Sunday, March 18, 2007

A Short History of (Bit)Torrent

These articles kind of tell the torrent story.

The birth of Bittorent (2004) ... Bram lives off the hundreds of dollars that grateful Bittorrent users send him each day.

Bram starts to make peace with Hollywood (2006) ...he's threatened with lawsuits so he makes nice with the movie makers..

Bram is hired by Hollywood (2007) ... he takes Hollywood's money. Actually he's positioning himself nicely for the future.

The suits in Hollywood don't understand the difference between Bittorrent the brand owned by Bram Cohen, and Bittorent the torrent protocol that many other software developers use to create file sharing clients. They think that by threatening and eventually co-opting Bram and Bittorrent they would put an end to torrents.