In world of copyright craziness, BitTorrent soars to new heights

It's a turbulent time in the world of content distribution. Despite a successful protest against overly restrictive anti-piracy legislation, law enforcement has demonstrated its already considerable power to take copyright-infringing websites offline, and several hosting and torrent sites have gone dark voluntarily to evade prosecution. In the middle of all these warring groups -- or perhaps more accurately, completely removed from them -- stands BitTorrent, a company whose technological innovation gave the Internet important new capabilities, making it easier for everyone to share files, both legally and illegally.

Although the word "BitTorrent" is often used in context with the word "piracy," the company itself has steered clear of legal problems by avoiding any distribution of unlicensed content, and narrowing its focus to delivering the best Internet file-sharing technology it's capable of building. BitTorrent, developer of the BitTorrent peer-to-peer file sharing protocol and owner of the popular BitTorrent and uTorrent client software, says its monthly active users have increased from 100 million to 150 million in the past year. Despite the recent upheaval noted above, such as the shutdown of torrent search engine BTJunkie and even lawsuits filed against BitTorrent users, BitTorrent Chief Strategy Officer Shahi Ghanem tells Ars he expects nothing but continued growth. And the company has its eye on new markets, including live streaming of content and an experimental "cloud storage" service taking advantage of the same peer-to-peer technology BitTorrent is known for.