Spring 2014

Bittorrent: What you Probably Don’t Know About Torrents

The Free Software Movement

Jordan Wiebe

”Torrent” is a word that if you had uttered 15 years ago, people would think that you were talking about a wave. Today, “torrent” has taken on a whole new technological meaning. Although the word is extremely common, you might not know a whole lot about the technology.

Bram Cohen from the University of Buffalo created torrents in April 2001. He was tired of the long wait times for downloading files from another person’s computer, since the download speed largely depended on the file owner’s connection. He came up with the solution in which a client would download a file from multiple servers called seeders. Essentially, the client was piecing the file together from multiple different sources and users, even if the file wasn’t completely finished downloading on the others’ machines. This method of file sharing quickly grew popular and became an easy, inexpensive way to download various types of files.

The Pirate Bay

Soon afterwards in 2003, the largest torrent site, the Pirate Bay, was created. It started in Sweden, by the think tank Piratbyrån, as a way to create a torrent site that had more local content. The first computer used to run the site was a 1.3GHz machine that had a mere 256MB of RAM. However, as the site grew increasingly popular, they were forced to upgrade in order to handle the increase in traffic. The Pirate Bay works by allowing users to upload torrent files, which contain information about the data files being distributed. These torrent files can then be used to download everything from music and games, to movies and even 3D printer blueprints through the use of a torrent client. The file is downloaded from a variety of different “seeders” (people uploading the file or parts of the file). However, the majority of files uploaded to the site were either illegal or unauthorized. So, how exactly does a site like this continue to remain online? Not easily. In April 2009, the creators of the site were found guilty of copyright infringement and eventually sentenced to 1 year in jail, in addition to being fined $6.5 million. The Pirate Bay is also being continuously blocked and taken down by various countries (Sweden, Iceland, Greenland, and even the Caribbean Island of Saint Maarten). As a result, they’ve had to change the domain countless times. With so much dedication and fight in them to remain online, it’s no wonder that they call themselves “the world’s most resilient torrent site”.

Isohunt shutdown

Not all torrent sites are as invincible as the Pirate Bay. Isohunt, a Canadian born site, was one of the largest torrent sites while in its prime and had 13.7 million active torrent files. Created by Vancouver’s Gary Fung, the site was around for ten and a half years before the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) shut it down. As a result of legal action, Gary Fung was fined $110 million.

Oldest Torrent

The oldest active torrent today is known as the Matrix ASCII (the entire Matrix movie converted to ASCII). It was created in December 2003 when large social media sites, such as YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter, were not yet in existence.

Ironically, the oldest active torrent on the Pirate Bay is a documentary called “Revolution OS”, which is a documentary about the history of the free software movement, GNU, and Linux. It was uploaded on March 31, 2004.