BitTorrent (protocol)

BitTorrent is a peer-to-peer file sharing protocol used to distribute large amounts of data. The initial distributor of the complete file or collection acts as the first "seed". Each peer who downloads the data also uploads them to other peers. Relative to standard internet hosting, this provides a significant reduction in the original distributor's hardware and bandwidth resource costs. It also provides redundancy against system problems and reduces dependence on the original distributor.

Programmer Bram Cohen designed the protocol in April 2001 and released a first implementation on 2 July 2001.cite web|url=http://finance.groups.yahoo.com/group/decentralization/message/3160|year=2001-07-02|title=BitTorrent — a new P2P app| first=Bram|last=Cohen| publisher=Yahoo eGroups| accessdate=2007-04-15] It is now maintained by Cohen's company BitTorrent, Inc. Usage of the protocol accounts for significant Internet traffic, though the precise amount has proven difficult to measure. There are numerous BitTorrent clients available for a variety of computing platforms.

Operation

A BitTorrent client is any program that implements the BitTorrent protocol. Each client is capable of preparing, requesting, and transmitting any type of computer file over a network, using the protocol. A peer is any computer running an instance of a client.

To share a file or group of files, a peer first creates a small file called a "torrent" (e.g. MyFile.torrent). This file contains metadata about the files to be shared and about the tracker, the computer that coordinates the file distribution. Peers that want to download the file must first obtain a torrent file for it, and connect to the specified tracker, which tells them from which other peers to download the pieces of the file.

Though both ultimately transfer files over a network, a BitTorrent download differs from a classic full-file HTTP request in several fundamental ways:

* BitTorrent makes many small data requests over different TCP sockets, while web-browsers typically make a single HTTP GET request over a single TCP socket.
* BitTorrent downloads in a random or in a "rarest-first"cite web| url=http://www.imconf.net/imc-2006/papers/p20-legout.pdf| title=Rarest First and Choke Algorithms Are Enough | month=December | year=2006| last=Urvoy-Keller| publisher=imconf.net | accessdate=2007-11-10|format=PDF] approach that ensures high availability, while HTTP downloads in a sequential manner.

Taken together, these differences allow BitTorrent to achieve much lower cost, much higher redundancy, and much greater resistance to abuse or to "flash crowds" than a regular HTTP server. However, this protection comes at a cost: downloads can take time to rise to full speed because it may take time for enough peer connections to be established, and it takes time for a node to receive sufficient data to become an effective uploader. As such, a typical BitTorrent download will gradually rise to very high speeds, and then slowly fall back down toward the end of the download. This contrasts with an HTTP server that, while more vulnerable to overload and abuse, rises to full speed very quickly and maintains this speed throughout.

In general, BitTorrent's non-contiguous download methods have prevented it from supporting "progressive downloads" or "streaming playback". But [http://torrentfreak.com/interview-with-bram-cohen-the-inventor-of-bittorrent comments made by Bram Cohen in January 2007] suggest that streaming torrent downloads will soon be commonplace and [http://torrentfreak.com/bittorrent-launches-ad-supported-streaming-071218 ad supported streaming] appears to be the result of those comments.

Creating and publishing torrents

The peer distributing a data file treats the file as a number of identically-sized pieces, typically between 64 kB and 4 MB each. The peer creates a checksum for each piece, using the SHA1 hashing algorithm, and records it in the torrent file. Pieces with sizes greater than 512 kB will reduce the size of a torrent file for a very large payload, but is claimed to reduce the efficiency of the protocol [http://wiki.theory.org/index.php/BitTorrentSpecification] . When another peer later receives a particular piece, the checksum of the piece is compared to the recorded checksum to test that the piece is error-free. Peers that provide a complete file are called seeders, and the peer providing the initial copy is called the initial seeder.

The exact information contained in the torrent file depends on the version of the BitTorrent protocol. By convention, the name of a torrent file has the suffix .torrent. Torrent files have an "announce" section, which specifies the URL of the tracker, and an "info" section, containing (suggested) names for the files, their lengths, the piece length used, and a SHA-1 hash code for each piece, all of which is used by clients to verify the integrity of the data they receive.

