BRAM COHEN

Bram Cohen is solving another puzzle, and this makes him happy. Unshaven in the dark office of his Bellevue, Washington, home, he twists a saucer-shaped gizmo called a Rubik's UFO in his pale hands. "See, I solved it," he says, tossing the toy into a box of others he's conquered.

The greatest puzzle he's mastered, however, is the most controversial: how to traffic movies, music and software over the Net. Cohen is the creator of BitTorrent, the most enduring file-sharing program online. While the creators of Napster and Grokster have sold out and been sued into obsolescence, respectively, Cohen has found a way to keep both his ideals and his technology intact.

BitTorrent now has more than 45 million downloads, and counting. As a result, this semi-autistic thirty-year-old goth has become one of the most influential, some say dangerous, geeks of his generation. Now, with an infusion of $8.75 million in venture capital, he's embarking on his boldest challenge: turning BitTorrent into a business.

By breaking up large files of data into easily transferable bits, BitTorrent transforms the Net into the people's automat. The downloads can take overnight, but queuing up a list of torrents before bedtime has become as routine as running the dishwasher.

This has pissed off the multibillion-dollar media industry in a major way. Because BitTorrent exists in the decentralized open-source community, there's no one behind it to sue. So, instead, the lawyers are going after users. In November, a thirty-eight-year-old man in Hong Kong was sentenced to three months in prison for using BitTorrent to upload copyright-protected movies -- the first file-sharer ever to go behind bars.

Though Cohen doesn't endorse piracy, he says nothing can stop the march of progress. "The model of selling data on physical media is going to melt," he says. "The content-distribution industry deserves to go away. It's obsolete. It has no business existing."

Cohen is an unlikely anti-hero. After a troubled childhood in Manhattan, he diagnosed himself with Asperger's Syndrome, a mild form of autism marked by feverishly narrow interests and an inability to read social cues. Cohen lost himself in puzzles and computers. After two years in college he dropped out to join the hacker underground.

For an early version of BitTorrent, Cohen lured testers by offering free porn and Grateful Dead bootlegs. Despite the ensuing avalanche of interest, he says he never considered how his program would be used. "I wrote BitTorrent because it's a technically difficult thing to do," he says. "There are other people who care a whole fuckload more about what people might do with it."

Lately, more people are coming around to his way of thinking. Hollywood execs are meeting with Cohen to see how they may exploit his wares. And artists are tapping the grass-roots potential of the technology. The Decemberists used BitTorrent to spread a music video into the viral community. "We owe a tremendous amount of our success to file-sharing," says singer Colin Meloy. "It drew people to our shows. People who take an antagonistic approach to BitTorrent are just making the situation worse. You have to embrace it as a reality."

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