It was the first time a working copy of the BitTorrent code had been made available to the public, but the initial response wasn’t exactly overwhelming.

“What’s BitTorrent, Bram?” was the one reply he received on the board.

Despite this underwhelming response, BitTorrent was born. In the weeks and months that followed more people started to become aware of its potential. The music-sharing community Etree was one of the first paces where its full capacity was tested in the wild.

“Early tests used losslessly compressed audio files from Etree, a fan community where people could upload self-recorded concert footage by artists who allowed recordings. That kickstarted it all. Also, Slashdot gave us some early coverage that definitely attracted the attention of engineer influencers,” Bram told TorrentFreak.

It turned out to be the start of something big, something really big. Fast forward a decade and BitTorrent is part of the daily routines of millions of people. Hundreds of petabytes of data are transferred over BitTorrent every day and this number continues to rise.

A question Bram probably heard a few times over the years is why he came up with BitTorrent in the first place. In hindsight this may seem to be a stupid question, but the idea behind BitTorrent wasn’t so obvious in the early 2000s.

“Fundamentally, I was trying to figure out how people on the Internet could utilize all the unused upstream bandwidth to make it faster to send huge files,” Bram told TorrentFreak.

“The technology has been a success in that it works the way I had envisioned and lots of people use it. However, there are many use cases where BitTorrent could potentially be applied, and as file sizes explode, the protocol is increasingly relevant,” he adds.

Today, BitTorrent does indeed utilize much of the consumer upstream traffic that would otherwise lie unused. In fact, recent estimates show that BitTorrent accounts for more than half of all upstream traffic on the Internet in many locations, including the United States.

However, as Bram emphasizes there is also a lot of untapped potential in BitTorrent. Only recently Twitter and Facebook discovered that BitTorrent was a life saver for them, and today its helping these tech giants distribute files across their servers faster and more efficiently than any other alternative. And the opportunities don’t end there.

Aside from everything that went right, the original BitTorrent code was also improved on many times in the last decade.

“There were two changes that had a significant impact,” Bram told us. “With the first in-the-wild testing in 2001, there was no Web integration or real UI. You had to do everything manually, which was awful. The Web UI in 2002 made it easy for anyone to use.”

“The second improvement was uTP, finalized last year. Overnight, BitTorrent became good Internet citizens, simply by voluntarily de-prioritizing our protocol traffic when a network is over-congested. We don’t cause network congestion today.”

But not only on the code side was significant progress made. In 2004 Bram Cohen co-founded the BitTorrent Inc. company to turn his increasingly popular file-sharing protocol into a business. Although the company is doing well today thanks to acquiring the popular BitTorrent client uTorrent in 2006, looking back Bram things he might do things differently if he could start over now.

“If I had to do it all over again, I’d have kept the company more focused on core technologies from day one. We have a lot of smart people who have a lot of great ideas, and on occasion have become distracted. Today, I’m very focused on live streaming.”

Looking ahead, streaming is one of the new territories where BitTorrent may play a more important role in the coming years. It can save publishers tens of thousands of dollars in distribution costs and allows everyone to stream content to large audiences.

“BitTorrent may be able to play a role in creating experiences for stuff to start playing as soon as you hit a Web page, for example. Streaming is also going to play a role, outside of Live streaming, the new protocol I’m building.”

“Also, until bandwidth becomes virtually free, BitTorrent adds value to the ultimate goal of moving large files. People are now not only consuming huge files, but creating and sharing them as well. Cell phone videos, hi-res pics come to mind. Who wants to create quality content and then destroy the quality just so someone else can see it?”

Today, demand for BitTorrent is greater than ever before. Despite the numerous streaming websites and direct-download portals that were launched over the years, BitTorrent continues to expand its user base. An entire generation grew up with BitTorrent and many people can’t imagine an Internet without it, ever.

We want to congratulate Bram for his groundbreaking invention that has had a tremendous impact on the Internet in the last decade, and we eagerly look forward to the next 10 years.

Source: BitTorrent Turns 10: Happy Birthday!

However, a key characteristic of the young Internet is that it constantly evolves, and in 2005 video streaming was brought to the mainstream thanks to YouTube. This online video streaming revolution has hugely increased the use of bandwidth by individual consumers. At the same time it’s also resulting in huge bandwidth bills for streaming sites.

So as we near the 10th anniversary of BitTorrent its inventor Bram Cohen is finalizing a new protocol, this time aimed at P2P-live streaming. Although P2P-live streaming is not something new per se, Cohen thinks that his implementation will set itself apart from competitors with both its efficiency and extremely low latency.

“Doing live properly is a hard problem, and while I could have a working thing relatively quickly, I’m doing everything the ‘right’ way,” Bram Cohen told TorrentFreak last year when he announced his plans. He further explained that the BitTorrent protocol had to be redone to make it compatible with live streams, “including ditching TCP and using congestion control algorithms different from the ones we’ve made for UTP”

In the months that followed Cohen figured out most of this complex puzzle and the technology is now mature enough to show to the public. Although there’s still a lot of secrecy around the technical details, the BitTorrent team agreed to show TorrentFreak a demo in anticipation of the official release later this year.

