This article was taken from the May 2015 issue of WIRED magazine. Be the first to read WIRED's articles in print before they're posted online, and get your hands on loads of additional content by subscribing online.
BitTorrent has long been synonymous with online piracy. BitTorrent Inc, however, is another story. The San Francisco-based company is continuing to develop the infamous peer-to-peer file-sharing protocol for a slew of more legitimate -- and transformational -- purposes. In September 2014, musician Thom Yorke released an album, Tomorrow's Modern Boxes, through BitTorrent Bundles -- a new service that allows artists to add paywalls to any content on the service. The album was downloaded more than 4.5 million times and reportedly grossed millions. The company is also working on a file-sharing service called Sync, a messaging app and a web browser. WIRED talks to Matt Mason, chief content officer -- and author of The Pirate's Dilemma -- about its naming problem, artist partnerships deals and the platform's future.
**WIRED: What was the thinking behind BitTorrent Bundles?**Matt Mason: There has always been a very clear desire from the company to build products that worked for content producers. We'd already tried licensing and seen it not work for us. But BitTorrent is about content. We think it's the best way to move a large file around on the internet. It would be financially irresponsible of us not to try and do this again.
**What's the revenue split for artists?**We take ten per cent of any pay-day revenue for the maintenance of the platform. The credit-card provider -- typically Stripe or PayPal -- will take between two and five per cent of the revenue, depending on the price that you set. So at worst the artist is going to get 85 per cent of their revenue directly.
**How much money did Thom Yorke make from Tomorrow's Modern Boxes?**Part of the deal terms of working with Thom and his team were that we couldn't disclose the final sales figure. But to quote Thom Yorke's manager Chris Hufford, "This could not have gone any better." There was a lot of hype in the press that it made $26 million (£17m). He did not make $26 million, I'll tell you that -- but he did make more than we all expected to make.
**Aside from bundles, you're also launching a number of apps using the BitTorrent protocol.**It was very much Bram Cohen's mission when he founded the company. He founded BitTorrent Inc [in 2004] three years after he created the BitTorrent protocol. The idea is to find new applications and build new products that run on top of the protocol.
**What is the goal of these new services?**When the NSA scandal broke in 2013, we took a look at what was happening, and it became clear to us that there was an opportunity for a completely server-less chat application. That became BitTorrent Bleep. It uses the BitTorrent protocol instead of a server infrastructure to drive the chat service. Sync is a way to transfer data between your own server infrastructure -- whether that's your laptop and your mobile or 5,000 devices. There's no charge because there's no server farm to maintain. There's also no server farm to hack. The NSA can't look at what you're doing without physically seizing your laptop or mobile device.
Then there's the BitTorrent web browser, which you have said is an experiment in rethinking they way the whole internet works.The browser is a project called Maelstrom that is currently in alpha. The idea for that is: what if the entire web was distributed [over peer-to-peer]? There are a lot of things you can do if servers are taken out of the equation. There are so many implications around security and using the web. There are also a lot of various implications for things like the blockchain and alt coins, and the ways we might use those on the web. It's a very early-stage product, and we're still not sure what all the applications of it will be, but it seems like a cool idea.
**People still associate the company with the peer-to-peer protocol and piracy sites. You're trying to change that -- how successful have your efforts been so far?**We've changed perceptions in a major way within certain communities. In the entertainment industry, most people are aware of what we are doing now. They may not all want to be part of it, but people are broadly understanding that we're trying to do good things. In the tech community it's become easier to hire the best talent -- that's a good indicator that the perception of the company is great. The word "BitTorrent" means so many different things to so many people. It's really interesting -- when I first got here there was a big plan on the table to change the name of the entire company.
**Why don't you?**Because this is one of the internet's most recognised brands. There may be 500 people in Hollywood who don't want to work with us, but they still won't if we change our name. Meanwhile, half of all men in Russia aged 15-24 use our product. We have 170 million users. Change the name to whateverstartup.com and it wouldn't fix the problem. We didn't feel we should change the name. The product was never designed for piracy, it was designed to replace HTTP.
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
