Is Torrenting legal or illegal?

What is your stance on torrenting?

Torrenting as a means of data transfer is legal, obtaining copyrighted material through it is illegal.

not that that's ever going to stop me lmao

Spherical Ice said:

Torrenting as a means of data transfer is legal, obtaining copyrighted material through it is illegal.

Click to expand...

This, really. Simple as that. It's treated as illegal because the overwhelming majority of people who use it do end up using it to obtain copyrighted materials.

The real issue with torents isn't as much the download of illegal content, but rather the fact, that it makes you offer the same data you just downloaded to others who are also downloading the same thing at the same time. The whole thing was designed to reduce traffic for the mirrors that you download from.

There's usually an option in the torrent client that allows you to turn off that kind of data sharing, though.

I only used a torrent once when I wanted to download an album from ocremix. So it wasn't even illegal.

not that i'll ever stop but the only reason I do it is because the music i listen to is not on available on the itunes store

Downloading warez, pirated music, pirated programs, ripped movies and pirated apps would consider illegal as you don't pay for them and other people would already pay and share illegally.

i know some have used torrents to get songs that are outside of there itunes region i know in the past you couldnt purchase overseas songs/albums of some stuff ive \even downloaded lvo live songs of which some i have the actual CD for now but not all

Torrenting is about as legal as streaming so my point is, it doesn't matter how you do something but what you're doing.

e.g. you can download a torrent for a linux distro which is perfectly fine vs downloading a torrent with pirated content. Similarly with streaming it's legal on netflex but there are illegal srreaming sites too.

Depends on what you use it for really.

Torrenting is great for downloading files if a mirror's server is either too slow or just flat out down. This works great for Linux distros, which come from trustworthy sources most of the time. However, I very much condemn the practice of using torrents to download content illegally or unlawfully.

CUTIEFLY!!! said:

Depends on what you use it for really.

Click to expand...

Care to expand on that, perhaps? :)

Tsutarja said:

Torrenting is great for downloading files if a mirror's server is either too slow or just flat out down. This works great for Linux distros, which come from trustworthy sources most of the time. However, I very much condemn the practice of using torrents to download content illegally or unlawfully.

Care to expand on that, perhaps? :)

Click to expand...

Well obviously downloading anything illegal through it is illegal, but I feel like there are good uses for it too, like getting things that existed on sites that have been taken down for instance.

I think that its illegal but as many people does so we can't stop not using so.

It's objectively legal as a process, but can be used to obtain content illegally. There's no real stance to have on it.

Well... if you use it to obtain copyrighted material, then this has to be considered as an illegal use.
If you use it just as a way to transfer files, then no.
Free Linux distros official websites (for example Ubuntu) offer the opportunity to use torrent as a download option for people who maybe don't have a very fast internet connection and so they aren't able to download the file in just one single run, in this way they can download it bit by bit.

Torrent it's just a mean of data transfer and as such, it's not illegal.

Pretty much the general of everything stated here so far. Torrenting is just a means of transmitting information; what you transmit and whether you have the permission to do it are the core issue, but in that sense it is not any different than eg.: physical disc copying, or streaming.


Much as it can, in theory, be considered illegal to obtain such things as games via torrents, I do think it is the overall best way to obtain them that the market has to offer: it is safer, simpler, stabler, cheaper, more efficient and self-failproofed compared to most other means, even buying directly from the licensor. The disc comes with DRM or even viruses, as was the case with Sony, whereas the people who take the work to torrent up a game usually distribute it in an actually playable way that has been tested.


When it comes to stuff like Linux distros, or big data packets (for example, torrenting scientific data for simulations across universities), torrenting offers also a number of advantages over other means, though I think the most important one is, by far, that it promotes a culture of collaboration and communal welfare that our technological marketplace desperately needs to adopt again.

Torrent =/= piracy, its just a medium for users to download files more easily. Its the content that's being downloaded, that makes it illegal. If its copyrighted stuff & you don't own it, then downloading it for free, via torrent, is illegal. I think the laws vary from country to country.

What you do inside your torrent client is important, because that's managed by a decentralized list of servers. Once you start the download of the actual file you want to get to, you end up downloading little pieces of the file from a bunch of people, so when you download stuff through the torrent protocol, there's no real way to stay completely safe.

That being said though, it still one of the most effective P2P protocols in the world.

Pika Pika :chu:

Technically it's illegal...but who's going to stop me!

I have this app that I use download movie torrents. I also download free music from sketchy websites hehe.