Programmer Bram Cohen, a University at Buffalo alumnus, designed the protocol in April 2001, and released the first available version on 2 July 2001. Cohen and Ashwin Navin founded … See more

The BitTorrent specification is free to use and many clients are open source, so BitTorrent clients have been created for all common See more

A growing number of individuals and organizations are using BitTorrent to distribute their own or licensed works (e.g. indie bands distributing digital files of their new songs). Independent adopters report that BitTorrent technology reduces demands on private … See more

One concern is the UDP flood attack. BitTorrent implementations often use μTP for their communication. To achieve high bandwidths, the underlying protocol used is UDP, which allows spoofing of source addresses of internet traffic. It has been possible to carry out See more

The BitTorrent protocol can be used to reduce the server and network impact of distributing large files. Rather than downloading a file … See more

Distributed trackers
On 2 May 2005, Azureus 2.3.0.0 (now known as Vuze) was released, utilizing a distributed database system. This system is a distributed hash table implementation which allows the client to use torrents that do not have a working See more

Although the protocol itself is legal, problems stem from using the protocol to traffic copyright infringing works, since BitTorrent is often used to download otherwise paid content, such as movies and video games. There has been much controversy over … See more