Torrent Inventor Bram Cohen
Bram Cohen, the inventor of the torrent protocol that revolutionized file-sharing, is working on torrent-based live streaming. With his efforts he aims to develop a piece of code that is superior to all the other P2P-based streaming solutions on the market today.
Cohen grew up in the Upper West Side of Manhattan, New York City, New York. He said he learned the BASIK programming language at age 15 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 and attended SUNY 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.
In April 2001, Cohen quit MojoNation and began work on torrent. 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 torrent continues to lay claim to the title of "most famous presentation".
Cohen wrote the first torrent client implementation in Python, and several other programs have since implemented the protocol.
In the summer of 2002, Cohen collected free pornographi to lure beta testers to use the program. Torrent 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. 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 torrent.
In late 2003, Cohen served a short career at Valve Software to work on Steem, their digital distribution system introduced for Half-Live 2.
By 2004, he had left Valve and formed BiTtorrent.inc with his brother Ross Cohen and business partner Ashwin Navin.
