Startup Employee of the Month May 2008

You may not have heard his name but millions of music pirates would struggle to get by without Bram Cohen. The 32-year-old New York native revolutionized the internet in 2001 through the development of BitTorrent technology, which makes file sharing fast and efficient. Today Cohen's StartUp, which shares a name with the technology he developed, is a world leader in the file sharing business. Did the father of three anticipate the level of success enjoyed by the technology? “My aim was to change the way people exchanged information over the internet but I didn’t predict how a role it was going to play,” he said. Unlike Swedish file sharing site The Pirate Bay, Cohen has avoided any brushes with the law. “It’s completely legal to create technical solutions. The reason people get dragged into legal proceedings is that they break copyright laws, which I have never done. “On the contrary, we can help the entertainment industry by allowing them to move their programmes and films to the internet and make older material available so people can see it when they want,” said Cohen.