The FBI doesn't like it. The Department of Homeland Security in the US is so concerned that it has closed down Web sites related to it. The Moving Picture Association of America (MPAA) is waging a war against it. And every day millions of people around the world use it to share music, TV programs and movies.
The "it" is BitTorrent -- a computer program that's the brainchild of the softly-spoken Bram Cohen. It is a super-smart way to share huge files over the Internet, and one which, depending on whose side of the argument you listen to, is either an evil tool for those involved with copyright theft, or a work of genius set to transform the media industry as we know it.
Recent research has shown that last year BitTorrent was responsible for one third of all traffic on the Internet. That's one third. And this despite a wave of legal activity against the peer-to- peer technology (P2P) that un-derpins Cohen's brainchild.
In essence, BitTorrent is just the latest in a line of programs that started with Napster and allows individuals to swap information with each other over the internet. An Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development report on digital music released this week revealed that at any one time there are as many as 10 million people exchanging files using all forms of P2P. Business Week has estimated that the total number of users could be as high as 100 million.
BitTorrent has become more popular than its competition because it is much more efficient. Systems such as Napster and Kazaa often used to grind to a halt because the files that were being shared sat on one computer and could only be downloaded as quickly as the lines going in and out of that computer would allow.
Cohen's idea was to break the files up into bits. Once someone downloaded a bit, they also became a source for that bit. As a result, more people downloading a file meant there were also more people uploading it, which meant it actually became faster rather than slower.
Originally intended for software developers to move their work around the net, it wasn't long before BitTorrent became popular with music and video fans. This shouldn't have come as much of a surprise: Instead of people simply swapping songs of around 3-4 megabytes, using BitTorrent they could swap whole movies of about 500 times bigger (1.5 gigabytes).
And swap they do. Anything and everything digital is shared. Legal and illegal. People gather on sites where they can download files or "torrents," which they then run on their own computer using special software. If you have a broadband connection and can set it all up (and you need to be reasonably technically competent to do so), you can download an album in an hour, an hour's worth of TV in a couple of hours; and a movie overnight.
Needless to say, the advent of torrent sharing is not making the movie industry happy -- and, like the recording industry before it, the response is lawsuit-shaped.
The Motion Picture Association of America -- the organization that has been most vehemently against the growth of BitTorrent -- has, until now, focused its attention not on BitTorrent itself, but on sites that allow the downloading of torrents. One such site was EliteTorrents.org. It was here that around 100 movies and the final instalment of Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith, appeared -- six hours before it was due to open in US cinemas. On May 28, officers from the FBI swooped on a number of homes and offices across the US in what was called operation D-Elite. Within hours, the site was no more.
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