Completed torrent files are typically published on websites or elsewhere, and registered with a tracker. The tracker maintains lists of the clients currently participating in the torrent.cite web| url=http://www.bittorrent.org/protocol.html| title=BitTorrent Protocol 1.0 | month=October | year=2002| first=Bram| last=Cohen| publisher=BitTorrent.org | accessdate=2006-05-06] Alternatively, in a "trackerless system" (decentralized tracking) every peer acts as a tracker. This is implemented by the BitTorrent, µTorrent, BitComet, KTorrent and Deluge clients through the distributed hash table (DHT) method. Vuze also supports a trackerless method that is incompatible (as of April 2007) with the DHT offered by all other supporting clients.

Downloading torrents and sharing files

Users browse the web to find a torrent of interest, download it, and open it with a BitTorrent client. The client connects to the tracker(s) specified in the torrent file, from which it receives a list of peers currently transferring pieces of the file(s) specified in the torrent. The client connects to those peers to obtain the various pieces. Such a group of peers connected to each other to share a torrent is called a "swarm". If the swarm contains only the initial seeder, the client connects directly to it and begins to request pieces. As peers enter the swarm, they begin to trade pieces with one another, instead of downloading directly from the seeder.

Clients incorporate mechanisms to optimize their download and upload rates; for example they download pieces in a random order to increase the opportunity to exchange data, which is only possible if two peers have different pieces of the file.

The effectiveness of this data exchange depends largely on the policies that clients use to determine to whom to send data. Clients may prefer to send data to peers who send data back to them (a tit for tat scheme), which encourages fair trading. But strict policies often result in suboptimal situations, such as when newly joined peers are unable to receive any data because they don't have any pieces yet to trade themselves or when two peers with a good connection between them do not exchange data simply because neither of them wants to take the initiative. To counter these effects, the official BitTorrent client program uses a mechanism called “optimistic unchoking,” where the client reserves a portion of its available bandwidth for sending pieces to random peers (not necessarily known-good partners, so called preferred peers), in hopes of discovering even better partners and to ensure that newcomers get a chance to join the swarm.cite web| url=http://web.archive.org/web/20041119150847/http://mnl.cs.stonybrook.edu/home/karthik/BitTorrent/Robustness_of_BT.doc| title=Studying and enhancing the BitTorrent protocol | first=Karthik | last=Tamilmani | coauthors=| publisher=Stony Brook University| year=2003-10-25| accessdate=2006-05-06|format=DOC]

Adoption

A growing number of individuals and organizations are using BitTorrent to distribute their own or licensed material. Independent adopters report [See, for example, [http://tasvideos.org/WhyBitTorrent.html Why Bit Torrent] at [http://tasvideos.org tasvideos.org] ] that without using BitTorrent technology, and its dramatically reduced demands on networking hardware and bandwidth, they could not afford to distribute their files.

Film, video and music

*BitTorrent Inc. has amassed a number of licenses from Hollywood studios for distributing popular content at the company's website.
*Sub Pop Records releases tracks and videos via BitTorrent Inc. [cite web| url=http://www.bittorrent.com/users/subpoprecords/| title=Sub Pop page on BitTorrent.com| accessdate=2006-12-13] to distribute its 1000+ albums. The band Ween uses the website Browntracker.net [cite web| url=http://www.browntracker.net |title=www.browntracker.net, the website used by Ween| accessdate=2006-12-13] to distribute free audio and video recordings of live shows. Furthermore, Babyshambles and The Libertines (both bands associated with Pete Doherty) have extensively used torrents to distribute hundreds of demos and live videos.
*Podcasting software is starting to integrate BitTorrent to help podcasters deal with the download demands of their MP3 "radio" programs. Specifically, Juice and Miro (formerly known as Democracy Player) support automatic processing of .torrent files from RSS feeds. Similarly, some BitTorrent clients, such as µTorrent, are able to process web feeds and automatically download content found within them.

Broadcasters

*In 2008 CBC became the first public broadcaster in North America to make a full show (Canada's Next Great Prime Minister) available for download using BitTorrent. [cite web
title = CBC to BitTorrent Canada's Next Great Prime Minister:
date = 2008-03-19
url = http://www.cbc.ca/nextprimeminister/blog/2008/03/canadas_next_great_prime_minis.html
accessdate = 2008-03-19]
*The Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation (NRK) have since March 2008 experimented with bittorrent distribution from [http://nrkbeta.no/bittorrent/ this site] . Only selected material in which NRK owns all royalties are published. Responses have been very positive, and NRK is planning to offer more content.

