Next for BitTorrent: Search

The free search tool will be the first large-scale commercial offering from BitTorrent, a five-person company headed by Cohen that so far has drawn most of its revenue from T-shirt sales and PayPal donations.

The ranked search results will be accompanied by sponsored links provided through a partnership with Oakland, California, company Ask Jeeves, says Ashwin Navin, BitTorrent's chief operating officer. BitTorrent will make money from each clickthrough. "Ask Jeeves syndicates our advertising products to many different sites, and BitTorrent will be one of them," confirmed Ask Jeeves spokeswoman Darcy Cobb.

Navin demonstrated the service for Wired News last week at BitTorrent's temporary headquarters, a small, one-room San Francisco office shared with Navin's last venture, an import/export firm called GSI Group. Surrounded by pallets of imported playing cards and poker chips, Navin fired up a browser on his laptop and typed "Mozilla" into the BitTorrent search box. The search quickly produced a site offering torrents for the free browser.

The search engine is expected to go live within two weeks, according to Navin, who is moving to the Bay Area from Bellevue, Washington. It will live on BitTorrent, the website from which Cohen distributes the open-source software that has changed the way netizens distribute and connect with content online.

BitTorrent speeds internet file transfers by shifting the bandwidth burden off the publisher, and distributing it among users downloading the file: Everyone downloading a file over BitTorrent is unobtrusively uploading it to other users at the same time so that large, popular files actually move at a faster rate than obscure ones.

The new search engine takes that dynamic into account. It resembles Google in operation, with a simple interface and results ranked by an automated process. But unlike a general web search, the BitTorrent web crawler interacts with each torrent behind the scenes to determine the number of nodes downloading and uploading through it. That lets the search engine order its results by the throughput of each torrent.

"Web search rates things by relevance," says Navin, a former strategist for Yahoo. "Our search rates things by relevance and availability."

Although BitTorrent has become associated with online piracy thanks to its role in distributing copyright movies and television shows, the company is eager to highlight its utility as a completely lawful program for furthering free speech. That's the vision that drives the company, says Navin -- now anyone can publish their own movies, music or software, because BitTorrent all but eliminates expensive bandwidth costs.

Last week, Cohen released a new beta version of the official BitTorrent software that makes the process even easier by giving users the option of skipping the complicated step of setting up a special tracker to manage BitTorrent transactions. "This is indicative of our hope that BitTorrent will enable more independent web publishing," says Navin.

But, of course, that's not all BitTorrent enables. At a reporter's request, Navin ran "The Interpreter" through the search engine, and the top result was an illicit copy of the Nicole Kidman film -- still in theaters -- offered on The Pirate Bay, a torrent aggregator in Sweden known for making pirated movies, music and software freely available in open defiance of publishers.

To Navin, BitTorrent may be a free speech tool, but to scofflaws, it's a great way to move pirated content over the internet. A report from network monitoring vendor CacheLogic last year found that BitTorrent was by far the most popular file-sharing tool, accounting for 53 percent of all peer-to-peer traffic.

Last December, the Motion Picture Association of America began a legal crackdown that's shuttered several prominent BitTorrent clearinghouses that were distributing pirated movies -- LokiTorrent, SuprNova.org and others -- and this month the group set its sights on BitTorrent hubs providing television shows for download.

The MPAA slammed BitTorrent last week for accelerating the spread of a pirated copy of Revenge of the Sith -- a leaked studio workprint of the third Star Wars prequel debuted online even as fans queued up for Thursday's theatrical release. The organization had no immediate comment on the upcoming search service Friday.

In this environment, a comprehensive search facility operated by BitTorrent's creator could be a bright red bull's-eye to content industry lawyers, says Mark Lemley, a law professor at Stanford University Law School and an expert in intellectual property and internet law.

"This creates something that BitTorrent has until now lacked, which is a centralized node to target," Lemley says. "One of the differences between BitTorrent and Kazaa has been that there's a central Kazaa company.... There hasn't been a similar centralized service or site associated with BitTorrent, and now there is."

But Navin isn't worried -- because the new search engine indexes every torrent it can find without human intervention, the company can't be held liable for results that happen to point to infringing content, he says. Lemley says that's probably right, at least as a matter of law: The Digital Millennium Copyright Act provides safe harbor for "information location tools" if administrators promptly remove links to infringing content upon notice by the copyright holder.

"I think the search engine itself shouldn't be illegal, but I think (Cohen) will find himself inundated with notices of infringing material," says Lemley. "He may find over time that his full-time job is turning off links."

Moreover, being right might not be enough to keep Cohen and BitTorrent clear of the working end of a lawsuit. "I would be very surprised if he didn't get sued, because they've gone after a number of people who have much less connection to infringement," says Lemley.

But in the end, the content industries may find the BitTorrent search engine too useful to mess with. "The copyright owners can now identify the most-trafficked materials that are infringing their copyrights and go after them in a more efficient way," says Lemley. "It's kind of ironic."