Come Home BitTorrent: All is Forgiven!

As soon as I heard the name BitTorrent it all came back to me. 1999 and my German friend Martin regularly coming in to visit from Stuttgart bearing a giant rucksack filled with 20-odd massive portable memory drives. All the booze and food we wanted in exchange for access to our record collections. A killing, genuinely worth millions of bucks, was made of millions of recordings, which were converted into files and sold all over the old Soviet bloc.

So no wonder, if you mention the name BitTorrent to most techies of a certain age, they’ll have a good giggle. Right or wrong, their name has been rendered infamous vis-a-vis its association with online piracy. Having invented the eponymous code utilized in transferring over one-third third of each and every single day’s Internet traffic, it is used most as a means for large corporations to transfer their files internally. This has always been BitTorrent’s bread and butter. Unfortunately, unbeknownst to the executives of the company and the scientists who created it, it is also the source for most of the illegal global copying of music and films, which are easily resourced on the web before being repackaged into downloadable