Personal material

*The Amazon S3 "Simple Storage Service" is a scalable Internet-based storage service with a simple web service interface, equipped with built-in BitTorrent support.
*Blog Torrent offers a simplified BitTorrent tracker to enable bloggers and non-technical users to host a tracker on their site. Blog Torrent also allows visitors to download a "stub" loader, which acts as a BitTorrent client to download the desired file, allowing users without BitTorrent software to use the protocol. [cite web| url=http://grep.law.harvard.edu/article.pl?sid=04/08/26/0236209| title=Blog Torrent and Participatory Culture|date=2004-08-26| first=Roger E. |last=Rustad|publisher=Grep Law| accessdate=2006-05-09] This is similar to the concept of a self-extracting archive.

Software

*Many major open source and free software projects encourage BitTorrent as well as conventional downloads (HTTP, FTP...) of their products to increase availability and reduce load on their own servers, especially when dealing with larger files.

Network impact

CableLabs, the research organization of the North American cable industry, estimates that BitTorrent represents 18% of all broadband traffic. cite web| url=http://www.multichannel.com/article/CA6332098.html| date=8 May 2006| title=BitTorrent’s Swarms Have a Deadly Bite On Broadband Nets| first=Leslie| last=Ellis| publisher=Multichannel News| accessdate=2006-05-08] In 2004, CacheLogic put that number at roughly 35% of all traffic on the Internet.cite web
url=http://www.interesting-people.org/archives/interesting-people/200411/msg00078.html
date=2004-11-04| title=LIVEWIRE — File-sharing network thrives beneath the radar
first=Adam
last=Pasick
publisher=Yahoo! News
accessdate=2006-05-09] The discrepancies in these numbers are caused by differences in the method used to measure P2P traffic on the Internet.cite web| url=http://www.bcr.com/opinion/next_generation_networks/peer-to-peer_traffic_internet_myth_born_20051101647.htm| title= Peer-to-Peer Traffic: Another Internet Myth Is Born| first=Peter| last=Sevcik| date=1 November 2005| publisher=Business Communication Review| accessdate=2006-05-09]

Routers that use NAT, Network Address Translation, must maintain tables of source and destination IP addresses and ports. Typical home routers are limited to about 2000 table entries while some more expensive routers have larger table capacities. BitTorrent frequently contacts 300-500 servers per second rapidly filling the NAT tables. This is a common cause of home routers locking up. [cite web|title=uTorrent's FAQ page|url=http://www.utorrent.com/faq.php#Modems_routers_that_are_known_to_have_problems_with_P2P]

Indexing

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 (possibly) copyrighted material, rendering those sites especially vulnerable to lawsuits. Several types of websites support the discovery and distribution of data on the BitTorrent network.

Public tracker sites such as The Pirate Bay allow users to search in and download from their collection of .torrent files; they also run BitTorrent trackers for those files. Users can typically also upload .torrent files for content they wish to distribute.

Private tracker sites such as Demonoid operate like public ones except that they restrict access to registered users and keep track of the amount of data each user uploads and downloads, in an attempt to reduce leeching.

There are specialized tracker sites such as FlixFlux for films, MVgroup for educational content, Metal-Torrents.com for metal music, cheggit.net for pornographic content, and tv torrents for television series. Often these will also be private.

Search engines allow the discovery of .torrent files that are hosted and tracked on other sites; examples include Mininova, Monova, BTJunkie, Torrentz and isoHunt. These sites allow the user to ask for content meeting specific criteria (such as containing a given word or phrase) and retrieve a list of links to .torrent files matching those criteria. This list is often sorted with respect to relevance or number of seeders. Bram Cohen launched a BitTorrent search engine on http://search.bittorrent.com that commingles licensed content with search results. [cite web| url=http://www.betanews.com/article/BitTorrent_Creator_Opens_Online_Search/1117065427| title=BitTorrent Creator Opens Online Search| first=David| last=Worthington| coauthors=Nate Mook| publisher=BetaNews| date=25 May 2005| accessdate=2006-05-09] Metasearch engines allow to search several BitTorrent indices and search engines at once.

