Ask Bram Cohen about BitTorrent

It's a clever P2P 'information broadcasting' concept, as the simple diagram on the BitTorrent home page shows. It's gotten a fair amount of notice, especially here on Slashdot. And reader Ignorant Aardvark wrote to us about BitTorrent sites disappearing, possibly because of RIAA/MPAA intervention, so this technology is now generating some controversy as well. The person behind BitTorrent is Bram Cohen, and he's agreed to answer 10 of the highest-moderated questions about BitTorrent you post here. So ask away (after reading the project FAQ and other info about BitTorrent and Bram, of course). We'll run Bram's answers as soon as he emails them back to us.

Comments

Are you a target?

[dood]

Bram,

Do you feel you might be a target of litigation or any sort of legal action because you're the "point" person for this project? Stories like these prompted my question:
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=03/0 5/27/133822 3&mode=thread&tid=188&tid=97

It looks like the media companies are looking for someone to "drag over the coals." :)

Re:torrentse.cx

[Strepsil]

Being linked to from Slashdot every couple of days didn't exactly help with bandwidth costs.

Re:Searching for torrents

[cruppel]

Maybe you should rethink your stance.

Maybe you should learn how to disagree without attacking someone, but since you sound like such a charming individual let me explain what I mean so you'll understand. If the capability to search was added, there would be a guaranteed hoard of people taking advantage of the software. Right now BitTorrent is a rather small enterprise compared to other networks like Kazaa, and its usefulness as a large file transfer mechanism is sustained by the way that people are using it. Instead of letting everyone use this service for whatever they please why not maintain it as a tool people use for transfer instead of a mass search engine? There are a few benefits...

1. Separation of usage and blame. When the program is not helping a user find what he wants, and only to download it, that hardly puts the developers in a position to be held responsible for what is traded.
2. Less needless traffic. It seems that this system was developed to help people download large files, and most of what would be downloaded would most likely be mp3s. People would use BitTorrent because it's less congested than other P2P networks, then boom, it isn't. Yeah yeah, the more users, the larger the web, but it wouldn't grow larger than the amount of traffic.
3. As was mentioned somewhere in these comments, BitTorrent resembles FTP more than anything else. As soon as Bram gets back to us on his real intents for his software we'll know if that's his aim or not, but judging by it's progress so far...

I hardly consider careful discretion a restriction of rights.

Bandwidth minimisation?

[WolfWithoutAClause]

Currently P2P networks generally form almost entirely at random- you're as likely to connect to a server on the other side of the world as you are to connect to a server 5 feet away that has the same file. This means you use up bandwidth on all the links on all the machines inbetween. Clearly you can reduce the total amount of bandwidth used, and often latency and throughput, if you (mostly) go to local servers. Are you planning to include any strategies to help minimise this in Bittorrent?