Perhaps more than any other software, BitTorrent has enabled users to turn the Internet into a vast entertainment network, where the latest films, music and television series can be quickly downloaded free. The program has been downloaded an estimated 30 million times and is now so popular that, by some estimates, it hogs a third of all traffic on the Internet. As anticipated, the motion picture and recording industries are now attempting to vilify the technology and many of its users. Will BitTorrent go the way of Napster?
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Bittorrent's incredible effectiveness at distributing content means that it has far more substantial noninfringing use than almost any previous P2P technology. It's now commonplace to see legal content distributed via BT in order to reduce bandwidth costs for content producers. Every day I see independent films distributed on BT by their producers, films that we wouldn't be seeing if their creators had to pay for the bandwidth to host them. A BT swarm can also provide incredibly high download speeds to a staggering number of peers simultaneously, speeds that would simply be impossible to obtain from a single source. P2P content distribution systems like BT are the future of the Internet; by leveraging the aggregate bandwidth of many peers, they eliminate the need for expensive, well-connected servers that are also single points of failure.
--Alereon, infidel@gmail.com
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