Limitations and security vulnerabilities

Lack of anonymity

BitTorrent does not offer its users anonymity. It is possible to obtain the IP addresses of all current, and possibly previous, participants in a swarm from the tracker. This may expose users with insecure systems to attacks.

Dialup versus broadband

BitTorrent is best suited to continuously connected broadband environments, since dial-up users find it less efficient due to frequent disconnects and slow download rates.

The leech problem

BitTorrent file sharers, compared to users of client/server technology, often have little incentive to become seeders after they finish downloading. The result of this is that torrent swarms gradually die out, meaning a lower possibility of obtaining older torrents. Some BitTorrent websites have attempted to address this by recording each user's download and upload ratio for all or just the user to see, as well as the provision of access to newer torrent files to people with better ratios. Users who have low upload ratios may see slower download speeds until they upload more. This prevents (statistical) leeching, since after a while they become unable to download much faster than 1-10 kB/s on a high-speed connection. Some trackers exempt dial-up users from this policy, because they cannot upload faster than 1-3 kB/s.

The leech compensation problem

To combat this leeching problem, some seeders deliberately withhold one final piece from the seed, thus leaving a large number of potential seeders once they receive the withheld piece of data. With clients each awaiting that one final piece, the seeder ensures that there will be many more seeds once the final piece is released.

It is considered good etiquette to utilize the "Share Ratio" data, and equal (1.000 Ratio) or double (2.000 Ratio) one's leeching. This provides an opportunity for one to compensate for one's own leeching, and support the torrent, and nature of the protocol. While this is usually most easily accomplished with a DSL or ADSL connection, those using Dial-up will not be able to conform easily to this rule of etiquette.

The cheater problem

There are "cheating" clients like BitThief which claim to be able to download without uploading. Such exploitation negatively affects the cooperative nature of the BitTorrent protocol.

Technologies built on BitTorrent

The BitTorrent protocol is still under development and therefore may still acquire new features and other enhancements such as improved efficiency.

Distributed trackers

In June 2005, BitTorrent, Inc. released version 4.2.0 of the Mainline BitTorrent client. This release supported "trackerless" torrents, featuring a DHT implementation which allowed the client to use torrents that do not have a working BitTorrent tracker. Current versions of the official BitTorrent client, µTorrent, BitComet, and BitSpirit all share a compatible DHT implementation that is based on Kademlia. [ [http://khashmir.sourceforge.net/ Khashmir Sourceforge] ] Vuze uses its own incompatible DHT system called the "distributed database", but a [http://azureus.sourceforge.net/plugin_details.php?plugin=mlDHT plugin] is available which allows use of the mainline DHT.

Another idea that has surfaced in Vuze is that of "virtual torrents". This idea is based on the distributed tracker approach and is used to describe some web resource. Currently, 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 decentralized network of nodes that route traffic to dynamic trackers.

Most BitTorrent clients also use Peer exchange (PEX) to gather peers in addition to trackers and DHT. Peer exchange checks with known peers to see if they know of any other peers. With the 3.0.5.0 release of Azureus, now known as Vuze, all major BitTorrent clients now have compatible peer exchange.

Content delivery

Web seeding was implemented in 2006. The advantage of this feature is that a site may distribute a torrent for a particular file or batch of files and make those files available for download from that same web server; this can simplify seeding and load balancing greatly once support for this feature is implemented in the various BitTorrent clients. In theory, this would make using BitTorrent almost as easy for a web publisher as simply creating a direct download while allowing some of the upload bandwidth demands to be placed upon the downloaders (who normally use only a very small portion of their upload bandwidth capacity). This feature was created by John "TheSHAD0W" Hoffman, who created BitTornado. [cite web| url=http://bittornado.com/docs/webseed-spec.txt| title=HTTP-Based Seeding Specification| format=TXT| accessdate=2006-05-09] . From version 5.0 onward the Mainline BitTorrent client also supports web seeds and the BitTorrent web site has a simple publishing tool that creates web seeded torrents. µTorrent added support for web seeds in version 1.7.The latest version of the popular download manager GetRight supports downloading a file from HTTP, FTP, and BitTorrent protocols.