Although it’s fascinating to see BitTorrent’s inventor waving at a computer, it is impossible to see how this compares to competing technologies without the option of testing a working version and having more technical details.

Over the years we’ve already seen a few working implementations and adaptations of the BitTorrent protocol that allow for P2P live streaming. Most notable is the SwarmPlayer, which has proven to work well with low latencies in real live tests, but usually supported by high bandwidth ‘fall-back peers’.

“The main areas of innovation relate to techniques he is using to manage latency at an unprecedented low while controlling network congestion,” BitTorrent’s VP of Product Management Simon Morris told TorrentFreak in our quest for more information.

“As outlined in the academic literature on live P2P content delivery, the management of live p2p streaming on the open internet requires split second reconfigurations to reroute content delivery in the fewest possible round trips between peers in the event of network hiccups.”

“Bram’s methods to manage network reconfiguration wrap rerouting together with a novel approach to congestion control. Obviously we’ll be happy to share more technical details in due course, but only once the technology reaches a level of maturity that it makes sense to share.”

This means that the wait continues, and we were told that the official release will take at least a few more months. For some reason we think that it might take until July, which makes sense PR-wise because the BitTorrent protocol then officially celebrates its tenth anniversary.

Source: BitTorrent Inventor Demos New P2P Live Streaming Protocol

At the event Cohen sat down for an interview to talk about the new App platform, and how the company came to be where it is now. Some of the failures such as the video store and BitTorrent’s CDN were briefly touched on, and according to Cohen these failures made them realize that the true power of the company lies with the millions of users of their software.

Together, the Mainline client and flagship uTorrent have a massive 80 million monthly active users, and more recently the company shifted most of its resources to the development of the clients instead of selling services and goods to the public.

This also meant that the company’s main source of income is now coming from the Ask toolbar that comes with their BitTorrent client. A rather old-fashioned and not entirely sexy revenue stream, but it pays the bills for the few dozen people at the company.

Finally, Bram Cohen talked about the direction the company is heading in the future, in particular his pet project – BitTorrent live streaming. His implementation, which will be released in a few months, should crush the competing streaming services currently out there in terms of latency and cost efficiency. It will be the ideal platform from which to stream sports events, news events, and webinars according to Cohen, and will allow individuals to stream content to millions of people without having to spend tens of thousands of dollars on bandwidth.

Check out the full interview below.

Source: BitTorrent Inventor Bram Cohen On BitTorrent’s Future

It therefore came as a big surprise to hear that Ethan Applen, director of technology and business strategy at Warner Bros., stated at NewTeeVee’s Video Rights Roundtable that P2P technology doesn’t deserve to be blamed for the fact that some people use it to download copyright infringing content.

“In terms of our own view, we think P2P gets vilified. It’s just a technology. CNN used it for Inauguration coverage. It can be used for piracy, but as a technology, I think it has a lot of advantages to it,” Applen said, adding that “P2P works really well at delivering an entire season or the entire run of a show.”

Applen’s comments are at odds with the legal strategies of the Hollywood studio, where its lawyers continue to blame the providers of technology for the activities of their users. If Warner Bros. indeed believes that P2P technology is not the villain, then they should inform their lawyers or withdraw from the court cases they are currently involved in.

Applen appeared together with Bram Cohen in the roundtable session, where worryingly some of the attendees admitted hating the BitTorrent inventor for creating his famous file transfer protocol. Aside from praising P2P for its speedy delivery of TV-shows, Applen also mentioned that it is a good marketing tool.

This is no surprise as a Warner Bros. executive previously admitted to leaking a pilot of Pushing Daisies on BitTorrent in order to “help the cause”.

Bram Cohen himself also gave several example of how ‘unauthorized sharing’ via BitTorrent may have helped content creators. He mentioned that the leak of an unfinished copy of X-Men Origins: Wolverine might have boosted interest in the film, and he noted that BitTorrent may have also helped the anime business to grow.

Despite all the positive comments on the use of BitTorrent and P2P in general by this Warner Bros. executive, we can’t help wondering why they are still pouring millions into ridiculous anti-P2P lawsuits that haven’t decreased piracy a single bit.

Source: Warner Bros. Thinks P2P Gets Unfairly Vilified

Thus far the demand for video continues to grow, and it is even expanding to live video. To keep video services from collapsing and to save bandwidth costs, it seems almost inevitable that content providers will have to look at P2P-based streaming solutions. Last year we reported that CNN had experimented with a P2P-based live stream, and the Tribler research team has already shown that it’s possible to use BitTorrent to stream live footage.

There are currently a few dozen people working on P2P-based live streaming, and they are soon to be joined by Bram Cohen, the inventor of BitTorrent. Last week he tweeted that he will beat Tribler’s solution in terms of delay. “Tribler’s live streaming benchmarks are a joke. I’m going for < 5sec delay," Bram wrote.

This comment did of course peak our interest, so we decided to get in touch with Bram Cohen to ask him what he’s up to exactly. He told us that his BitTorrent-powered live streaming implementation is still in an early stage of development, but he hopes to have a working version ready “sometime next year”.

“I think there’s a very large market for live [streaming] in general, and to date noone has proven that a p2p solution can meet the real-world requirements for being an acceptable live solution. I intend on changing that,” Bram told us.

