Saturday, December 3, 2005
Thomas Hawk: "Bram Cohen and His Deal With the Devil"
Posted by Suhit Gupta in "ARTICLE" @ 07:00 AM
"Bram Cohen, the founder and chief executive of BitTorrent, yesterday held a press conference with Dan Glickman, chairman of the Motion Picture Association of America, to announce a new agreement between Cohen and the studios that involve him removing links to pirated movies online and receiving in return $8.75 million in VC money from the studios. Cohen's company BitTorrent Inc. also will help the studios with "content distribution" in the future. Of course, the irony of the situation is that although Bram's site may belong to him, the BitTorrent technology he created actually does not. From slyck.com ""Bittorrent.com is their own, they can of course fix that," said ThePirateBay spokesperson brokep. "But not in the other torrent sites without changing the protocol. The protocol actually doesn't belong to Bram Cohen, it belongs to the community and will evolve in the way it seems fit.""
This news story is almost funny. Cohen seems to have made off like a bandit because he has gotten VC funding in return for almost nothing. As the article points out, BitTorrent basically belongs to the community now and Cohen's site barely gets any major traffic. But then, it is also a decent move on the part of the MPAA because they get visibility that they now control the highest (in terms of profile) of the BitTorrent folks.
This news story is almost funny. Cohen seems to have made off like a bandit because he has gotten VC funding in return for almost nothing. As the article points out, BitTorrent basically belongs to the community now and Cohen's site barely gets any major traffic. But then, it is also a decent move on the part of the MPAA because they get visibility that they now control the highest (in terms of profile) of the BitTorrent folks.