Broadcatching combines RSS with the BitTorrent protocol to create a content delivery system, further simplifying and automating content distribution. Steve Gillmor explained the concept in a column for Ziff-Davis in December, 2003. [Gillmore, Steve. [http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1895,1413403,00.asp BitTorrent and RSS Create Disruptive Revolution] "EWeek.com," 13 December 2003. Retrieved on 2007-04-22.] The discussion spread quickly among bloggers ( [http://www.techdirt.com Techdirt] , [http://www.corante.com/importance/ Ernest Miller] , Chris Pirillo, etc.). In an article entitled "Broadcatching with BitTorrent", Scott Raymond explained:

The RSS feed will track the content, while BitTorrent ensures content integrity with cryptographic hashing of all data, so feed subscribers will receive uncorrupted content.

One of the first software clients (free and open source) for "broadcatching" is Miro. Other free software clients such as PenguinTV and KatchTV are also now supporting broadcatching.

The BitTorrent web-service MoveDigital has the ability to make torrents available to any web application capable of parsing XML through its standard Representational State Transfer (REST) based interface. [cite web| url=http://www.movedigital.com/docs/index.php/MoveDigital_API| title=Move Digital REST API| publisher=Move Digital| accessdate=2006-05-09 Documentation.] Additionally, Torrenthut is developing a similar torrent API that will provide the same features, as well as further intuition to help bring the torrent community to Web 2.0 standards. Alongside this release is a first PHP application built using the API called PEP, which will parse any Really Simple Syndication (RSS 2.0) feed and automatically create and seed a torrent for each enclosure found in that feed. [cite web|url=http://web.archive.org/web/20060526130219/http://prodigem.com/code/pep/pep.txt| title=Prodigem Enclosure Puller(pep.txt)| publisher=Prodigem.com| format=TXT| accessdate=2006-05-09 via Internet Wayback Machine]

Encryption

Since BitTorrent makes up a large proportion of total traffic, some ISPs have chosen to throttle (slow down) BitTorrent transfers to ensure network capacity remains available for other uses. For this reason methods have been developed to disguise BitTorrent traffic in an attempt to thwart these efforts. [cite web| url=http://torrentfreak.com/encrypting-bittorrent-to-take-out-traffic-shapers/| title=Encrypting Bittorrent to take out traffic shapers| year=2006-02-05| publisher=Torrentfreak.com| accessdate=2006-05-09]

Protocol header encrypt (PHE) and Message stream encryption/Protocol encryption (MSE/PE) are features of some BitTorrent clients that attempt to make BitTorrent hard to detect and throttle. At the moment Vuze, Bitcomet, KTorrent, Transmission, Deluge, µTorrent, MooPolice, Halite, rTorrent and the latest official BitTorrent client (v6) support MSE/PE encryption.

In September 2006 it was reported that some software could detect and throttle BitTorrent traffic masquerading as HTTP traffic.cite web| url=http://media.www.studlife.com/media/storage/paper337/news/2006/09/27/News/Restech.Solves.Network.Issues-2310692.shtml| title="ResTech solves network issues" | month=September | year=2006| first=Ben| last=Sales| publisher=studlife.com ]

Reports in August 2007 indicated that Comcast was preventing BitTorrent seeding by monitoring and interfering with the communication between peers. Protection against these efforts is provided by proxying the client-tracker traffic through the Tor anonymity network or, via an encrypted tunnel to a point outside of the Comcast network. [ [http://torrentfreak.com/comcast-throttles-bittorrent-traffic-seeding-impossible/ Comcast Throttles BitTorrent Traffic, Seeding Impossible] , "TorrentFreak", 17 August 2007] Comcast has more recently called a 'truce' with BitTorrent, Inc. with the intention of shaping traffic in a protocol-agnostic manner. [ [http://www.news.com/8301-10784_3-9904494-7.html Comcast and Bittorrent Agree to Collaborate] ] Questions about the ethics and legality of Comcast's behavior have led to renewed debate about Net neutrality in the United States. [ [http://www.cnet.com/8301-13739_1-9769645-46.html Is Comcast's BitTorrent filtering violating the law?] ]

In general, although encryption can make it difficult to determine "what" is being shared, BitTorrent is vulnerable to traffic analysis. Thus even with MSE/PE, it may be possible for an ISP to recognize BitTorrent and also to determine that a system is no longer downloading, only uploading, information and terminate its connection by injecting TCP RST (reset flag) packets.

