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BitTorrent’s disastrous, legendary, and controversial story
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BitTorrent’s disastrous, legendary, and controversial story
The file-sharing app launched 25 years ago and unleashed a wave of piracy that would shake Hollywood to its core.
by Janko Roettgers
Janko Roettgers
Lowpass author, Verge contributor
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Follow See All by Janko Roettgers
Jul 2, 2026, 11:00 AM UTC
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Cath Virginia / The Verge
Janko Roettgers
Janko Roettgers
Lowpass author, Verge contributor
Posts from this author will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed.
Follow See All by Janko Roettgers
is a tech reporter and author of the Lowpass newsletter.
Twenty-five years ago today, a young, little-known programmer by the name of Bram Cohen fired off a short message to a mailing list for peer-to-peer enthusiasts. “My new app, BitTorrent, is now in working order, check it out here,” Cohen wrote, followed by a link to his personal website.
“What’s BitTorrent, Bram?” the founder of the list asked in response.
Cohen never bothered to reply. The world would find out soon enough.
In the following years, BitTorrent quickly became the world’s most popular file-sharing app, unleashing a massive wave of piracy that upended Hollywood forever. At one point, BitTorrent was said to be responsible for a huge amount of internet traffic — somewidelycitedmetrics peg it at half of P2P and one-third of all internet traffic in 2004. And while the entertainment industry succeeded in shutting down file-sharing systems like Napster and Kazaa, it largely failed to curtail the massive flood of BitTorrent piracy.
What stymied movie studios and record labels alike is exactly what makes the story of BitTorrent’s 25th anniversary a gripping one. There’s BitTorrent, the app that Cohen unveiled in July 2001 and which continues to attract tens of millions of monthly users to this day. There’s BitTorrent, the file-sharing protocol, which has been adopted and advanced by hackers and developers from around the world, and which helped birth an entire cottage industry of piracy websites. And there’s BitTorrent, the company cofounded by Cohen, which struggled for years to make money with its technology.
“Going into it, my plan was not to start a business,” Cohen recalls.
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