Sunday, January 22, 2006

Protect Free Speech with P2P

BitTorrent is a protocol that eases the burden of distributing files to a large number of people. When each person is simultaneously uploading and downloading the file to many different people it removes the large bandwidth requirements that a single source would face.

With BitTorrent a single person can "seed" a large file and distribute it to millions of people for almost no cost. To post the same file to a website for download would consume huge amounts of bandwidth and cost the website operator a great deal of money. This allows an independent filmmaker of novelist to release their work to a wide audience without having to use a movie studio or publishing house.

Peer-to-peer (P2P) file sharing is the most bandwidth intensive internet activity, with the BitTorrent protocol itself accounting for more than half of the traffic on the internet today.

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