Bram Cohen, the developer behind the BitTorrent phenomenon, has stated many times that BitTorrent is not designed for piracy. Considering the way his protocol is designed, this is actually very true. Like his website says, if you have a great, legitimate product that you wish to distribute to the masses, BitTorrent is the way to go.

For example, say company "X" just developed a killer open source software application that everyone is going to want. Now, let us assume this application is very large - say 150 megabytes. Let us further assume that thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands of individuals are going to want this free, open source product. Before the advent of BitTorrent, company "X" would have to spend a considerably amount of money on bandwidth to accommodate such a demand. However, BitTorrent solves this problem by distributing the upload and download responsibilities to the masses.

In this respect, BitTorrent works wonderfully. However, it has also evolved where digital pirates take advantage of this protocol to distribute warez of all types. From a distribution perspective, the protocol efficiently propagates large files across the Internet. However, finding torrent files is the tricky part. The individual is required to venture to various torrent-indexing sites to find the file he or she wishes.

This method does work rather well, however web-based trackers have been known to have a limited life span, thanks to the enforcement efforts of the MPAA. Because of this, distributed trackers and searchability efforts are beginning to take root.

Azureus was the first BitTorrent application to establish the "trackerless" concept. By applying a DHT (Distributed Hash Table) on top of the existing BitTorrent network, individuals could continue to download files even if the tracker went off line. The DHT layer creates a virtual index of torrent files that allows for the continuation of swarmed downloads and will also find additional sources.

The Socialized.Net furthered this concept by adding a search plug-in to the Azureus client. It does not search the Azureus' DHT index, however does search a sub-network called TSN (The Social Net.) Users are required to run a daemon to participate on this sub-network.

Several days ago, BitTorrent creator Bram Cohen developed his own DHT layer to the official client. Although establishing web based trackers to distribute files are less expensive then hosting the file outright, it still can be a costly affair. The latest version of BitTorrent allows the individual to skip the tracker part of the equation and publish the file directly to the BitTorrent community. All one needs is a website to advertise the file and an Internet connection.