BitTorrent overview (by publisher)

The BitTorrent peer-to-peer file transfer protocol was created and introduced in 2001 by BitTorrent Inc. co-founder Bram Cohen. Bram began his mission to solve a problem experienced by the online community since the birth of the Internet. While it wasn't clear it could be done, Bram wanted to enable effective swarming distribution - - transferring massive files from server to client with the efficiency of peer-to-peer - - reliably, quickly and efficiently. By 2003, BitTorrent had sparked a global revolution in file distribution on the web. Today, we are providing millions of users worldwide with a valuable platform to publish, search and download popular digital content

 

about BitTorrent

BitTorrent is both the name of a peer-to-peer (P2P) file distribution client application and also the name of the file sharing protocol itself, both of which were created by programmer Bram Cohen. BitTorrent is designed to widely distribute large amounts of data without incurring the corresponding consumption in costly server and bandwidth resources. CacheLogic suggests that BitTorrent traffic accounts for ~35% of all traffic on the Internet, while other sources are skeptical.

In other words BitTorrent is a file-sharing protocol which progressively distributes the bandwidth for transferring files across many users. BitTorrent can speed file downloads making it possible to transfer large audio and video files over the Web in a reasonable amount of time (usually minutes or hours depending on the file size). BitTorrent can also reduce the cost of delivering files for a content provider.

 

Legal issues

There are two major differences between BitTorrent and many other peer-to-peer file-trading systems, which advocates suggest make it less useful to those sharing copyrighted material without authorization. First, BitTorrent does not offer a search facility to find files by name. A user must find the initial torrent file by other means, such as a Web search. Second, BitTorrent makes no attempt to conceal the host ultimately responsible for facilitating the sharing: a person who wishes to make a file available must run a tracker on a specific host or hosts and distribute the tracker address(es) in the .torrent file. While it is possible to simply operate a tracker on a server that is located where the copyright holder cannot take legal action, this feature of the protocol does imply some degree of vulnerability that other protocols lack. It is far easier to request that the server's internet service provider shut the site down than it is to find and identify every user sharing a file on a traditional peer-to-peer network

Alternative approaches

The BitTorrent protocol provides no way to index torrent files. As a result, a comparatively small number of websites have hosted the large majority of torrents linking to copyright material, rendering those sites especially vulnerable to lawsuits. In response, some developers have sought ways to make publishing of files more anonymous while still retaining BitTorrent's speed advantage. The Shareaza client, for example, provides three alternatives to BitTorrent: eDonkey2000, Gnutella, and Shareaza's native network, Gnutella2. If the tracker is down, it can finish the file over the other protocols, and/or find new (Shareaza) peers over G2. The use of distributed trackers is also one of the goals for Azureus 2.3.0.2 and BitTorrent 4.1.2. Another interesting idea that has surfaced recently in Azureus is virtual torrent. This idea is based on the distributed tracker approach and is used to describe some web resource. Right now, it is used for instant messaging. It is implemented using a special messaging protocol and requires an appropriate plugin. Anatomic P2P is another approach, which uses a decentralised network of nodes that route traffic to dynamic trackers.

This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License.
It uses material from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BitTorrent.

External links

Official BitTorrent Websit

How to start using BitTorrent to download files

BitTorrent Specification