Torrential Reign
Bram Cohen’s BitTorrent software made it a cinch to pirate films on the Internet. So why is Hollywood on his side?
from the Oct. 17, 2005 issue
By Daniel Roth
For
two years after the dot-com crash, Bram Cohen could almost always be
found at his small dining-room table, first in San Francisco’s Nob Hill
and later in Oakland. His long brown hair would flop in front of his
eyes, and he’d curl it back over his ears as he stared at the screen of
his Dell laptop, writing line after line after line of code.
Occasionally Cohen would take breaks—there was a club to visit some
nights, a conference on coding to help organize, a trip to
Amsterdam—but then he’d return to his wooden chair, his keyboard on his
lap, his laptop propped up on some books, his back perfectly straight
(thanks to posture classes he was taking), and he’d program some more.
First he lived off savings from the handful of jobs he’d worked during
the bubble. When that ran out, he lived off credit cards, following a
rigid system for applying for and transferring debt to 0%
introductory-rate cards. Friends would ask what he was doing. Why
wouldn’t he just get a job? Cohen shooed them away. He was determined
to solve a puzzle that was consuming him. Since the birth of the Net, programmers had been stumped by
how to transfer massive files—movies, TV shows, games, software,
whatever—without incurring astronomical bills or risking frequent
failure. Cohen knew he could find a solution; all it would take was
time, good code, and brute intellect. He had all three. The money would
take care of itself. “I didn’t have any clear plans when I first
started,” he says. “I wasn’t worried, partially because what I was
doing was really cool, and partially because I’m broken and can’t feel
anxiety.
