Bram Cohen

Infobox Person


image_size = 150px
name = Bram Cohen
caption =
birth_date = 1975
residence = flagicon|USA San Francisco Bay Area, California
known_for = BitTorrent
occupation = CEO, BitTorrent, Inc.
website = http://bitconjurer.org

Bram Cohen (born 1975) is an American computer programmer, best known as the author of the peer-to-peer (P2P) BitTorrent protocol, as well as the first file sharing program to use the protocol, also known as BitTorrent. He is also the co-founder of CodeCon, organizer of the San Francisco Bay Area P2P-hackers meeting, and the co-author of Codeville.

He currently lives in the San Francisco Bay Area with his wife Jenna and their two children.

Early life and career

Cohen grew up in the Upper West Side of Manhattan, New York City, New York. He learned the BASIC programming language at age 5 on his family's Timex Sinclair computer. Cohen passed the American Invitational Mathematics Examination to qualify for the United States of America Mathematical Olympiad (USAMO) while he attended Stuyvesant High School in New York City. He graduated from Stuyvesant in 1993 [cite web |url=http://bitconjurer.org/resume.txt |title=Resume |accessdate=2007-10-31] and attended the University at Buffalo. He later dropped out of college to work for several dot com companies throughout the mid to late 1990s, the last being MojoNation, an ambitious but ill-fated project he worked on with Jim McCoy.

MojoNation allows people to break up confidential files into encrypted chunks and distribute those pieces on computers also running the software. If someone wanted to download a copy of this encrypted file, he would have to download it simultaneously from many computers. This concept, Cohen thought, was perfect for a file sharing program, since programs like KaZaA take a long time to download a large file because the file is (usually) coming from one source (or "peer"). Cohen designed BitTorrent to be able to download files from many different sources, thus speeding up the download time, especially for users with faster download than upload speeds. Thus, the more popular a file is, the faster a user will be able to download it, since many people will be downloading it at the same time, and these people will also be uploading the data to other users.

BitTorrent

In April 2001, Cohen quit MojoNation and began work on BitTorrent. Cohen unveiled his novel ideas at the first CodeCon conference, which he and his roommate Len Sassaman created as a showcase event for novel technology projects after becoming disillusioned with the state of technology conferences. It remains an event for those seeking information about new directions in software, though BitTorrent continues to lay claim to the title of "most famous presentation".

Cohen wrote the first BitTorrent client implementation in Python, and several other programs have since implemented the protocol.

In the summer of 2002, Cohen collected free pornography to lure beta testers to use the program.cite web|url=http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/13.01/bittorrent.html|title=The BitTorrent Effect|publisher=Wired|year=2005|month=January|first=Clive|last=Thompson|accessdate=2006-03-18] BitTorrent gained its fame for its ability to quickly share large music and movie files online. Cohen himself has claimed he has never violated copyright law using his software, and he suspects the Motion Picture Association of America would love to make a legal example of him if he did. Regardless, he is outspoken in his belief that the current media business was doomed to being outmoded despite the RIAA and MPAA's legal or technical tactics, such as digital rights management. In May 2005, Cohen released a trackerless beta version of BitTorrent.

In late 2003, Cohen served a short stint at Valve Software to work on Steam, their digital distribution system introduced for "Half-Life 2".

By 2004, he had left Valve and formed BitTorrent, Inc. with his brother Ross Cohen and business partner Ashwin Navin.

BitTorrent and the MPAA

By mid 2005, BitTorrent, Inc. was funded by venture capitalist David Chao from Doll Capital Management, and in late 2005 Cohen and Navin made a deal with the MPAA to remove links to illegal content on the official BitTorrent website. The deal was with the seven largest studios in America. The agreement means the site will comply with procedures outlined in the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. [cite web|url=http://www.informationweek.com/story/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=174401655 Information Week|title=Hollywood Hopes BitTorrent Deal Will Reduce Illegal Movie Downloads|first=Gary|last=Gentile|date=2005-11-23|publisher=Information Week]

Other interests

Cohen's hobbies include original origami and juggling up to five balls, but his main interest is in recreational mathematics. Cohen maintains a blog [ [http://www.livejournal.com/users/bramcohen/ Bram Cohen's Journal ] ] where he frequently discusses trust metrics with Raph Levien, as well as money systems, games of skill, and other math-related topics. He is also a Bodger and Badger enthusiast. He types with the Dvorak Simplified Keyboard layout instead of the widespread QWERTY layout.

Cohen claims he has Asperger syndrome [cite web
url=http://wrongplanet.net/modules.php?name=Articles&pa=showpage&pid=98
title=Bram Cohen, Creator of Bittorrent
date=2005-05-07
publisher=wrongplanet.net
date=2005-05-07
accessdate=2008-03-22] based on a self diagnosis. [cite news|title=Torrential Reign|date=2005-11-14|publisher=Fortune|first=Daniel|last=Roth|pages=91-96|url=http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/2005/10/31/8359146/index.htm|accessdate=2006-11-06]

References

External links

* [http://bitconjurer.org/ Bram Cohen's home page]
* [http://www.livejournal.com/users/bramcohen/ Bram Cohen's blog]
* [http://www.bittorrent.com/ Official website for BitTorrent]
* [http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/businesstechnology/2002146729_bittorrent10.html Interview with Cohen about BitTorrent and CodeCon]
* [http://www.metro.se/se/article/2008/04/22/14/3127-48/index.xml Interview with Bram Cohen about legal issues and The Pirate Bay]