There are still a lot of problems to solve though, before the first version becomes available to the public. Getting BitTorrent to work effectively with live streams requires several major adjustments.

“Doing live properly is a hard problem, and while I could have a working thing relatively quickly, I’m doing everything the ‘right’ way,” Bram told TorrentFreak. He further explained that everything has to be redone in order to make BitTorrent compatible with live streams, “including ditching TCP and using congestion control algorithms different from the ones we’ve made for UTP,” Bram said.

“I am fundamentally a technologist, and am simply not interested in working on something which doesn’t solve the fundamental problem it’s supposed to tackle, especially in a market where there have already been so many bad technologies which failed to succeed based on sales and marketing,” he added

In his tweet Bram Cohen focused on an extremely low latency of less than 5 seconds, so content will not have to buffer for minutes before the stream starts. According to some, such a low latency could mean that a lot of potential upload capacity would go lost. However, Bram disagrees on this, as he explained to TorrentFreak.

“Lower latency doesn’t require extra bandwidth, it just requires that everything be designed from the ground up for low latency. In terms of overhead, I’m shooting for making a swarm able to work with only 20% extra upload capacity, which is subtly different from having 20% extra overhead – because there’s noise in real networks, there needs to be some slop for when things get bad.”

“My actual extra bandwidth used will be less than 10%. This very important benchmark number is generally speaking not even mentioned for most p2p live streaming solutions, and I get the feeling that the developers don’t even know what the value is. I’m taking an approach of viewing all the important benchmarks (latency, extra bandwidth necessary, offload percentage) as central to the whole thing, and running realistic simulations constantly to get a good idea for what they are and help optimize them.”

“Oddly, most live p2p solutions don’t even make coherent claims as to what latency they can provide, and when they do it’s a delay which hardly qualifies as live. My offload of course goes over 99% on large swarms – without that it’s hardly p2p,” Bram said.

The big question is of course how BitTorrent’s inventor will try to solve this puzzle. Many researchers including the Tribler team are looking into P2P-powered live streams, and not all of them agree that the tit-for-tat algorithm based on reciprocity is suited for live streams. However, when we asked Bram whether he is looking into a new algorithm he was very clear.

“No, the low latency requirements basically preclude any competitive algorithms and I’m going with a cooperative approach. It does do a very good job of squeezing out every little bit of upload capacity all the peers have though, and doing it with the same ISP-friendly properties as UTP,” Bram said.

Quite a few ISPs are complaining bitterly about the strain BitTorrent puts on their network, so they will be delighted to hear that they are not being ignored in the development process. If done right, BitTorrent-powered live streams may accelerate the availability of live streams on the Internet.

Not only will existing broadcasters be able to stream their content at low costs, individual users will also be able to stream a live feed to tens of thousands of Internet users from their home connection without having to invest in bandwidth. More than ever the public will be in charge of distribution, while BitTorrent-powered TV moves one step closer to becoming reality.

Source: Bram Cohen To Deliver BitTorrent Live Streaming

“Maybe he’s talking trash because he invested $1.7 million in a ‘BitTorrent-like’ company. He’s been transparent about such motivations before. That said, he does has some claim to punditry in the bandwidth space because his $5 billion sale of broadcast.com for yahoo stock set the precedent for valuing bandwidth supply companies based on how quickly they flush money down the toilet. (Amusingly, if you go to broadcast.com today it simply redirects to yahoo.com.)”

Apparently Mark Cuban did not like the tone of the post. He fights back in a comment:

“I like your complexity analogies. You are right. BT has huge challenges. It works great for stealing content. Getting people to contribute bandwidth in order to get content for free. To quote Borat “Thats Nice”. But as you know yourself, you haven’t been able to make a real business out of content being bought and sold using BT. Could it be that there are users, the ones willing to pay for content, have challenges using the clients out there now?”

Cuban’s rants continue for a while, and he starts a discussing with the other commenters. Luckily, Bram was wise enough not to comment, at least up until this point. It is funny to see how personal this rant gets. In his initial post Cuban just said that BitTorrent, as a P2P protocol, has its challenges, but now he’s doubting BitTorrent Inc’s entire business model.

Here’s a great example, taken from Cuban’s comment:

“But where are they ? Not just the customers Bram. The content? I searched for Prison Break. Lots of torrents. None of them Legal. Is this what Fox had in mind when they signed up with you? They wanted people to find bootleg copies of their content? I”m a big shareholder in LionsGate. Is this what they had in mind when they signed with you ? Im sure if I call the CEO, they would say it wasn’t.”

Obviously Cuban doesn’t know that the BitTorrent store hasn’t even been launched yet, but he has a point when he says that it’s strange to see that much infringing content on bittorrent.com. It wouldn’t surprise me if BitTorrent Inc will (partially) take down the links to other BitTorrent sites when the video store goes live.

Anyway, for those of you who can’t get enough of Mr. Cuban, here is a lengthy comment he wrote in response to our “BitTorrent is Doomed” post.

Source: Bram Cohen vs. Mark Cuban, Round One

Bram Cohen: I really enjoy making products which I personally want to use, and like to empower people to do things they couldn’t do without BitTorrent’s efficiency and reliability. I also enjoy working with my team. We’ve recruited a really talented group of engineers from the P2P community and the tech industry, as well as some of the best business people in Silicon Valley. Together, we’re taking BitTorrent to new heights while still remaining true to our original goal of delivering content to the masses.

