BitTorrent, Comcast, EFF Antipathetic To FCC Regulation of P2P Traffic

Locally, the news has also spawned a class-action lawsuit against Comcast. Marin resident John Hart is the lead plaintiff in the suit, which accuses the Internet service provider of fraud — that it advertised "unfettered access" to the Internet and then secretly blocked file-sharing. The suit estimates damages to be higher than $5 million.

The guy who ushered in a paradigm shift in media distribution doesn't carry himself like some puffed-up media mogul. BitTorrent creator Bram Cohen stands maybe 5 feet 9 in sneakers, jeans, and a faded black Buckethead T-shirt. Three-day-old stubble shades the 32-year-old's boyish face, and he cracks an easy smile when talking about his invention. Cohen is also a lover of juggling, scooters, and especially puzzles. It's probably the kid in him that gave him the audacity to rewrite the rules of the Internet.

BitTorrent has grown from 10 million downloads in 2005 to 160 million downloads in 2007, thanks to Cohen's big innovation — swarm downloading of segmented files. It's cheaper, faster, and simply better than anything that came before.

The traditional way to get MP3s or video files required finding them directly on a specific Web site or computer and downloading them from there. This is how famed file-sharing program Napster worked. Users downloaded and installed Napster, searched for the music they wanted, and then hooked into someone else's computer for one-to-one downloads. The process could take hours.

"Napster wasn't very good," says Cohen, kicking his shoes off in the ninth-floor conference room overlooking the Transbay Terminal project. The place seems oddly quiet for midday at an office in the city: Most programmers work from home, or work nights. The smell of taco-truck cuisine drifts down the blue-carpeted halls. "I set a personal goal for myself, which was [to create] a program where one person could share a file and ten thousand people could jump on it simultaneously, and the thing would work," he laughs.

So Cohen wrote a protocol, or language, to enable this. If you go to www.bittorrent.com and download the program, you get a small (1.4 megabyte) file to install on your computer. This program mimics an air traffic controller. Tell it what file you want by plugging in its "tracker," and BitTorrent automatically scours the Internet for not just one person with that file, but thousands.

Trying to get the whole copy of, say, Justice's hit song "D.A.N.C.E." takes only seconds. BitTorrent arranges for your computer to take a sliver of the song from everyone who has it, all at once. The second you start to receive "D.A.N.C.E.," BitTorrent switches gears and lets other computers know that you have some of the club anthem to share. Paradoxically, all downloaders instantly become uploaders, or "seeders." With the BitTorrent paradox, the higher the demand for a file, the higher the supply — because everyone is immediately sharing the segments they receive with people who don't yet have them. Downloads are 35 to 50 percent faster, and distribution costs for artists plummet, because fans chip in bandwidth to get the files out.

The first versions of BitTorrent began circulating among Cohen's peers in 2001. He used free porn as an incentive to download the bittorrent.exe program, but porn lovers are wary of files labeled ".exe," because such executable files can kill a computer with hacker programs.

The earliest adopters of BitTorrent turned out to be Deadheads. The 1960s jam-band legend the Grateful Dead has a fervent fan community of bootleg concert traders, known as "tapers," that ranks among the oldest, most robust file-sharing networks. The Dead always encouraged their devotees to plug into their live soundboards. Such recordings comprise the currency of an international, multigenerational taper economy possibly hundreds of thousands strong. Deadheads used to trade cassettes, but live recordings of the Dead quickly piggybacked onto the Net because so many Bay Area tapers doubled as computer geeks.

Cohen says he modeled the Bit-Torrent interface on taper mailing lists. "It was so painful to see how they did this," he says. "One guy would say, 'Hey, I have this recording. The first 10 people to ask for it will get a password to download it.' It was so slow. I wanted it to be automatic."

After Cohen got BitTorrent up and running, Deadheads were able to use it to find and download every live Dead show in existence on the Internet.

Cohen says the trusting taper community led the way until the anime crowd discovered BitTorrent to share comics across the globe, and the program spread rapidly. Soon after its release, Cohen says he went into hiding, fearful of the monster he had created. "I was scared," he recalls. "People were saying I was personally going to be sued out of existence."