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By Steven Levy
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Bram Cohen estimates that a third of all Internet bandwidth these days is tied up in his file-distribution program called BitTorrent. If that's right, the program that the 30-year-old New York native (now living in the Bay Area) wrote in 2001 is now responsible for one in three bits moving on the Net. BitTorrent, which cleverly exploits peer-to-peer technology to move big files speedily (especially media like music and video), is both a scary reality (piracy!) and enticing possibility (efficiency!) for Hollywood. Forty-five million people have used it, many for illegal copying. But for whatever reason, Cohen has so far been spared the fate of Napster and Grokster, and has yet to be sued by record labels or movie studios. In fact, he recently flew down to L.A. to take a meeting with top movie-industry lobbyist Dan Glickman. And investors see a future in BitTorrent: Cohen's company recently received $8.75 million in venture capital. Though no one knows what's in store for BitTorrent, the program and its creator are definitely in for a wild ride. Cohen shared his thoughts about it via his cell phone in California.
COHEN: It was fairly technically motivated. There was this core problem in file distribution--there's plenty of upload capacity out there, how do we utilize it?
No. I've made a very-general-purpose tool that can be used for anything. Napster was designed like a covert application for copyright infringement. BitTorrent is for publishing things which you own.
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If there's widespread copyright infringement, you really want to go after the ringleader. And we're not being the ringleader for that. The Web types that are doing piracy are the ringleaders for that.
Well, it's hardly surprising. Copyright infringement is illegal. I make a tool. It's a very powerful and general-purpose tool, but it is a lot like a car. Its primary function is a very, very utilitarian one. Cars kill people, you know, a lot more than guns do, but we still love our cars.
He seems really interested in what to do next. Everyone knows that things are changing, and I believe he's very interested in adapting. I was really surprised at how if you go to them nonconfrontationally they respond in kind.
We're setting up a marketplace for selling content online, and it's going to be both pay-per-download and advertising space. We're aiming to have some amount of content that you can't get elsewhere, but we're aiming to be fairly all-inclusive in terms of if you want to get content online, you can just go to our Web site and get it.
It makes you less emotional when you're coding. It's like you don't take it personally when the computer doesn't work well. I'm still relatively new to the CEO thing, so ask me that question in a couple years.
That people with Asperger's are immoral, which isn't true at all. People with Asperger's frequently don't understand what's going on, and don't know how to express what they're thinking, but that's very different from not wanting to do the right thing.
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