Kazaa. LimeWire. Napster. There are hardly any widely used filesharing sites that didn’t try to “go legit” at some point after being dinged for facilitating piracy. It doesn’t usually work. Napster, for example, no longer exists; it was nearly bought by a porn company before it was acquired by Roxio and then sold to Best Buy, which de-branded it and merged it with the paid service Rhapsody. So could BitTorrent, the current king of peer-to-peer filesharing, succeed where the first generation failed? BitTorrent, Inc., which invented BitTorrent and owns the most popular client, is releasing a version of the torrent file called the BitTorrent Bundle. The Bundle format allows creators to require an action before users can download. That means creators can require a payment, a pay-what-you-want fee, or email registration, for example. It’s part of BitTorrent’s effort to disassociate itself from piracy and become a service content creators can use to their advantage.
Read the full story at The Verge.