I should preface this by letting you know that the act of torrenting itself is not illegal, it is specifically the content which is downloaded that could make you torrenting something illegal. People that have downloaded copyrighted material through torrenting have been arrested and owners/operators of sites that support torrents containing copyrighted material have also been arrested. However, more often than not downloading copyrighted material could lead to a stern letter from the Recording Industry Association of America(RIAA) or Motion Picture Association of America(MPAA) or potential lawsuits from the aforementioned Associations.
Think of BitTorrent as a way of transmitting files across the internet; a torrent as an indivdual file; torrenting as the act of downloading files. Files that are transmitted can vary in size from a single .jpg which is a couple of kB's in size to entire video libraries which can be hundreds of GB's in size. With the speeds that BitTorrent is capable of, a full movie will take a few minutes to download given there are enough people sharing the file. Sharing the file is not only uploading a file to be downloaded but also supporting that file after you upload it so others can download that same file, you in this case would be a seeder while the person trying to download that file would be a leecher. If you upload a file to a tracker site and do not in turn seed that file then nobody will be able to download it but if you upload it and seed then others can download from it and become seeders as well, after they have finished the download. This video gives not only a basic overview of BitTorrent, it also double as one of the worst commercial advertisements ever made.
With a basic understanding of what BitTorrent does and also the concept of needing seeders to allow downloads for leechers, let's discuss how to get started with torrents. There are mimimal hardware capabilities required for torrenting with possibly only a hard drive large enough for your downloaded files, an inexpensive external hard drive will work just fine for this. What you will need to make torrenting possible is a torrent client, of which µTorrent is currently the most popular outside of China. After you have a torrent client that enables the file sharing, you need to know where to look to get files that you can torrent. The Pirate Bay is one of the most widely known magnet link sites which we will label a public tracker meaning anyone can access it. The process after finding a torrent you like is as follows: click the download link to have that file load in your client; click the button to accept that torrent being added to your client; opening the file after the torrent has finished downloading; an optional step may be needing to unzip the file so you can access it. Public trackers will give you a huge selection of content to choose from with an equally as large number of peers seeding and leeching, the downside to public trackers is that there can be a public record of what your IP address has downloaded. A more secure way of torrenting would be from private trackers which usually require signing up, and in more elite private trackers, the need to be invited.
Acceptance into private trackers could also require proof that you are not only familiar with
torrenting, but you are also a person that seeds more than you
leech, or ratio requirements. Private trackers give a little more piece of
mind but they can have wait times associated with downloads, not have
enough seeders for downloads or just not have a particular download you
are looking for. I feel that is more than enough to give an overview of what
exactly torrenting is, next time I will get into the more advanced terms
and options associated with torrenting.
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