The creators of Bit Torrent have been eager to eliminate their technology's automatic association with piracy as they seek to woo legit vendors (and actually make money from their creation). Cuddling up to the entertainment industry, the company has struck a deal with four independent studios after penning a major deal with Warner Brothers. Bit Torrent is building a video store, and this latest deal will add some 1700 independent titles to the catalog.

As the centerpiece of this legitimizing effort, Bram Cohen recently released the latest version of his Bit Torrent client, which focuses on ISPs caching content to avoid the increasingly common practice of throttling all bandwidth available for the application. Of course ISPs won't cache pirated content, and users continue to use third-party Bit Torrent clients to get their pirated content fix.

Cohen will at least get a financial reward for his revolutionary idea - provided ISPs such as Canada's Shaw (see previous discussion here) make exceptions in their packet shaping guidelines to avoid throttling all Bit Torrent traffic.