BitTorrents

There's something I noticed: more and more people use torrents every day. Torrents are considered illegal by most people. Most people think that torrents are illegal. It's like the Pirate Bay, LimeWire. They all use torrents. But some people, when asking the police or someone else, are told that torrents aren't actually illegal; and that is correct. I'm going to explain to you when it becomes illegal and why it's not illegal.

Torrents are just ways of sending files over the internet. I've gotten a little printout here that has a few notes I've taken. First of all, Bram Cohen designed the protocol called BitTorrent in April 2001, and he first released it on July 2nd, 2001. So, it's been around for a few years. BitTorrent is a peer-to-peer file sharing protocol. It has nothing to do with going to google.com and downloading a file; it's different than that in many ways.

What it's mainly used for is distributing files that are either large or distributing them from a site that has so many visitors and so many hits, and so little bandwidth, that they don't have to suffer through that. The way it works is one person initially shares his or her file; then someone else comes along and starts downloading that file. Every person who's downloading this file then allows other people to download the file from them.

So say you have a random person. They start giving out a file; that's called seeding. They're seeding a file. Then someone else comes along and starts downloading that file from that person. Then another person comes along and wants to download that file. He can get it from both the person who's downloading and the person who originally seeded, because the person who's downloading is most likely seeding as well.

Once you get a ton of people seeding and people with different parts of the file from this original person, this file gets thrown around on the internet and it's on random computers sitting here, and they're not just on a website that originally gave you the torrent. This is why torrents are sometimes faster. Say there's a site like thepiratebay.org; they probably get about five hits, maybe 50 hits a second. I actually have no idea, but they're hosting some cheap place that might not have so much bandwidth. If everyone all the time was downloading files from their site, their site would always be down and would never work.

But since they give you out torrents for all their files and stuff they're sharing, that makes it so you're not just downloading from them; you're downloading from 20 other people somewhere out there. So thepiratebay.org mostly has legal torrents. Torrents can be used for sharing any type of file, though. They can be used for sharing a version of Linux from an overused server. They could be used for open-source software of any kind. We could even make backups of our software if we want to.

Torrents are just used in other places for illegal downloads because then the people giving you these torrents don't have to work as hard. You don't have to pay as much money for bandwidth, which is kind of lame, but it's how it works. So, why is torrenting stuff illegal?

Well, torrenting, say a program like, I don't know, iLife for instance, or iWork. If you torrent iWork, it's no different than going to a site and downloading iWork and using it for free. It becomes illegal when you're getting a piece of software that you'd have to pay for, for free, or when you're not paying the person who originally distributed the software.

So, torrenting files that would be illegal anyway is the illegal part. Torrents themselves are totally legal and, in my opinion, a pretty nice thing. Anyone who's seeding a torrent could seed you false information. Luckily, there are so many people normally seeding that you wouldn't be getting a whole false file. But here are some estimates: 35% of all internet traffic in 2004 was BitTorrents. Now that's pretty amazing.

I think I have a number somewhere; it's like 1.7 petabytes or something in that area of data is being torrented. Let me just look that up real quickly because it's amazing. Torrents aren't all illegal, but...