Bram Cohen

As of 2008, Cohen lives in the San Francisco Bay Area, United States, with his wife Jenna and their three children.

By mid-2005, BitTorrent, Inc. was funded by venture capitalist David Chao from Doll Capital Management, and in late 2005 Cohen and Navin made a deal with the MPAA to remove links to illegal content on the official BitTorrent website. The deal was with the seven largest studios in America. The agreement means the site will comply with procedures outlined in the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.

By 2004, he had left Valve and formed BitTorrent, Inc. with his brother Ross Cohen and business partner Ashwin Navin. In 2012 he announced a beta-version of BitTorrent Live for TV broadcasting through the Internet. Cohen left BitTorrent, Inc. in a day to day capacity to co-found Chia.Network in the fall of 2017.

In late 2003, Cohen had a short career at Valve working on Steam, their digital distribution system introduced for Half-Life 2.

In the summer of 2002, Cohen collected free pornography to lure beta testers to use the program. BitTorrent gained its fame for its ability to quickly share large music and movie files online. Cohen has claimed he has never violated copyright law using his software. Regardless, he is outspoken in his belief that the current media business was doomed to being outmoded despite the RIAA and MPAA's legal or technical tactics, such as digital rights management. In May 2005, Cohen released a trackerless beta version of BitTorrent.

In April 2001, Cohen quit MojoNation and began work on BitTorrent. Cohen unveiled his novel ideas at the first CodeCon conference, which he and his roommate Len Sassaman created as a showcase event for novel technology projects after becoming disillusioned with the state of technology conferences. It remains an event for those seeking information about new directions in software, though BitTorrent continues to lay claim to the title of "most famous presentation".

Cohen grew up in the Upper West Side of Manhattan, New York City as the son of a teacher and computer scientist. He claims he learned the BASIC programming language at the age of 5 on his family's Timex Sinclair computer. Cohen passed the American Invitational Mathematics Examination to qualify for the United States of America Mathematical Olympiad (USAMO) while he attended Stuyvesant High School in New York City. He graduated from Stuyvesant in 1993 and attended SUNY Buffalo. He later dropped out of college to work for several dot com companies throughout the mid to late 1990s, the last being MojoNation, an ambitious but ill-fated project he worked on with Jim McCoy.

Bram Cohen (born October 12, 1975) is an American computer programmer, best known as the author of the peer-to-peer (P2P) BitTorrent protocol, as well as the first file sharing program to use the protocol, also known as BitTorrent. He is also the co-founder of CodeCon and organizer of the San Francisco Bay Area P2P-hackers meeting, and was the co-author of Codeville.