Go back to torrents

Vaibhav Sharma

Despite the fact that torrent traffic accounts for a large percentage of the world’s total Internet traffic, torrents have acquired a bad name for themselves. The word is considered synonymous with piracy and illegal downloads. However, torrenting isn’t illegal, just as simply driving a car on the road isn’t criminal. If you use the car to ferry drugs, that is a crime. Similarly, if you download copyrighted material via torrents, that ought to be unlawful. The technology itself is wonderful as it allows anyone to distribute large files across the world without spending lots on money creating servers and infrastructure.

How torrents work

When you download a file from a website, your computer connects to the server associated with that portal and downloads the data directly from that server to your device.

Torrents, on the other hand, work on the BitTorrentprotocol, which is a peer-to-peer technology that lets a group of computers transfer data between each other without the need for a central server. This creates one big swarm of computers from where BitTorrent clients such as µTorrent download and assemble the file on your computer. The old way of joining such a swarm was by loading a .torrent file into the client. According to howtogeek.com, it then contacts a “tracker” specified in the .torrent file which is a special server that keeps track of the connected computers. The tracker shares their IP addresses with other BitTorrent clients in the swarm, allowing them to connect to each other.

Decentralised and hard to block

After authorities started cracking down on such trackers which were often run by pirate websites, a new mode of sharing with magnet links has become popular. This method involves using Distributed Hash Table (DHT) technology, that lets each BitTorrent client function as a DHT node. According to the portal, the DHT node contacts nearby nodes and those other nodes contact other nodes until they locate the information about the torrent and begin the download. This results in a system where there is no central server management, and BitTorrent becomes a fully decentralised peer-to-peer file transfer system. The authorities are thus left with no individual target, and this makes blocking torrents that much harder.

Seeders and leechers

Once online, the client downloads bits of files from different computers all across the world. Once it has a sizeable sum, despite not having the complete file yet it starts to upload the data to other users so that they can also download the missing pieces of the file. Therefore, everyone downloading a torrent is also at the same time uploading it. While you download a file, you are either a ‘leecher’ or a ‘peer’, but when you have the complete file and still continue to run the client for other people’s benefit, you become a ‘seeder’. Each torrent file must have at least one seeder, otherwise it won’t be possible to download it as no one would have the complete file.

Is torrenting illegal?

While being infamous for piracy, BitTorrent is also used across the world for all sorts of legal applications. For example, a gaming company called Blizzard distributes its games via torrents, saving thousands of dollars in server costs, which, say, a 7GB game installer would entail.

BitTorrent, Inc., the company responsible for developing BitTorrent as a protocol, is working on a plethora of applications such as a syncing application that securely synchronises files between several computers by transferring the files directly via BitTorrent, and a BitTorrent Live experiment that uses the BitTorrent protocol to help broadcast live, streaming video, leveraging the power of BitTorrent to stream live video to large numbers of people without the current bandwidth requirements. Some versions of the open source operating system Linux are also distributed via torrents.

Legal loopholes

Even websites that serve as directory for piracy related torrents claim to not offend the law by not hosting the file themselves. They state that even if they ran a tracking server, no file was actually downloaded from it as the real data flowed from one user to another. The content owners on the converse argue that even that amounts to aiding and abetting piracy, and should, therefore, be punishable.

The newer magnet link system to an extent counters this submission too, as the stance now is that they no longer even run tracking servers, so how could they aid or abet anything? That said, law makers across the world are quickly moving to plug all these legal loopholes of sorts and making any sort of involvement with pirated content explicitly illegal.