BitTorrent Assigned Patent

BitTorrent (Bittorrent Marketing GmbH), San Francisco, CA has been assigned a patent (8,522,073) developed by Bram Cohen, Mill Valley, CA, for a “distributed storage of recoverable data.”

The abstract of the patent published by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office states: “A system, method, and computer program product replace a failed node storing data relating to a portion of a data file. An indication of a new storage node to replace the failed node is received at each of a plurality of available storage nodes. The available storage nodes each contain a plurality of shares generated from a data file. These shares may have been generated based on pieces of the data file using erasure coding techniques. A replacement share is generated at each of the plurality of available storage nodes. The replacement shares are generated by creating a linear combination of the shares at each node using random coefficients. The generated replacement shares are then sent from the plurality of storage nodes to the indicated new storage node. These replacement shares may later be used to reconstruct the data file.”

The patent application was filed on Feb. 3, 2010(12/699,670).