Despite waves of lawsuits and plenty of angry letters from the RIAA and MPAA, among others, Bit Torrent continues to thrive. But throughout 2013, the world’s best mass distribution system hopes to become legal and legitimate.
How does Bit Torrent plan to do that? Apparently, Bit Torrent has been “trying to groom the entertainment industry to think about BitTorrent as a partner.”
Despite what people may think, Bit Torrent is a real company. Bit Torrent currently employs 110 people and its software is used by 160 million people around the world. Its two main software clients are uTorrent – which tends to be the most popular option – as well as BitTorrent, which is larger and not quite as popular but accomplishes the same basic task.
Instead of using those 160 million users to accomplish evil deeds like sharing copyrighted material, Bit Torrent wants to help its users access content legally. How? Here are some legitimizing strategies that Bit Torrent has used to promote healthy content distribution via its site in the past:
-Bit Torrent promoted a book called The Four-Hour Chef by uploading a number of additional materials to Bit Torrent for free. That extra content included notes, recipes, pictures, and more, all available as a free bundle download. Curious users downloaded the material over 210,000 times, and according to Matt Mason, the executive director of marketing at Bit Torrent, approximately 80,000 Bit Torrent users checked out the book’s Amazon’s page after downloading this extra material. However, Mason wasn’t sure how many of those Amazon visitors ever actually purchased the book.

-Expansion onto mobile devices. It’s no secret that mobile devices are the way the future is headed. Bit Torrent claims that its software has been downloaded over 10 million times on Android and iOS.
-BitTorrent wants to embed its software onto hardware devices like cable boxes so that users can stream TV shows and movies directly onto their systems, much like Hulu or Netflix.

Conclusion – how will Bit Torrent change for you?

So if you’re an illegal downloader, you might become a legal downloader overnight – without changing any of your downloading habits at all. Instead, Bit Torrent will be doing all of the hard work on behalf of its users.
The sooner content developers and a powerful sharing medium like Bit Torrent start getting along, the better off the world will be.