The Post’s Dave Hendricks interviewed Ashwin Navin, president and CEO of BitTorrent Inc., on file sharing and the recording industry’s lawsuits against students.

BitTorrent is a peer-to-peer file-sharing program. BitTorrent Inc. is a company founded by Navin, formerly of Yahoo!, and Bram Cohen, who wrote the BitTorrent file sharing protocol.

Navin said he wasn’t able to attend the panel discussion because he’s pinned down working on BitTorrent’s new Japanese subsidiary.

Post: How did you learn about the P2P ban at Ohio University last spring and what led you to write an editorial for CNet (a technology news Web site) against that policy?
Navin: I’ve never been to Ohio University, but I imagine it has ambitions to be a world-class higher educational facility. The last thing you want in a higher education facility is fear of new technology, new ideas and developments. In a way, by banning a really important technology — a technology many people depend on to bring their content and their expression to market — you may be censoring the content that’s made available with that technology. I think the university has an obligation to be the first place to experiment with new technology that the rest of the world could benefit from.

Post: What has been your experience with Audible Magic?
Navin: I think the content recognition technologies can be used to control and restrict, but they can also be used to enable new business models and provide more access and value creation. In the extent that they’re used in the latter, that’s great.

Post: What is your analysis of the impact of the recording industry’s lawsuits on universities?
Navin: I think that copyright holders have to look after their property and I think that they stand to benefit more from embracing technologies … rather than an approach of litigation and regulation. Embracing the audiences and monetizing those audiences wherever they are is probably the best model for the music industry.

Post: Most BitTorrent traffic violates copyright law. Do you see this changing?
Navin: I believe that given the way BitTorrent has been architected right from the beginning, the vast majority of traffic on BitTorrent will be legitimate over time — and that could be as soon as the end of next year. I think that big media companies also realize that piracy not only undermines all other business models but it potentially is providing the best experience for their content and so they have to mimic piracy in order to beat it.

Post: From my understanding what Comcast is actually doing is delaying or disconnecting BitTorrent transfers. Is that what’s going on?
Navin: We have verified that in certain geographies that Comcast will send what’s called a connection reset packet to BitTorrent users if they’re uploading and sharing for long periods of time. So that’s what we’ve been able to verify. And in fact, it’s if they’re uploading for a significant period of time longer than they’re downloading.

Post: What are your thoughts on (Comcast’s interference with BitTorrent traffic)?
Navin: There’s an interesting situation that ISPs face — a lot of their consumers who have a broadband want to use their broadband connections in a variety of way. People are also participating in media distribution in ways that they haven’t in the past … and most importantly they’re also sharing content — they’re acting as distributors. The way the networks have been implemented are in direct conflict with all of those trends and ISPs are going to face some scaling problems as applications evolve that tax those connections. So what you see between BitTorrent and Comcast is actually a symptom of a larger problem.