Multitracker

Another unofficial feature is an extension to the BitTorrent metadata format proposed by John Hoffman [cite web| url=http://www.bittornado.com/docs/multitracker-spec.txt| title=MULTITRACKER METADATA ENTRY SPECIFICATION| format=TXT| accessdate=2006-05-09| publisher=Bittornado.com] and implemented by several indexing websites. It allows the use of multiple trackers per file, so if one tracker fails, others can continue supporting file transfer. It is implemented in several clients, such as Vuze, BitComet, BitTornado, KTorrent and µTorrent. Trackers are placed in groups, or tiers, with a tracker randomly chosen from the top tier and tried, moving to the next tier if all the trackers in the top tier fail.

Torrents with multiple trackers [called MultiTorrents by indexing website [http://www.mybittorrent.com/ myBittorrent.com] ] can decrease the time it takes to download a file, but also has a few consequences:

* Users have to contact more trackers, leading to more overhead-traffic.
* Torrents from closed trackers suddenly become downloadable by non-members, as they can connect to a seed via an open tracker.

Decentralized keyword search

Even with distributed trackers, a third party is still required to find a specific torrent. This is usually done in the form of a direct hyperlink from the website of the content owner or through indexing websites like The Pirate Bay or Torrentz.

In May 2007 Cornell University published a paper proposing a new approach to searching a peer-to-peer network for inexact strings [cite web
url=http://www.cs.cornell.edu/People/egs/papers/hyperspaces.pdf
title=Hyperspaces for Object Clustering and Approximate Matching in Peer-to-Peer Overlays
format=PDF
accessdate=2008-05-26
publisher=Cornell University] which could replace the functionality of a central indexing site. A year later, the same team implemented the system as a plugin for Vuze called Cubit [cite web
url=http://www.cs.cornell.edu/~bwong/cubit/index.html
title=Cubit: Approximate Matching for Peer-to-Peer Overlays
format=HTML
accessdate=2008-05-26
publisher=Cornell University] and published a follow-up paper reporting its success [cite web
url=http://www.cs.cornell.edu/~bwong/cubit/tr-cubit.pdf
title=Approximate Matching for Peer-to-Peer Overlays with Cubit
format=PDF
accessdate=2008-05-26
publisher=Cornell University] .

Implementations

Because of the open nature of the protocol, many clients have been developed that support numerous platforms and written using various programming languages. The official client is also named BitTorrent.

Some clients, like Torrentflux, can be run straight from a server, allowing hosting companies to offer speeds unavailable to most users. Sites such as Torrent2FTP offer services to download torrents and then make them available to the customer on a FTP server.

[http://torrentrelay.com Torrent Relay] is a service that allows users to load torrents remotely and have them download as a simple HTTP link. Unlike Torrent2FTP this site offers a free version that isn't the common PHP based Torrentflux that has been widely available for years. This implementation offers some unique features such as ZIP compression, RAR decompression and Playstation 3 streaming & download support, that aren't seen in any other client to date.

Web based services such as the ones mentioned above overcome all forms of throttling, NAT issues or ISP restrictions because their traffic is standard FTP or HTTP.

Opera Software now incorporates BitTorrent downloads through its popular browser software [cite web| url=http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20070201-8750.html| title=Does network neutrality mean an end to BitTorrent throttling?| first=Nate| last=Anderson| date=1 February 2007| publisher=Ars Technica, LLC| accessdate=2007-02-09] , as does Wyzo.

An increasing number of hardware devices are being made to support BitTorrent. These include routers and NAS devices, as well as anything capable of running OpenWrt (routers) or Openslug (NAS).

Development

An as-yet (2 February 2008) unimplemented unofficial feature is Similarity Enhanced Transfer (SET), a technique for improving the speed at which peer-to-peer file sharing and content distribution systems can share data. SET, proposed by researchers Pucha, Andersen, and Kaminsky, works by spotting chunks of identical data in files that are an exact or near match to the one needed and transferring these data to the client if the 'exact' data are not present. Their experiments suggested that SET will help greatly with less popular files, but not as much for popular data, where many peers are already downloading it. [cite web|url=http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~dga/papers/nsdi2007-set/|title= Exploiting Similarity for Multi-Source Downloads Using File Handprints|author=Himabindu Pucha, David G. Andersen, Michael Kaminsky|month=April | year=2007|accessdate=2007-04-15|publisher=Purdue Univ., Carnegie Mellon Univ., Intel Research Pittsburgh] Andersen believes that this technique could be immediately used by developers with the BitTorrent file sharing system. [cite web|url=http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/6544919.stm |publisher=BBC News|title=Speed boost plan for file-sharing|date=2007-04-12|accessdate=2007-04-21]

Legal issues

There has been much controversy over the use of BitTorrent trackers. BitTorrent metafiles themselves do not store copyrighted data, hence BitTorrent itself is not illegal—it is the use of it to copy copyrighted material that contravenes laws in some locations.

