Wired News is reporting that whiz kid inventor Bram Cohen and a small cadre of developers and entrepreneurs are in the final stage of launching an advertising-supported search engine dedicated to cataloging and indexing the thousands of movies, music tracks, software programs and other files for download over Cohen's popular BitTorrent protocol.
The service was briefy available at https://search.bittorrent.com until late last night after Slashdot readers commented about it's location, after which it was taken offline, it now defaults to an Apache Web Server page.
The service will no doubt be popluar to a horde of ex-napster/kazaa users who illegally trade music and movies online, but in the end, the content industries may find the BitTorrent search engine too useful to mess with. "The copyright owners can now identify the most-trafficked materials that are infringing their copyrights and go after them in a more efficient way," says Lemley. "It's kind of ironic."
View: Article, Next for BitTorrent: Search @ Wired News
