BitTorrent at 25: piracy boom, legal resilience and a hard business lesson
Bram Cohen’s file-sharing system became a piracy engine Hollywood struggled to stop, while the company behind it fought to turn usage into revenue.
By Hana Yoshida · Markets Reporter
3 min read
BitTorrent turned 25 as one of the most consequential file-sharing technologies of the internet era. The Verge reported that Bram Cohen introduced the app on July 2, 2001, setting off a wave of peer-to-peer distribution that reshaped online piracy and strained the entertainment industry’s enforcement playbook.
Cohen, then a little-known programmer, had worked at Mojo Nation, a startup that tried to combine file sharing, distributed computing and micropayments before shutting down in 2002, according to The Verge. After leaving, he focused on a narrower idea: breaking large files into many pieces and letting groups of users exchange those pieces with one another.
That design, known as swarming distribution, made BitTorrent efficient for moving large files. It also required users to upload while they downloaded, tying participation to the system’s speed and capacity.
The technology arrived as music and movie companies were attacking earlier file-sharing services in court. The Verge noted that Napster, Kazaa, Grokster, Audiogalaxy, LimeWire and eDonkey all faced legal pressure or shutdowns because they helped users search for copyrighted material and connect with others trading it.
BitTorrent’s structure made it harder to target. Cohen’s app did not include a built-in search tool, and it relied on outside torrent sites and tracker servers to help users find files and one another, The Verge reported. Cohen told The Verge that this was driven less by legal strategy than by the limits of building the software largely alone.
Early lawful communities used BitTorrent to share large files, including Etree, a hub for jam-band concert recordings. The Verge reported that piracy soon drove much broader adoption, especially through anime sharing and later through large torrent indexes such as Suprnova.org and The Pirate Bay.
As traffic grew, outside developers became central to the system. Dirk Engling, a German hacker also known as Erdgeist, built Opentracker after an early tracker server struggled under heavy demand, The Verge reported. He released the software freely, and major torrent sites, including The Pirate Bay, adopted it.
The entertainment industry shut down some services and pursued operators of torrent sites, but BitTorrent’s distributed design limited the impact of individual raids. Swedish authorities raided The Pirate Bay in 2006, according to The Verge, but the site returned within days. Its co-founders were later convicted in 2009 and sentenced to one year in prison and financial damages, while the site remained online under operators whose identities The Verge said are still unknown.
Cohen tried to turn BitTorrent into a company in 2004. The Verge reported that BitTorrent Inc. raised $8.75 million in 2005 and $20 million in 2006, then launched a Hollywood-backed download store in 2007 with titles from Warner Bros., Paramount and MGM.
The effort failed quickly. A former senior BitTorrent employee told The Verge that customers had little reason to buy protected movie downloads when unauthorized versions were already available, while contract guarantees left the company paying studios for content that did not sell. The store closed within two years, and the company laid off half its staff during a recapitalization.
BitTorrent later tried other businesses, including peer-to-peer content delivery, chat and low-latency livestreaming, The Verge reported. Advertising and bundled installer offers brought in money, but not the kind of return venture investors wanted, according to the former employee.
Justin Sun, the crypto entrepreneur behind Tron, bought BitTorrent Inc. in 2018, according to The Verge. The company later shut its San Francisco office and is now run from overseas, The Verge reported.
BitTorrent no longer dominates internet traffic as it once did. The Verge cited earlier estimates that BitTorrent represented roughly one-third of all internet traffic in 2004, while a more recent estimate said it now contributes less residential upstream traffic than iCloud and FaceTime. The company says its clients still have 54 million monthly users.
This story draws on original reporting from The Verge.