"The Accidental Inventor: The Story of Bram Cohen and the Rise of Torrenting"

The rise of streaming services like Netflix, Disney+, and Hulu has led to a significant decrease in piracy in recent years. However, for those who still engage in piracy, torrenting is a key tool that makes it possible. 

 

Torrenting is a file distribution system that makes it difficult to shut down piracy. Instead of downloading a file from a central server, with torrents, you download the file from thousands of other users who have already downloaded the file. This means that piracy websites like The Pirate Bay and KickassTorrents don't need to host the files themselves, they just need to host the torrenting links that connect pirates from around the world. 

 

This ease of moving websites has made it impossible to shut down large websites like The Pirate Bay, as they can constantly move websites thanks to torrents. Prosecutors and copyright holders aren't fans of the man who invented torrents: Bram Cohen, but at the same time, they can't do much about it. Bram Cohen, born on October 12, 1975 in Manhattan, New York, was a computer scientist from a young age. His father was a computer scientist and his mother was a school teacher, and from a young age, Bram showed a mature interest in STEM-related competitions. He even tried to learn the programming language BASIC at the age of 5. Throughout the 1990s, Bram's career was not stable as he worked for several startups that went under. However, his last job at MojoNation, where they were trying to create a decentralized method for safely storing and distributing confidential files, provided him with unique concepts and ideas that would inspire him to create BitTorrent. In April 2001, Bram quit MojoNation and began working on bringing his file-sharing idea to life. Over the next year, he programmed the first BitTorrent client using Python. Although the beta version of the software worked, Bram continued to improve it, and eventually released it to the public in July 2001. 

 

Today, BitTorrent is one of the most widely used file-sharing protocols in the world, and while it has been used for illegal activities, it has also been used for legitimate purposes such as sharing open-source software and distributing large files. Regardless of how it's used, the invention of BitTorrent by Bram Cohen has had a significant impact on the way we share and distribute files online.