How to Legally Download Torrents
Piracy is not only the infringement of copyrights but also illegal. A massive number of torrent users download huge amounts of legal and illicit information on the Internet. Torrenting which uses the BitTorrent protocol is not in itself unsafe or unlawful. It only offers the means to share files.
There are plenty of legal grounds to torrent, and the internet gives an opportunity to legal downloaders to get freeware, music and other download content. According to Quora, the law discriminates on account of what you are downloading. If you download non-copyrighted material, then the use of these websites is entirely legal. However, it is illegal to download torrents with copyrighted content.
Legal Torrenting
Several websites are dedicated to legal torrent downloads. Some of these sites may be limited in scope, but others contain almost everything. For the latter consider the following;
Archive.org
This site is an online library of software, movies, websites, music and much more. The non-profit site contains massive files which can be torrented and which are part of public domain, licensed under creative commons, or generated by the user community.
Legit torrents
With almost everything, it aims to be the best and the biggest legal torrent tracker. It allows users to search torrents through filtering by status and category whether or not peers are seeding the file on the network. It is particularly useful for downloading software. If you exactly know what you want, just type the keywords, and you are there.
Caution and Consequences
As long as the item is copyrighted and you do not own it, then downloading it freely via torrent is illegal. Copyright is registered to an individual or organization that creates something. Copyright laws depend on a particular country and vary from one country to another. Legal hazards include criminal prosecutions which may attract huge fines or a jail term.
According to Tripwire, caution is advised when torrenting as the law does not care if you did not know that the content was copyrighted or not during prosecution. Remember that even when downloading torrents legally, it might not appear that way to your internet service provider, they may see peer to peer traffic and assume that you are doing an illegal activity.
It is advisable to consult if you are not sure of the copyrights of what you want to download. Recently, tracking of pirates has been outsourced to copyright trolls who locate users downloading copyrighted material illegally through their IP addresses.
Whether it is software, music, movies, or anything else – there is a torrent for everything, what remains important is the copyright of the content of the torrents that makes the act illegal, not the torrent protocol.