TorrentFreak: How do you see the future of BitTorrent Inc, what will its core business be?

Bram Cohen: We have two core businesses. We have a content delivery service to power websites which have downloadable and streaming objects on them, and we also have an entertainment destination at BitTorrent.com which will allow consumers to both publish and download high-quality digital content. Professional publishers have licensed over 5,000 downloadable video, music and game files, some of which will be free, and some for rent or purchase. We expect our network to be very prominent and an extension of our well-known brand.

TorrentFreak: Are there still “puzzles” that need to be solved to improve the BitTorrent protocol?

Bram Cohen: I had lunch with Vint Cerf at Google last week, and we discussed this at length. BitTorrent is a mature protocol at this point, but there are still a number of interesting things to work on. For example, improving tit for tat, making seeding optimizations for enterprise use, and trying to figure out if there’s any good use for error correcting codes. Regarding that last one, it turns out that there are, but most of the academic work has been barking up the wrong tree. We also have a great testing environment built, so we can test the impact of protocol extensions on real, live swarms, which is critical when making enhancements that benefit the BitTorrent community at large.

TorrentFreak: More and more ISPs have started to throttle BitTorrent traffic. How do you feel about this, especially related to the upcoming BitTorrent video store?

Bram Cohen: ISPs have historically thought that all P2P traffic is illegal, which most definitely is not the case today. Identifying traffic as BitTorrent versus http is a very poor proxy for determining legal versus illegal. Even more so as content creators have begun using our self-publishing service to distribute their own work and major studios have signed up because they recognize the enormous potential of BitTorrent as a sales channel.

Legal traffic is growing within the P2P ecosystem and piracy also travels with HTTP and FTP in high volumes. ISPs have to invest in making their networks better and faster rather than stifling applications which consumers use and love. That’s just bad marketing and customer service, especially given the competition which exists in the broadband industry and consumer focus on network neutrality. For instance, in Japan and Korea, consumers currently enjoy true all-you-can eat symmetric fiber-to-the-home at 100 mbps. That’s a great environment for P2P development to make the Web a truly powerful medium for on-demand media, with broadcast economics. Of course, it also leads to the question: Why is the United States two generations behind?

TorrentFreak: What would you advise BitTorrent users to do, when they find out that their ISP is throttling BitTorrent traffic?

Bram Cohen: Switch. Competition is the best thing for the consumer. If you’ve got a couple of options, try the alternatives. If you have no alternatives or both alternatives suck, call customer service. And call them a lot. It turns out that angry customers are more expensive to ISPs than providing unadulterated access to popular applications and websites.

TorrentFreak: The mainline client now supports encryption, but there are no settings to control this (correct me if I’m wrong). Does this mean that the client encrypts all transfers?

Bram Cohen: No. The mainline client accepts incoming encrypted connections, but makes unencrypted outgoing connections by default. We added support for that primarily for our users in unfriendly ISP environments. As I’ve said before, protocol encryption is at best a temporary hack around ISP rate limiting, until identification techniques are put in place which use transfer patterns rather than packet inspection to identify traffic. There are better approaches to evade traffic shaping, although we’re still trying to work productively with ISPs, who own the network after all. But if we can’t find a way to work together to provide a better experience for BitTorrent users, then the arms race will begin.

TorrentFreak: You said before that you’re not a big fan of encryption. What would you suggest as an alternative?

Bram Cohen: I say just leave things in the clear, and try to use caching technology to improve the ISP network. Or better yet, ISPs should lay more fiber and build bigger pipes.

The so-called ‘encryption’ of BitTorrent traffic isn’t really encryption, it’s obfuscation. It provides no anonymity whatsoever, and only temporarily evades traffic shaping. There are better approaches to obfuscation, and I’ve got a great team of engineers who are quite eager to fight that battle, but I’m hoping that everything can be resolved amicably without getting into a serious arms race.

TorrentFreak: What was the main reason behind the acquisition of uTorrent?

Bram Cohen: uTorrent has both an impressively clean codebase and large user community, although we were already working on our own C++ implementation. Moving forward, you’ll see announcements related to BitTorrent being embedded on silicon and on non-PC hardware thanks to the new C codebase we have (based on uTorrent and our protocol extensions).

TorrentFreak: Are their plans to remove any of the present features uTorrent has?

Bram Cohen: No, uTorrent users are quite happy with it, and we wish to keep things that way. In fact, be on the lookout for a Mac and Unix port, which we have the resources to do thanks to the size of our engineering team.

TorrentFreak: What will happen to the mainline client in the future?

Bram Cohen: Our mainline extensions and uTorrent’s will converge. However, we are still committed to offering an open source BitTorrent reference implementation.

TorrentFreak: Will the uTorrent client be integrated into the BitTorrent Video Store?

Bram Cohen: We’re going to launch our entertainment network with support for whichever BitTorrent client the user wishes to install.

TorrentFreak: Can you give us any details on the pricing of the products in the BitTorrent Video Store, and the quality of the video files?

