File Sharing's Changing Landscape

[DudeAsInCool]

Here's a recent article from the NY Times on the topic:

File Sharing's New Face

February 12, 2004

By SETH SCHIESEL

SEATTLE

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.

"Obviously their problem was not enough bandwidth to meet

demand," Mr. Cohen said in an interview at a Mexican

restaurant near his home in Seattle. "It seemed pretty

clear to me that there is a lot of bandwidth out there, but

it's not being used properly. There's all of this upload

capacity that people aren't using."

That was the essential insight behind BitTorrent. Under

older file-sharing systems like Napster and Kazaa, only a

small subset of users actually share files with the world.

Most users simply download, or leech, in cyberspace

parlance.

BitTorrent, however, uses what could be called a Golden

Rule principle: the faster you upload, the faster you are

allowed to download. BitTorrent cuts up files into many

little pieces, and as soon as a user has a piece, they

immediately start uploading that piece to other users. So

almost all of the people who are sharing a given file are

simultaneously uploading and downloading pieces of the same

file (unless their downloading is complete).

The practical implication is that the BitTorrent system

makes it easy to distribute very large files to large

numbers of people while placing minimal bandwidth

requirements on the original "seeder." That is because

everyone who wants the file is sharing with one another,

rather than downloading from a central source. A separate

file-sharing network known as eDonkey uses a similar

system.

For Mr. Cohen, BitTorrent was always about exercising his

brain rather than trying to fatten his wallet. Unlike many

other file-sharing programs, BitTorrent is both free and

open-source, which means that those with enough technical

know-how can incorporate Mr. Cohen's code into their own

programs.

While writing the software, "I lived on savings for a while

and then I lived off credit cards, you know, using those

zero percent introductory rates to use one credit card to

pay off the previous card," Mr. Cohen said.

The first usable version of BitTorrent appeared in October

2002, but the system needed a lot of fine-tuning. Luckily

for Mr. Cohen, he was living in the Bay Area at the time

and his project had attracted the attention of John

Gilmore, the free-software entrepreneur, who had also been

one of the first employees at Sun Microsystems. Mr. Gilmore

ended up helping Mr. Cohen with some of his living expenses

while he finished the system.

"Part of what matters to me about this is that it makes it

possible for people with limited bandwidth to supply very

popular files," Mr. Gilmore said in a telephone interview.

"It means that if you are a small software developer you

can put up a package, and if it turns out that millions of

people want it, they can get it from each other in an

automated way."

BitTorrent really started to take off in early 2003 when it

was used to distribute a new version of Linux and fans of

Japanese anime started relying on it to share cartoons.

It is difficult to measure BitTorrent's overall use. But

Steven C. Corbato, director of backbone network

infrastructure for Internet2, the high-speed network

consortium, said he took notice in May. "We started seeing

BitTorrent traffic increase right around May 15, 2003, and

by October it was above 10 percent of the traffic," he

said.

Data for the week of Jan. 26, which Mr. Corbato said was

the latest reliable information, showed that BitTorrent

generated 9.3 percent of the total data traffic on

Internet2's so-called Abilene backbone, which connects more

than 200 of the nation's biggest research universities, in

addition to laboratories and state education networks. By

contrast, no other file sharing system registered more than

1 percent of the traffic, though Mr. Corbato said his

network might be underreporting the use of those other

services.

Just a few months ago, however, that success still had not

translated into dollars for Mr. Cohen.

"This past September I had, like, no money," he recalled.

"I was just scraping along and doing the credit card thing

again."

But unknown to Mr. Cohen, BitTorrent was serving as a job

application. Out of the blue, he heard from Gabe Newell,

the managing director of Valve Software, based in nearby

Bellevue, Wash. Valve is developing what gaming experts

anticipate will be a blockbuster video game, Half-Life 2,

but it is also creating an online distribution network that

it calls Steam. Because of Mr. Cohen's expertise in just

that area, Valve offered him a job. He moved to Seattle and

started work in October.

"When we looked around to see who was doing the most

interesting work in this space, Bram's progress on

BitTorrent really stood out," Mr. Newell said. "The

distributed publishing model embedded in BitTorrent is

exactly the kind of thing media companies need to build on

for their own systems."

All along, Mr. Cohen had accepted donations from BitTorrent

users at his Web site, bitconjurer.org, but the sum had

been minimal. In October, however, Mr. Cohen's father

prevailed on him to ask a bit more directly. Now, Mr. Cohen

said, he is receiving a few hundred dollars a day.

"It's been a pretty dramatic turnaround in lifestyle in

just a few months, with the job and the donations coming

in," Mr. Cohen said. "It's nice."

According to survey data from the Pew Internet and American

Life Project, file sharing is on the wane, apparently as a

result of the music industry's legal offensive. Last May,

29 percent of adult Internet users in the United States

reported that they had engaged in file sharing; that figure

dropped to 14 percent in a survey conducted in November and

December. Nonetheless, the ranks of the BitTorrent faithful

- whether anime fanatics, Linux users, Deadheads or movie

pirates - appear to be growing. And some are quite thankful

to Mr. Cohen.

"I think Bram is going to be like Shawn Fanning in terms of

the impact this is going to have," said Steve Hormell, a

co-founder of etree.org, a music-trading site that predates

the file-sharing phenomenon, referring to the inventor of

the original Napster service. "It is a bit of paradigm

shift and I can't stress the community aspect of it enough.

You have to give back in order to get. Going back 15 years,

that's what the Internet was all about until the suits came

along."

Not surprisingly, the movie industry is not amused.

"BitTorrent is definitely on our radar screen," Tom Temple,

the director for Internet enforcement for the Motion

Picture Association of America, said in a telephone

interview. While the association first became aware of the

technology about a year ago, BitTorrent's surging

popularity prompted the group to start sending infringement

notices to BitTorrent site operators in November.

"We do have investigations open into various BitTorrent

link sites that could lead to either civil or criminal

prosecution in the near future," Mr. Temple said.

For his part, Mr. Cohen pointed out that BitTorrent users

are not anonymous and that their numeric Internet addresses

are easily viewable by anyone who cares. "It amazes me that

sites like Suprnova continue to stay up, because it would

be so easy to sue them," he said. Using BitTorrent for

illegal trading, he added, is "patently stupid because it's

not anonymous, and it can't be made anonymous because it's

fundamentally antithetical to the architecture."

That said, Mr. Cohen is not in the nanny business.

"I'm

not going to get up on my high horse and tell others not to

do it because it's not my place to berate people," he said.

"I just sort of watch it with some amusement."

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/02/12/technolo...b17052738347670