BitTorrent & Internet Archive Offer More Than 1.8 M Free Books, Music, Movies, and More

[Wilhelm]

BitTorrent Inc. and Internet Archive form partnership to make over 1.8 million pieces of licensed, legal archived content and cultural artifacts available to the world.

This past August BitTorrent Inc. and the Internet Archive teamed up to make the latter’s vast collection of content more accessible to the public, and the result has been staggering.

The Internet Archive, founded in 1996, is a non-profit that was founded to build an Internet library, with the purpose of offering permanent access for researchers, historians, and scholars to historical collections that exist in digital format.

It has a historical web collection (the Wayback Machine) of over 150 billion web pages, about 240,000 movies, over 500,000 audio items (including over 70,000 live concerts), over 1,800,000 texts, 1600 education items, and over 30,000 software items that now, thanks to BitTorrent Inc., are more accessible than ever before thanks to the speed and reliability that BitTorrent offers.

“I supported the original creation of BitTorrent because I believe in building technology to make it easy for communities to share what they have,” said John Gilmore, founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation. “The Archive is helping people to understand that BitTorrent isn’t just for ephemeral or dodgy items that disappear from view in a short time. BitTorrent is a great way to get and share large files that are permanently available from libraries like the Internet Archive.”

The amount of content offered by the Internet Archive is over a petabyte – 25 times the size of the available titles on Netflix, and 31 times the number of available titles on Hulu.

The number of torrents offered by the Internet Archive clocks in at 1,892,183 at press time, and that number is only going to get much, much larger over time.

Why is the number so important? Because, as BitTorrent Inc. notes, it “has  the potential to change the way knowledge works online, it opens the world of content and shared cultural history up to everyone with a connection. The Internet is on-demand TV and music, and it’s more. The Internet is your library.”

With the power of BitTorrent libraries and archives worldwide can now distribute public materials quickly, efficiently, and inexpensively.