Bram Cohen: We haven’t announced any firm pricing yet. The video quality will be the best possible with the available codecs. In addition to being a “store,” our site will be a destination for publishing and discovering digital entertainment, and will have plenty of free files in addition to the pay ones.

TorrentFreak: You said before that some of the content from the video store will be “protected” by Windows DRM. What is your personal view on DRM, do you see other, more user friendly alternatives?

Bram Cohen: Right now most of our content partners are insisting on DRM for the content we’re making available. It’s causing an awful lot of headaches, but we’re trying to minimize the impact on user experience and support.

TorrentFreak: Over the past year we’ve heard quite a lot of rumors about the arrangement between BitTorrent and the MPAA. Can you tell a little more about the nature of this agreement?

Bram Cohen: We support keeping copyright infringing material off of our site, and have deals with most of the MPAA member companies to make their content available through our entertainment network. The MPAA is actually a lot less of a hive mind than many people think. We’ve had to negotiate individually with each member company regarding business deals. We don’t currently have any investment from any of them.

TorrentFreak: Several other BitTorrent sites like mininova.org and torrentspy.com have the exact same policy, and remove infringing material whenever they are asked to. Though, they are often seen as the bad guys. The MPAA even sued torrentspy and isohunt, and refuses to start a dialogue, while they index the same torrents and bittorrent.com does. What’s your opinion about this?

Bram Cohen: It’s easy to make the mistake that thinking the exact letter of the law is all that matters in such situations. I have no legal opinion of what mininova and torrentspy are doing, since I’m not familiar with the exact details. But being antagonistic will result in predictable outcomes, regardless of how well defended one thinks one is legally.

TorrentFreak: Due to the arrangement with the MPAA most people might think that most of the content they search for on bittorrent.com is legal. However bittorrent.com does index a lot of copyrighted work. Don’t you think this might confuse some of the users of the site?

Bram Cohen: We’re cooperating to get copyrighted work out of our search index, and when our new site launches, much more emphasis will be placed on the self-published and licensed content within our own index, instead of the general Web search.

TorrentFreak: In March the MPAA urged the Swedish government to take down the site because it is linking to infringing material. bittorrent.com indexes the torrents from thepiratebay.org , a site that is often referred to as “Pirate Heaven”. Has the MPAA ever asked BitTorrent Inc to stop indexing The Pirate Bay?

Bram Cohen: The focus of takedown notices has primarily been on particular pieces of content, not so much where they came from.

TorrentFreak: Is there a future for BitTorrent in the development of streaming online content. For example, would it be possible for video streaming sites like YouTube to use (a modified version of) BitTorrent?

Bram Cohen: Yes, we’ve developed a streaming version of BitTorrent. Stay tuned for more details around the middle of this year.

TorrentFreak: BitTorrent is slowly starting to replace the video recorder, especially among younger people. Popular episodes of TV shows like LOST are downloaded (illegally) more than 500,000 times in just one week over BitTorrent. These figures clearly show the potential that BitTorrent has, and it’s an indication that TV as we know it is about to change. Do you think BitTorrent Inc can play a role in the future of TV? And what kind of product or business model do you think could compete with these pirated shows?

Bram Cohen: Our new site will launch with thousands of movies and TV shows, so yes, we clearly have a role in the future of video. As far as competing with the piracy experience, the better consumer experience we provide, the less people will feel the need to rely on piracy. To do that, we’ll be providing an extensive and valuable catalog of content at a good price. In the future, we’ll expand into free, ad-supported content as an integral part of our site. We’re also going to give independent publishers a platform to distribute, promote, and ultimately sell their own content as part of that experience.

TorrentFreak: If you look back at the past 5 years, what is the thing you’re most proud of?

Bram Cohen: Looking back at the past 5 years, I can still say that I’m proud of getting BitTorrent to work in the first place. When I first started working on it, nobody knew whether it was possible to overcome all the logistical problems of handling a flash crowd. It was challenging, but not only did I get it to work at all, but got it to work extremely efficiently. More recently, I’m proud of being part of the team that has worked hard to convince content publishers and enterprise businesses that unlike other p2p architectures, BitTorrent is a legitimate and incredibly powerful tool for content delivery.

TorrentFreak: Thanks for taking the time to answer these questions!

Source: Interview with Bram Cohen, the inventor of BitTorrent

Windows DRM has been completely left behind in the portable media player market. The iPod can’t play content restricted (read: infected) by Microsoft’s little virus, and neither can Microsoft’s very own Zune! So, the only consumers who’ll be able to watch videos they have purchased from the BitTorrent Video Store away from their computers will be those who own Creative, Dell, Archos or any one of the other compatible devices. This is, assuming the content from the store will be protected with Janus, Microsoft’s Windows DRM for portable devices. If it isn’t, it won’t play on any portable device at all.

In September of this year Ashwin Navin, the co-founder of BitTorrent Inc said that his company foresees a future without DRM. Although, even then, the company had said that they would use DRM, Navin also made it clear that it would only be in the early stages. Let’s hope the POA hasn’t changed.

