More On Bittorrent
“In November 2002, an unemployed programmer named Bram Cohen decided there had to be a better way, so he spent a few weeks writing an improved version of the protocols used to create peer-to-peer networks, and came up with BitTorrent. BitTorrent is a radical advance over the peer-to-peer systems which preceded it. Cohen realized that popularity is a good thing, and designed BitTorrent to take advantage of it. When a file (movie, music, computer program, it’s all just bits) is published on BitTorrent, everyone who wants the file is required to share what they have with everyone else. As you’re downloading the file, those parts you’ve already downloaded are available to other people looking to download the file. This means that you’re not just “leeching” the file, taking without giving back; you’re also sharing the file with anyone else who wants it. As more people download the file, they offer up what they’ve downloaded, and so on. As this process rolls on, there are always more and more computers to download the file from. If a file gets very popular, you might be getting bits of it from hundreds of different computers, all over the Internet - simultaneously. This is a very important point, because it means that as BitTorrent files grow in popularity, they become progressively faster to download. Popularity isn’t a scourge in BitTorrent - it’s a blessing. …
…Hey, Hollywood! Can you feel the future slipping through your fingers? Do you understand how badly you’ve screwed up? You took a perfectly serviceable situation - a nice, centralized system for the distribution of media, and, through your own greed and shortsightedness, are giving birth to a system of digital distribution that you’ll never, ever be able to defeat. In your avarice and arrogance you ignored the obvious: you should have cut a deal with SuprNova.org. In partnership you could have found a way to manage the disruptive change that’s already well underway. Instead, you have repeated the mistakes made by the recording industry, chapter and verse. And thus you have spelled your own doom.”