FILE-SWAPPING BitTorrent poses challenge for movie studios

The file-sharing software can transfer a feature movie in only two hours.
KNIGHT RIDDER NEWSPAPERS
SEATTLE -- A radical new technology threatens to do to Hollywood what Napster did to the music industry.
It's called BitTorrent and is much faster than other file-swapping software used to exchange movies and music over the Internet. In fact, BitTorrent can transfer a feature-length film in about two hours -- a fraction of the 12 hours it typically takes with file-sharing services such as Kazaa. What's more, the speed of the download actually increases with the number of people sharing a particular file.
"One of the scary things about BitTorrent is how effective it is at redistributing content," said Andrew Parker, chief technical officer at CacheLogic, a British company that monitors Internet traffic.
As BitTorrent becomes mainstream, it imperils the movie studios' most lucrative source of revenue -- the $17.5 billion the industry reaped last year from DVD sales and rentals.
Hollywood has yet to find a way to thwart BitTorrent's distribution of bootlegged copies of new films such as "Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow," or the latest episode of hot cable television shows such as "Nip/Tuck."
"We will continue to be technologically creative in both making our films and in zealously pursuing those who steal them," said John G. Malcolm, director of worldwide anti-piracy for the Motion Picture Association of America, in a statement.
Other files available
Movies aren't the only large files that can be found on BitTorrent distribution Web sites such as www.torrentreactor.net or www.suprnova.org. For instance, on Sept. 27, Torrentreactor offered copies of the Doom 3 video game and Apple's OS X operating system for Macintosh computers as well as dozens of other software titles.
BitTorrent is the creation of Bram Cohen, a 28-year-old Seattle resident who developed the software while living in Berkeley and paying his bills with zero-interest credit cards.
Like other software-coders drawn to Silicon Valley during the dot-com boom, Cohen toiled at his share of doomed Internet start-ups.
"I was sick of working for failures," said Cohen in an interview at his home near Lake Washington. "I wanted to work on something people would use."
Cohen struck out on his own to focus on a technological challenge: how to efficiently transfer files across computer networks.
After three years of work, Cohen produced BitTorrent. It's an open-source program, meaning anyone can download BitTorrent and tinker with its code. Cohen, who speaks about technology with a single-minded intensity, insists he has no connection with Web sites that use BitTorrent to distribute copyrighted movies and software.
A different approach
BitTorrent is an innovative departure from the file-sharing technologies that allow one computer user to obtain a file directly from another over the Internet. Napster popularized file-swapping in the late 1990s. When the courts shut down Napster in July 2001, file-swappers switched to Kazaa, which offered a new type of file-sharing program that quickly became the world's most popular with more than 371 million copies downloaded.
Both Napster and Kazaa created self-contained networks that allowed individuals to search for and obtain music, videos and software.
BitTorrent, however, isn't a permanent network. It is a software tool that spawns impromptu networks of computer users, all of whom are seeking the same digital file.
Reciprocal downloading
What makes it speedier than Kazaa is the notion of reciprocity. Anyone downloading a copy of, say, "I, Robot," is simultaneously exchanging portions of the movie they've already downloaded with others.
It's like a group of people sitting around a table, all trying to assemble a complete version of the hot-selling book "The Da Vinci Code." The book's owner has distributed the pages so that no one has a complete copy. Thus everyone copies and distributes the pages they have in exchange for the missing pages. The swap continues until everyone has the entire book.
With BitTorrent, a digital file -- be it a movie such as "Resident Evil," a bootlegged Grateful Dead concert or a software operating system -- is chopped into digestible bits to accelerate the exchange. The more people downloading a particular file, the faster everyone gets it.
BitTorrent is not nearly as easy to use as Kazaa and other popular file-sharing programs. It lacks a built-in search feature, like that found on those services. So anyone seeking to download a copy of the new video game "The Sims 2" has to hunt for it by entering the name of the game and the word torrent on Google or another Internet search engine. The search result points the way to Web sites that distributes pirated video games, movies and software.
A challenge to detect
Once a download is completed, the network disconnects and disappears without a trace. The ephemeral nature of BitTorrent exchanges creates a detection nightmare for companies such as Loudeye that are hired by the movie studios to disrupt online piracy.
Loudeye executive Marc Morgenstern said his company can interfere with most illicit file transfers on Kazaa. BitTorrent is another story.
"BitTorrent requires different techniques," acknowledged Morgenstern.
So far, nothing has been effective.
"There's no way for an interdiction company to really pollute the torrent network," said Mark Ishikawa, chief executive of Bay TSP, a Los Gatos, Calif., company that tracks file-swapping networks.