Navin made his standpoint on DRM quite clear when he said that “the bottom line is that DRM is bad for the content provider and it’s bad for the consumer.” About foreseeing a future without DRM, he said that he thinks “the future will not be marked by digital rights management. It will be marked by advertising-supported content that’s clear of DRM.” The inventor of BitTorrent, Bram Cohen too says that the company is “very concerned about the usability problems DRM introduces,” and that they are “educating [their] content partners about the lost commercial opportunity.”

To be fair, BitTorrent Inc is only walking down the path of limiting consumers’ rights because it is being forced to. The company is clearly against DRM. According to Cohen, it is the only way they have been able to strike deals with content creators. He says this is “at the insistence of [their] content partners.”

Source: BitTorrent Video Store to be Infected with Windows DRM

“This financing is a clear testament to the strength of our technology and potential growth, and I look forward to spearheading the continued development of BitTorrent,” said Bram Cohen in response to the announcement.

It hasn’t been an easy ride for the company, but it looks like things may finally be falling in place. BitTorrent Inc has had a great a business model for a while, it’s the support of major media companies that was lacking. The deals signed earlier this week and the following investment of venture capital is bound to bring it success.

“To have the support from Accel Partners and initial investor DCM is fuel for our continued leadership as the preeminent mechanism for efficient content delivery on the Web. Both firms are top-tier venture investors and bring a wealth of expertise and relationships to support our dominant position in the marketplace,” said Ashwin Navin, President and Co-founder of BitTorrent.

Source: BitTorrent Inc receives $20 Million in Funding

“With the feeders soon seeding bleeders, you’ll find yourself flooded with needers needing bleeders finding feeders in the seed.

When your feeder seeds the seed, you need the needer needing needs on the feeds you can bleed while bleeding feeders what they call stackers. Now, stackers sit and sack the seed while bleeders knead the needers and the hackers pack the stackers in the needy feeder feeds. Slackers take the sacking stackers in the feeder bleeding seeds.

Then the tracker stacks the hacker needing feeder feeding feeds, while the bleeder seeds the seeds and the stacker tricks the tracker into bleeding needlessly. While the tracker stacks the stacker in the feeding bleeder deed, you can sick the needy knocker in the bleeder seeding feed.”

Revolutionary development! We definitely going to hear more about this one.

source

Source: Bitchtorrent: Bram Cohen Invents New Protocol

The San Francisco Chronicle, from BitTorrent’s hometown San Francisco wrote a great piece on Bram Cohen, the founder of BitTorrent.

The SFC asked Bram about a bubble in the “video download business”, and he breaks down the issue piece by piece, just as he would with any puzzle.

“Inevitably, most of these companies are going to tank,” he said. “There just isn’t that much room in the space”.

But the question really is: Is investment in these companies rational? Because the potential payoff due to the inevitable size of the whole industry is huge. So how much video will people be downloading online in the future?

“Well, so let’s say we take all of cable TV and deliver it over (the Internet), which inevitably is going to happen. Then that looks like an awful lot of money. So that’s why the potential is enormous. I don’t really see a bubble going on at all.”

there’s more over here.

Source: The Puzzling Bram Cohen

Bram talks about BitTorrent’s deal with the MPAA and Warner Bros. And about the past and the future of his amazing filesharing protocol. No breaking news, but it’s a good podcast.

link

Source: Bram Cohen on the Web2.0 Show

Currently, “regular” BitTorrent is traffic is suffering from throttling ISP’s that claim that BitTorrent traffic is cluttering their pipes. However, this new and improved version is promising the opposite, downloads will be accelerated instead of throttled. However, only for commercially licensed content.

But how does this affect the widely debated “network neutrality”?

BBC’s Newsnight asked Bram Cohen, the founder of BitTorrent about this.

“I most definitely do not want the internet to become like television where there’s actual censorship… however it is very difficult to actually create network neutrality laws which don’t result in an absurdity like making it so that ISPs can’t drop spam or stop… (hacker) attacks. ”

Does the Cachelogic proposal violate network neutrality? “Depending on how you define net neutrality that violates some definitions of it,” says Cohen.

And would he feel comfortable if a media company using BitTorrent did start seeking network priority for its data?

“It depends really on the nature of the whole thing… I’m against net censorship. However when you’re talking about large file transfers going to very large numbers of people there frequently are significant costs involved… (the media companies) are frequently bearing a lot of costs already today. They make some stuff available and pay for bandwidth on it so it’s just a question of the download costs as well as the upload costs.”

hmmm…

read on

Source: Cached Torrents and Network Neutrality

p2pnet: Hi, Bram. I know you must be up to your ears in alligators and I really appreciate you taking the time out to answer these questions, particularly since I realise some of them are a little on the thorny side.

p2pnet: Did you ever think BitTorrent would take off in quite the way it has?

Cohen: I’ve run out of answers to give to that question. Yes? No? Maybe?

p2pnet: When was the very first time you actually saw what was to become BitTorrent as a workable application?

Cohen: It first had the current user interface in early 2002. It first transferred files with the current protocol format and not for testing in late 2002.

p2pnet: If you could travel back in time, is there anything you’d change about the BT technology?

Cohen: A few little things, for example some protocol extensions which we’re about to unveil which are the way things should really have been done to begin with, but in terms of what the pieces are and how they interact, I think I did it right.

p2pnet: How does it feel to realize that not perhaps, but definitely, your children will read about you in the history books as someone whose invention quite literally changed the face of the Net and world comunications?

