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\title{United Article on Bittorrent\footnote{This article was
commissioned by Mute Magazine. It was published in the the M27 printed
edition. Visit Mute online at \tt{http://www.metamute.com/}.}}

\author{Benjamin Mako Hill}

\date{September 26, 2003}

\maketitle

As celebrants continue to laud the web as a medium where everyone can
be a publisher, the fine print reads something like: ``unless you've
got money, you'd better hope you don't get popular.''  Hosting
companies charge by the megabyte and, in the case of many
non-commercial video and audio distributors, this often boils down to
a choice between handouts, debt, or silence. Peer to peer (P2P)
technology has succeeded by sidestepping the traditional server-client
paradigm altogether. However, the emphasis in most major P2P systems
to date has been on aggregating smaller media collections into massive
distributed libraries. These systems are simply not optimized for
those who need to get a single chunk of data to thousands quickly and
cheaply.

BitTorrent is a P2P protocol that, while more than two years old, has
been gaining steady visibility in the P2P world and filling this
niche. From an interface perspective, downloading a file with
BitTorrent is similar to downloading the same file over the web or
through FTP. However, rather than pulling the file directly from a
server, BT connects users to a ``tracker'' that puts them in contact
with peers with the file in question. As each client downloads, it
simultaneously uploads downloaded data to others. As more people
download a file, the upload capacity for that file increases. In
simple economic terms: as demand increases, supply rises to meet
it. The BitTorrent system handles the dynamic ``source'' of the data
elegantly by organizing distribution so that network bandwidth is
always used as efficiently as possible.

Perhaps BitTorrent's first major breakthrough was in a widely read
Slashdot.org article in March 2003 announcing the availability of
RedHat 9.0 CD Images. RedHat, who had suffered under the costs of
giving away bandwidth, had begun charging 60 USD per year for access
to FTP servers hosting the 2 gigabyte images. BitTorrent, which
featured prominently in the Slashdot article, harnessed the help of
over 3000 RedHat users to create an alternate, and free, distribution
system that served nearly 2500 CDs worth of data in the first four
hours alone. Beyond allowing the community to move more data than any
single member could afford, it allowed for the distribution of more
data than the network infrastructure could have supported.

In less high profile cases, this success is mirrored thousands of
times a day. Movies, videos, music, software and more is ``torrented''
and transfered by ad-hoc file sharing communities forming around
particular pieces of data at particular moments. Unsurprisingly,
companies, music fans, and independent media activists have noticed
the usefulness of BT and have put it into service. As a result,
BitTorrent seems poised for continued success in helping media
distributors realize the promise of P2P.


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