Bram Cohen wants to do business on the BitTorrent network

    Bram Cohen can easily collect a Rubik's Cube in a minute and a half. He has been working at a computer since he was five. In transport, in half an hour, Bram solves two Sudoku puzzles and scores 320 points in Tringo - a mixture of Tetris and Bingo. This is a man of outstanding abilities. But some tasks are not easy for him to solve, writes the San Francisco Chronicle.

    The fact that Bram is suffering from Asperger Syndrome, that is, he has poorly developed social abilities. Patients with Asperger Syndrome also have narrow, but intense interests, as well as strangeness of speech and language. In fact, this is a fairly common disease that is diagnosed in at least 1 out of 300 school-age children. It is difficult for such people to establish visual contrast, as well as to catch intonations in the interlocutor’s voice (for example, sarcasm). Among programmers suffering from Asperger's syndrome are much more common.

    Thirty-year-old programmer Bram Cohen is trying to develop social abilities, look people in the eyes and recognize sarcasm. He definitely needs this to solve another puzzle: what to do with the BitTorrent peer-to-peer systemwhich he created four years ago and which has become the most popular P2P network on the Internet. According to CacheLogic statistics, this network accounts for 30-40 % of all traffic on the Internet. Of course, most of this traffic is pirated content.

    The creator of the BitTorrent program is a co-founder and director of a startup of the same name, registered in San Francisco, not far from Hollywood studios, whose content makes up the bulk of the traffic within the network. Bram Cohen believes that users should change their habits and stop downloading pirated music and movies. His company received $ 9 million in venture financing and entered into an agreement with Warner Bros. Studios, according to which the official sale of TV shows and films through the BitTorrent network will begin in the fall.

    But the problem is that people do not want to change their habits. There is great doubt that all 70 million users will start paying for content that they previously received for free. Another problem of BitTorrent is that its software is not so easy to use, so it’s much easier for the average person to work with the iTunes store or with some other of dozens of competitive services.

    The main asset of BitTorrent is tens of millions of active users. How many of them will turn from pirates to content buyers - we'll see in the fall.

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