BitTorrent is a peer-to-peer (P2P) file distribution protocol. The protocol was designed in
April 2001 and created in Summer 2002 by programmer Bram Cohen, and is now maintained by BitTorrent,
Inc.
BitTorrent is a method of distributing large amounts of data widely without the original distributor incurring the
whole of the corresponding costs of hardware, hosting and bandwidth resources. Instead of the distributor alone
servicing each recipient, under BitTorrent the recipients each also supply data
to newer recipients, thus significantly reducing the cost and burden on any
given individual source as well as providing redundancy against system problems, and reducing
dependence upon the original distributor.
CableLabs, the research organization of the North American cable industry,
believes that BitTorrent could represent 55% of the upstream traffic on the
cable company's access network.[1] CacheLogic puts that number at roughly 35% of all
traffic on the Internet.[2] Another paper states that some 18% of all
broadband traffic carries torrent files needed to initiate BitTorrent
downloads.[3] The large discrepancies in these numbers could be
caused by dissenting opinions on the methodology to measure P2P traffic on the
Internet.[4]
The original BitTorrent client was written in Python. Its source code, as
of version 4.0, has been released under the BitTorrent Open Source License,
which is a modified version of the Jabber Open Source Licence. There are numerous
compatible clients, written in a variety of programming languages, and running on a
variety of computing platforms.