Various jurisdictions have pursued legal action against websites that host BitTorrent trackers. High-profile examples include the closing of Suprnova.org, Torrentspy, LokiTorrent, Demonoid (now back online), OiNK.cd and EliteTorrents.org. The Pirate Bay torrent website, formed by a Swedish anti-copyright group, is noted for the [http://thepiratebay.org/legal "legal" section] of its website in which letters and replies on the subject of alleged copyright infringements are publicly displayed. On 31 May 2006, The Pirate Bay's servers in Sweden were raided by Swedish police on allegations by the MPAA of copyright infringement; [cite web| url=http://torrentfreak.com/the-piratebay-is-down-raided-by-the-swedish-police/| year=31.05.2006| publisher=TorrentFreak| title=The Piratebay is Down: Raided by the Swedish Police| accessdate=2007-05-20] however, the tracker was up and running again three days later.

HBO, in an effort to combat the distribution of its programming on BitTorrent networks, has sent cease and desist letters to the , by providing bad chunks of data to clients. [cite web| url=http://radar.oreilly.com/archives/2005/10/hbo_attacking_bittorrent.html |title=HBO Attacking BitTorrent|publisher=O'Reilly.com|first=Nat|last= Torkington|date=4 October 2005|accessdate=2007-04-22]

On 23 November 2005, the movie industry and BitTorrent Inc. CEO Bram Cohen, signed a deal they hoped would reduce the number of unlicensed copies available through bittorrent.com's search engine, run by BitTorrent, Inc. It meant BitTorrent.com had to remove any links to unlicensed copies of films made by seven of Hollywood's major movie studios.

More recently, the BitTorrent network has been subject to scrutiny by the British Phonographic Industry (BPI). There are suggestions that they are using the network to obtain the IPs of those currently connected to the tracker. The information is then used to contact the ISP of each downloader so that notifications can be made (this was given sizeable coverage in the UK press with regard to Virgin Media sending letters out to customers suspected of using P2P networks).

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 itself 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. Because it is possible to operate a tracker on a server that is located in a jurisdiction where the copyright holder cannot take legal action, the protocol does offer "some" vulnerability that other protocols lack. It is far easier to request that the server's ISP shut down the site than it is to find and identify every user sharing a file on a peer-to-peer network. However, with the use of a distributed hash table (DHT), trackers are no longer required, though often used for client software that does not support DHT to connect to the stream.

See also

* Terminology of BitTorrent
* Super-seeding
* Segmented downloading
* Comparison of file sharing applications
* Magnet URI scheme
* Similarity Enhanced Transfer
* Bencode
* .sfv files in .torrents

References

Further reading

*cite book |chapter= The Bittorrent P2P File-Sharing System: Measurements and Analysis |title=Peer-to-Peer Systems IV |last=Pouwelse |first=Johan |authorlink= |coauthors="et al." |editor= |year=2005 |publisher=Springer |location=Berlin |isbn=9783540290681 |doi=10.1007/11558989_19 |pages=205–216

External links

* [http://www.bittorrent.org/beps/bep_0003.html Official BitTorrent Specification]
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* [http://streaming.scmp.com/podcasting/upload/News_BitTorrent_june15.mp3 Interview with chief executive Ashwin Navin]
* [http://wiki.theory.org/BitTorrentSpecification Unofficial BitTorrent Protocol Specification v1.0] at wiki.theory.org
* [http://wiki.theory.org/BitTorrent_Location-aware_Protocol_1.0_Specification Unofficial BitTorrent Location-aware Protocol 1.0 Specification] at wiki.theory.org
* [http://www.metro.se/se/article/2008/04/22/14/3127-48/index.xml Interview with Bram Cohen about Bittorrent and The Pirate Bay]