It's not just The Pirate Bay that's getting ready to celebrate its birthday. BitTorrent, the technology that made it possible for The Pirate Bay to be in first place, is celebrating its 12th birthday this year.
Bram Cohen launched BitTorrent on July 2, 2001 with a simple announcement on a Yahoo message board.
And as is often the case with major Internet technologies, BitTorrent's low-key launch was no indication of what was to come.
In just a few years, BitTorrent became the main driver of Internet traffic and one of the largest producers of bandwidth traffic today (of Internet traffic in general).
Of all other types of data exchange, from upstreams to users on the main backbones, BitTorrent is still the largest source of data today.
But BitTorrent's glory has more to do with the power it gave ordinary Internet users. Open-source creations that could hardly afford hosting on a high-end server now had a simple and fast way to share huge files with any number of users with minimal resource usage.
And for ordinary users, BitTorrent gave them the ability to enjoy far more music, movies, TV shows, games, and software than they ever had the chance to, even if most of it was illegal.