Cohen: My children seem happy with me just as daddy.

p2pnet: What achievement, or achievements, are you most proud of?

Cohen: I’d say getting BitTorrent to be such a compelling tool that publishers started using it, despite massive political pressure not to. The Linux distro torrents were quite amusing until the Linux distros got sick of being humiliated and started doing them themselves.

p2pnet: What kind of computer equipment do you use?

Cohen: Currently, an IBM laptop running Ubuntu. It’s okay, but playing video files is quite busted.

p2pnet: What’s you favourite piece of software?

Cohen: That’s rather like asking what one’s favorite type of weld is. People use software to get stuff done, not for the sake of playing with software. The exception is games, but I haven’t had much time for game playing lately.

p2pnet: What’s your personal favourite piece of code?

Cohen: You mean of my own? I generally want to rewrite everything after it’s been around for a while, so it’s hard for me to get too excited about any one thing. The merge code I wrote recently is rather nice though, since it’s simple enough that people can experiment with it and try out variations, while historically merging has been so difficult that it’s almost unapproachable.

p2pnet: You use Ubuntu. So what do you like about it?

Cohen: Uh … it’s less likely to get hacked than windows?

p2pnet: Would you recommend Ubuntu to anyone (or everyone : ) ?

Cohen: Not until it plays all video properly out of the box and has a good working UI for selecting wireless networks. Both of those work poorly on windows too though.

p2pnet: If not, what would you recommend?

Cohen: Flint tools rarely have such problems.

p2pnet: What kind of music do you listen to, and where do you get it?

Cohen: I haven’t had much time for music lately. In my early 20′s I bought close to 1000 CDs, which are quite eclectic in style, but I did used to listen to a lot of industrial music.

p2pnet: What’s your favourite, and least favourite, movie?

Cohen: Someone asked me what my favorite movie was a few years ago, and I said Blade Runner, and she said Everybody says Blade Runner, and asked for a different movie, so I guess the right answer is Amadeus. As for least favorite, that’s hard to say, so many things are unwatchably bad.

p2pnet: What was the very first computer you ever had and where did it come from? And what did you use it for?

Cohen: A Timex Sinclair in 1980. I used to write little programs in basic to make it crash, for example by poking into random parts of memory or doing an infinite recursion.

p2pnet: How old were you?

Cohen: Five.

p2pnet: Can you remember the first program you ever wrote? And how old were you then as well?

Cohen: The first substantive program I even wrote was when I was 12, and it played connect 4, written in Promal on my Commodore 64. I wrote a simple board evaluation algorithm and alpha-beta pruning. It could stomp me quite thoroughly.

p2pnet: Putting BT to one side, which do you think is the most significant commercial p2p application out there at the moment?

Cohen: In terms of a commercial entity publishing their own content, there isn’t a significant competitor to BitTorrent protocol, nor is there a need for one. That problem has been solved.

Ap2pnet: And on the indie p2p side, what impresses you the most?

Cohen: There’s been some interesting work on DHTs.

p2pnet: What would you think about replacing BitTorrent trackers with virtual trackers in a DHT network?

Cohen: A tracker is both more reliable and lets you get statistics about distribution. The reasons to not use one are for (massive) scaling and reliability, which are rarely ever a problem. We do have a DHT protocol though, and it works quite well.

p2pnet: You’re the co-founder of CodeCon. Are you still involved?

Cohen: Yes, I still run the program committee and emcee parts of it.

p2pnet: If you could get the people who run BearShare, Blubster, eDonkey, LimeWire, Morpheus and Warez (in alphabetical order ; ) around a table, what would you say to them with respect to their ongoing troubles with the major labels and movies studios?

Cohen: Uh, stop running warez networks?

p2pnet: And if you could do the same with the Big Four record labels, Warner Music, EMI, Vivendi Universal and Sony BMG, and the Big Six studios, Time Warner, Viacom, Fox, Sony, NBC Universal and Disney, what would you say to them with respect to their apparent impasse with the p2p application developers?

Cohen: We’re already talking to all of those entities, and they’re being quite reasonable.

p2pnet: Do you think the current corporate wholesale pricing structure of, so I’m told, 60 to 85 cents for each digital file is reasonable?

Cohen: There are a lot of things which can be a ‘digital file’. We’re going to see considerable evolution of pricing models over time.

p2pnet: As a father, what do you think of the RIAA’s practice of naming children in p2p file sharing subpoenas?

Cohen: I’m not sure what you’re referring to, and of course am not involved in suing anybody.

p2pnet: Do you think people who share copyrighted files are criminals and thieves, as the RIAA and MPAA say they are?

Cohen: It certainly is illegal.

p2pnet: You’ve been very quiet about your brother’s departure from your company? Are you able to say what happened to make him leave?

Cohen: No.

p2pnet: Ashwin Navin is BitTorrent president. How, where and when, did you meet him?

Cohen: We had a friend in common, and met in 2004.

p2pnet: Whose idea was it for BitTorrent to move into the corporate world?

Cohen: I’d wanted to set up a commercial venture for a while.

p2pnet: Before you actually became involved with the entertainment industry, were you ever seriously threatened with court action?

