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Torrents are an easy way to download large files to your computer without taking the whole day. Most Internet users download small files every day. These files only take a few seconds or minutes to complete on a broadband connection. For larger files, however, torrents are a much better option but some people may have heard that torrents are of questionable legality.

 

Before we get into the details of whether or not a torrent is legal or not it may help to explain what a torrent is. ‘Torrent’ is the shortened term for BitTorrent, a peer-to-peer file sharing protocol that can be used to send and receive massive amounts of data. It allows users to receive and send this data without all the resource strain that would normally be required. Even a web host would have trouble handling the amount of data flow produced by a torrent but this protocol makes it a simple task.

 

Torrents work by users sharing their files with one another over a broadband connection. First a user called a seed makes a file available on the network. People connected to the network, called peers, can download the seed file. As more peers request the same file their computer receives a different piece of data from the seed. Once multiple peers have multiple pieces of the seed, the torrent protocol allows those peers to become a source for those portions of the file taking some of the strain away from the seed. In this way the task of downloading is distributed amongst the seed and the peers.

 

This saves everyone a lot of bandwidth while making it easier to download. Even if some of the peers or seeds are offline the file can still be downloaded from the others still online. Torrents have a built-in redundancy system and the more people are downloading and sharing the file the faster the download occurs.

 

The legal issue surrounding torrents is not with the sharing of files. There are no laws that prevent people from sharing their files with one another. The legal issues are concerned with the illicit distribution of copyright material over torrents. For anyone that has used torrents it is no surprise that one can find music, movies, games, software, books and lots of other copyright material available for download. By downloading this material users are effectively taking away the money the content producers would have earned from a sale of that content.

 

So does this make torrents illegal? The answer is not as simple as yes or no. Rather the answer is dependent on what the user was downloading using the torrent. In fact many software companies offer updates to their software on torrents as it makes them easier to download. How a person uses their broadband connection and torrents is not the torrent protocol’s fault or the torrent client’s responsibility – it is the user’s responsibility

 

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