Understanding Torrents

With all this talk recently about Sopa, Acta, Cispa, or whatever acronym you choose, It’s always important to understand both sides of this “internet war”.

The short answers is no. torrents are no where near illegal, nor are they likely to ever be. When someone says their torrenting something it’s just a means of downloading something. Just as you stream a youtube video from a .flv format you download a torrent in a .torrent format. So you maybe wondering why a torrent then?

When people torrent, it’s organized in a P2P or Peer to Peer system. A Peer to peer system is when you start the torrent, you’re downloading it from everybody that has downloaded it, and is now uploading it (a Seeder) Or people who are downloading it, and are also uploading it (a Peer), the people who download, and don’t upload are the rechard leechers.

So this still leaves us unanswered with why torrenting. The reason torrenting is used so often is because it isn’t pinned onto a single site or server. a .torrent tells you where all the peers are for you to start downloading, the .torrent file isn’t the file you’re downloading. In fact, it’s 100% legal to have a .torrent file, what it gives you may not be legal.

Does Torrenting have to be with illegal files?

Of course not silly. Lets say you have a photo album on your computer you want to share with grandma, well instead of getting each photo and sending them to some cloud sharing site, you could just make a .torrent file from the photos and grandma could download it for her to laugh and see time with the family. You upload, she downloads, simple as that.