the poster boy for a popular and disruptive Internet file-swapping technology.
But now that the Supreme Court has clarified the do’s and don’ts of file-sharing, the creator of BitTorrent — which allows video and other large files to be quickly downloaded — has no reason to hide. Indeed, Cohen, 29, recently relocated from Seattle to San Francisco, and he and his chief operating officer are making the rounds on Sand Hill Road looking for venture capital for their new company, BitTorrent. They’ve forged a partnership with paid-search provider Ask Jeeves, and recently the duo flew to Burbank for high-level talks with the Motion Picture Association of America.
BitTorrent already has struck deals with video game publishers to distribute games with its technology.
Cohen’s bid to commercialize BitTorrent is a measure of how far the entertainment industry has come since the late 1990s, whenNapster introduced millions of people to the power of peer-to-peer technology for downloading songs — and mobilized scores of lawyers to shut it down.
The recording industry continues its legal campaign to crush the once-wildly popular Australian-based Kazaa file-sharing service. But the studios are now moving to embrace BitTorrent technology — which gracefully and cheaply distributes giant files — even as they sue those who use it to trade bootlegged movies, TV shows or video games.
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