Bram Cohen says the right things, and that political gift has saved his hide. By consistently and frequently decrying unauthorized file-sharing, Cohen has aligned himself with the interests of Hollywood, even as his software creation has facilitated unpaid movie downloads on a colossal scope. Repeated estimates assign one-third of all Internet traffic to Bit Torrent transfers, and although there is no measurement of authorized vs. unauthorized files, even a conservative assessment of infringing shares would be staggering.

Despite Cohen's valued contribution to quick and semi-anonymous file-sharing, and despite daringly producing his own torrent search engine at Bittorrent.com, Cohen has coasted clear of prosecution. Perhaps, recognizing him as a latter-day Shawn Fanning, Hollywood wishes to skip over the costly litigative phase and go directly to the deal-making. Today saw the first installment of that deal. In a joint press conference with MPAA chief Dan Glickman at the American Film Institute, Cohen agreed to a platter of demands, while continuing to mouth the platitudes that have spared him harsher punishment. the deal is that Cohen must facilitate any MPAA takedowns of unauthorized tracking sites located via Bittorrent.com, and, furthermore, must block search results that link to unauthorized content.

This is how I interpret what the MPAA really said today: "We could crush BitTorrent.com because it is functionally identical to other torrent search engines that we have crushed. We want to be friends with Bram Cohen because he utters politically correct statements. Therefore we are neutering his search engine instead of crushing it."

Two important points:

First, I don't anticipate the upcoming blocking to work particularly well, considering how dispersed is torrent sharing. Remember the court injunction that required the original Napster to block unauthorized content? Napster simply gave up without even trying. I speculate that this time, the deal is more important than the results; everyone knows Cohen cannot block unauthorized search results, so much looking the other way will occur while the relationship continues to build. At the moment, the Bittorrent.com search engine rolls merrily along, delivering plenty of downloadable results for every movie and TV title I enter into it.

Second, who the heck uses Bittorrent.com anyway? With ThePirateBay and many other engines in operation, this announcement is pure window dressing. It bookmarks a relationship between Cohen and the MPAA without making any actual news.