The BitTorrent Effect

Wired has an excellent interview with Bram Cohen, the creator of BitTorrent. At five pages, it's a good read.

BitTorrent is freeware, but asks for a donation after you've used it a while. Apparently, he gets enough donations via PayPal to support his family. He completely understands that BitTorrent has both legal and illegal uses, but he stays out of the reach of lawyers - not by fleeing to another country, but by not downloading a single piece of copyrighted material himself.

He is no more guilty than Xerox is for making the photocopier.

I think the MPAA and the RIAA and TV networks and whoever else will have a hard time really shutting down this P2P or whatever P2P technology comes next, especially given that most of these sites reside outside of US legal jurisdiction. As stated in the article, a cease and desist letter addressed to Sweden is meaningless.

What the companies need to do is figure out how to make the content appealing enough, affordable enough, and accessible enough for these same consumers to obtain it via legal means. iTunes is a great example of this. But I really like that Bram pointed out that all of these "problems" and legal battles are over the distribution method for this content. And the distribution problem will be a short-lived one. While it used to take an hour to download a megabyte over the phone line, you can now swap DVD quality movies that are over a gigabyte in less time.

It's the content explosion. iPods hold your entire music collection (tens of thousands of songs) in the palm of your hand. I carry a half gigabyte of miscellaneous stuff on my keychain. Data is data and it's going to get pushed around the Net. Not much use in trying to stop it. Posted by Chris on 1/13/2005 08:57:00 PM :: Permalink   
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