Again during a discussion at the New Video Summit today, Bram Cohen of BitTorrent had some harsh words on the old Napster, which he describes as a system that was built from the ground up to promote piracy. On the other hand, Bram defends that some people started pirating stuff using BitTorrent, not because it was particularly suitable to piracy, "as it has no anonymity feature whatsoever in its design", but just because it's cheap to distribute content using BitTorrent.

Major studios and the like did not start using BitTorrent mostly out of stigma from what happened with Napster. So Napster made this technology which was actually quite piracy focused. It was like really specifically enabling a certain process for people pirating things and was fairly custom tailor to that. While BitTorrent is just a thing that integrates with the Web really nicely. Also when Napster collided with recording studios, the attitude was kind of like "screw you, we're sticking it to the man" which is not a very good way to conduct business. :-)