Cohen: Nope.

p2pnet: Did you start the dialogue with the MPAA?

Cohen: They called me first.

p2pnet: If you were approached by the association rather than the other way around, who initially contacted you?

Cohen: Dean Garfield.

p2pnet: How much time have you actually spent with Dan Glickman?

Cohen: I’ve met him in person several times.

p2pnet: Do you and he still talk to each other?

Cohen: I don’t personally talk to him regularly, but people from BitTorrent talk to people from the MPAA on a routine basis.

p2pnet: What kind of discussions are you currently having with the RIAA?

Cohen: Take down processes and future online sales.

p2pnet: Do you believe a time will eventually come when a genuine accord will be reached between the major movie and music companies and their customers?

Cohen: Not sure what you mean. They’re quite happy with their paying customers.

p2pnet: What would you say to someone who’s contemplating launching a music/movie download site?

Cohen: Get licenses.

p2pnet: What would you say will be the three most significant developments for p2p between now and 2010?

Cohen: It’s hard to say what will happen in networking generally, but clearly everything will be dominated by bandwidth price plummeting and throughput going through the roof.

p2pnet: Do you have any new, personal projects in mind, and if you do, what are they?

Cohen: I’ve been working on a new generation of Codeville’s merge algorithms lately, and they’re going to be available for several other version control systems.

p2pnet: What does the future hold for BitTorrent?

Cohen: We’ve got our Allegro release of the client with tons of performance enhancements you can’t find anywhere else coming out, and are going to start making video available on the web site.

p2pnet: Finally, I’ve asked a lot of questions, but I’d also really appreciate it if you’d use this to express any thoughts or comment on topics which haven’t been covered here.

Cohen: We’re expanding BitTorrent.org to be a common meeting ground for all client developers, so there’s a coherent place where discussions of protocol development take place. A bunch of new documentation is going up there soon, and we’re getting other client developers involved.

p2pnet: Cheers! And thanks. And all the best …

P2Pnet

Source: Bram Cohen Interview

BitTorrent inc. did change their search engine. They even improved the look and feel by covering it in a web2.0 sauce. But they are still not filtering out the pirated flicks. And that’s strange because in November Bram Cohen (BitTorrent founder) said:

“BitTorrent, Inc. discourages the use of its technology for distributing films without a license to do so. As such, we are pleased to work with the film industry to remove unauthorized content from BitTorrent.com’s search engine.”

The press release continued:

Cohen confirmed BitTorrent, Inc.’s commitment to removing links that direct users to copies of pirated content owned by MPAA companies from its search engine at BitTorrent.com. The announcement today is historic in that two major forces in the technology and film industries have agreed to work together and proactively identify ways to l and to promote constructive innovation in this area.

Bram Cohen (BitTorrent) and Dan Glickman (MPAA)

The MPAA was happy and said:

“We are glad that Bram Cohen and his company are working with us to limit access to infringing files on the BitTorrent.com website,” said Glickman. “They are leading the way for other companies by their example.”

However, it seems that nothing is removed from BitTorrent.com at all, or they do a very, very poor job. If you search for Universals latest blockbuster “inside man” the CAM rips will pop up. And if you try other piracy sensitive terms like “dvdrip“, and “dvdscr” you will see that there’s a lot of pirated content available. In fact, I believe that more that 90% of the users of BitTorrent.com uses it to search for pirated content.

So what’s going on here? Is BitTorrent just messing around with the MPAA? Why is the MPAA going after other torrent search engines and not after BitTorrent.com?

update April 5: in a follow-up on this post BitTorrent spokeswoman Lily Lin told TorrentFreak

To slyck she stated

“Any copyright holder that believes our search engine links to an unlicensed version of their work can notify us. “We have a procedure in place which complies with the DMCA, and we follow that to the letter. Since the launch of our search engine, we have responded to every single take-down request sent to us.”

So they are not “working with the MPAA to limit access to infringing files on the BitTorrent.com”, like the press release stated. It is in fact the exact same procedure as other torrent search engines like Isohunt and Torrentspy have. So it sounds like a double standard to sue torrentspy and Isohunt, but leave BitTorrent.com unharmed.

Source: Is BitTorrent Inc. messing with the MPAA?

Encrypting protocol headers is needed to fight ISP’s that are using bit-shaping applications to throttle the traffic that is generated by BitTorrent.

It should only ne a matter of time before other clients are going to implement this “new standard”. It is doubtful if the official clients is going to support it since Bram Cohen was not really enthusiast about these developments.

Links: Azureus, Bitcomet, uTorrent

Source: Bitcomet follows Azureus and uTorrent

What I heard was that there was some nudging by brother and Bit Torrent founder, Bram Cohen.

I popped an email to the company’s director of communications, Lily Lin, and she replied. “Yes, Ross is not at BitTorrent anymore. The position was no longer a good fit.” Well, when you take $8.75 million in VC funding it means you get some careful monitoring … right.

link

Source: Cohen vs. Cohen at BitTorrent?

If you want to suggest any questions for Bram (Python related), you can add them to their Wiki.

Source: Ask Bram Cohen a Question

BitTorrent co-founder and President Ashwin Navin states:

“We want to aggregate video and other content and make it available in a legal and sanctioned area”