"AXXo You Are a God" The secrets of BitTorrent's top movie pirate.

BitTorrent is TiVo for the tech-savvy and the ethically flexible—a way to watch what you want when you want it without having to pay for it. Instead of flipping through the channels or putting on a DVD, you can head for the Web to grab pirated digital copies of whatever movies and television shows you want. As you might expect, downloaders gravitate to popcorn flicks and nerd-friendly TV fare—among the top search phrases on one BitTorrent search engine are Quantum of Solace, Max Payne, Saw V, Heroes, Prison Break, and Fringe. But the No. 1 search query isn't a movie title or the name of a TV show. Rather, it's the name of BitTorrent's top uploader: aXXo.

No matter what metric you choose, aXXo is BitTorrent's biggest name. The editor of the blog TorrentFreak, a 28-year-old from the Netherlands who goes by the nom de Web Ernesto, says that his weekly chart of the 10 most pirated films on BitTorrent is essentially a compilation of aXXo's latest releases. That includes last week's top four: Tropic Thunder, Wall-E, The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian, and Kung Fu Panda. Exactly how popular are aXXo's movies? Ernesto says that the most popular aXXo titles get 500,000 to 1 million downloads per week. Eric Garland, the CEO of download-tracking firm BigChampagne, says that on a recent, randomly selected day, a remarkable 33.5 percent of the movies downloaded on BitTorrent were aXXo torrents. (The next closest competitor, FXG, is responsible for a mere 8.9 percent of movie downloads.) To judge by the fawning comments on the torrent aggregator Mininova—"i dont know what to do without you axxo," "Tks aXXo! I wish you were my father!," "axxo you are a god"—the Web is teeming with satisfied customers. That god theme is common. Last year, TorrentFreak published an aXXo prayer that begins, "Our Ripper, who art on Mininova / aXXo be thy name."

BitTorrent, as Paul Boutin explained in a 2004 Slate piece, is the smartest file-sharing mechanism yet conceived by man. Downloading something from a single source can be slow and unreliable. BitTorrent speeds things up by grabbing pieces of the file—aka torrent—from lots of different sources. The cleverest thing about the BitTorrent protocol, though, is its sharing scheme. As you're downloading, your computer simultaneously uploads the chunks of the file you've already received to others who still need them. The more popular the file, the more people share it, and the sooner your download will finish.