As BitTorrent becomes ever more popular, David Crookes looks at the battles against file sharers, the legalities of downloads and the best software.
There is an irritating, oft-trotted mantra that guns do not kill people, rather people kill people using guns. It's a very skewed slogan, which is roundly - and humorously - scorned on the online Urban Dictionary and in wider real life as it seeks to exploit the idea of the gun as a mere tool that merely performs the particular function asked of it by the operator.
For those who use BitTorrent, a similar argument is put forward. BitTorrent is not the reason for piracy, so the point of view goes, people who use it are. But at least there is merit in this. And that's because for all of the brickbats that are thrown at BitTorrent and for all of the accusations of piracy, it does have many potential good uses. The only problem is that the bad uses get so much of the publicity.
The music and film industries have long scorned BitTorrent for allowing people to download free music. Sites such as uTorrent and the Pirate Bay, a BitTorrent hosting site billed as "the world's largest BitTorrent tracker", have long infuriated the likes of the Motion Picture Association of America and the Recording Industry Association of America by allowing people to share illegal content every day. They have blamed it for affecting their profits and disrespecting the creative output of musicians, actors and directors.
This kind of emotional blackmail has certainly helped foster a negative image of BitTorrent. Even though file sharing now makes up 6.27% of total internet bandwidth and is more popular than ever, according to Palo Alto Networks' Application Usage and Threat Report, many unnecessarily steer clear fearing that it only equates to piracy and malware.
It hasn't helped that so many companies have gone after BitTorrent users in the past, something that has led to a game of cat and mouse. Virgin Media announced in 2008 that it was going to specifically target and restrict BitTorrent traffic under a "management" policy with which the heaviest downloaders would be penalised. Lots of ISPs have followed suit to the extent that now many of them block access to torrent sites.
This has forced people to use virtual private networks to get around the ban and so, with hardcore pirates looking to avoid detection by using proxies, the entertainment industry has gone as far as hiring monitoring agencies, some of which have uploaded files that they think will be widely downloaded and implanted them with trackers that will allow them to work out just who is falling foul of the law. According to reports in publication such as the New Scientist, "anyone who has downloaded pirated music, video or ebooks using a BitTorrent client has probably had their IP address logged by copyright enforcement authorities within three hours of doing so."
And yet things appear to be changing. One of the first moves was made by the company BitTorrent, which announced its BitTorrent Bundle project in 2013. It aimed to legitimise torrents by allowing access to free content and giving artists and film makers the opportunity to bypass traditional means of distribution and go direct to paying customers. Part of the problem, the company said at the time, was that despite already having more than two million pieces of licensed and legal content in its ecosystem, people still saw it as a way to grab Game of Thrones without having to fork out for a Sky Atlantic subscription.
The first bundle was the Dada Life remix of the Kaskade track 'Dynasty' and the trailer for its Freaks of Nature tour documentary. By 2014, many major artists were using the service, from Madonna to Werner Herzog, and with lots of exclusive behind-the-scenes footage and the ease of using the service, it was increasing the number of visitors to such as extent that it was up to 100 million downloads and streams by the middle of June 2014. At the same time it also posed a direct challenge to iTunes, especially because some artists selling via BitTorrent were not making their work available on Apple's platform. It has also enabled groups like De La Soul to get around copyright claims that had been applied to their work.
The BitTorrent Bundles soared in popularity last September when a well-known musician turned to it in a blaze of glory. Thom Yorke, the lead singer of Radiohead, was releasing his solo album and, while he once decried Spotify as the last desperate fart of a dying corpse, he believed BitTorrent to be the best way to go about it. By putting a price of $6 on his album and selling it in this way, he claimed it was an attempt to bypass "the self-elected gatekeepers" of the music industry. It was immediately seized on by internet watchers as a major breakthrough.
Suddenly BitTorrent wasn't being seen as an evil at all - a tool bringing the music, game and film industry to its knees. Suddenly here was a prominent British musician heralding it as a good thing and deciding that it could be used legally, contrary to the claims that had been doing the rounds for so long. The experiment also seemed to be a resounding success, with figures suggesting Yorke had earned £13 million from the endeavour, a sum his spokeswoman later said was "totally and utterly false".
But that is beside the point. Whether or not the album did make such amounts matters little when put against the strides taken towards legitimising BitTorrents. Many creatives were hoping that it would show how BitTorrents could boost their livelihoods and, indeed, it was downloaded an impressive 4.4 million times. Figures like that make it highly likely that the experiment will be repeated.
And why not? At heart, BitTorrent is a protocol on the same lines as HTTP and FTP. File transfer protocol allows content creators to upload media for people to access and hypertext transfer protocol is the means by which files are transported to a computer and it's what allows people to view web pages in a browser.
BitTorrent is just another means of allowing quick and unlimited sharing of large files between internet users (while also being the name of a company that facilitates it). By splitting a large file into smaller bits, it is able to spread the load, so when a file is downloaded, it's pulled from multiple sources and recreated as a whole. All you need in order to facilitate this is a BitTorrent client. When you download a torrent file, data within it tells the client where it can find all of the little pieces in order to bind everything together.
BitTorrent is used by Linux users to download .iso files, and it's utilised by a host of recognisable names including Facebook and Twitter to transfer large files to thousands of locations in the shortest possible time (indeed, before Facebook began using it, Tom Cook of the company's system's engineering group, said daily code updates had proved problematic).
Without BitTorrent, the job of key services such as The Internet Archive, the organisation behind the Wayback Machine, would be made more difficult. People can use a BitTorrent to download items from the site, ranging from audio and video to ebooks and live concerts, all of which are in the public domain and so have no legal limitations placed on them.
The UK government has also found that BitTorrent Is an Inexpensive and effective method of sharing large files with the public. In June 2010, the Treasury released torrents at data.gov.uk that detailed how the previous government was spending the public's money. Even though the files were not actually that big (uncompressed they were between 32 and 78MB), officials said BitTorrent was the best way to send large files to large numbers of people across the internet, since it allows savings on bandwidth costs and it speeds up download.
This has certainly not been lost on the commercial world. Gamers seeking the likes of World of Warcraft download a BitTorrent client, and that's because Blizzard's Downloader is based on the BitTorrent open source. It allows the company to distribute content and patches. The record label Sub Pop uses BitTorrent to distribute demos and live videos. Even broadcasters have got in on the act. The Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation has allowed online BitTorrent distribution of its programming.
Legalities
So what are the legalities of using BitTorrents? As you can probably guess, using a BitTorrent client in and of itself is no more illegal than browsing on a website or using a FTP program. It all depends on what's being downloaded. This is usually very clear. If you happen on a blockbuster movie that has been released in the recent past or even ahead of it appearing in the cinema, then common sense dictates that it is illegal. There will be a copyright issue over the file, and by downloading it rather than purchasing it, you’re committing an offence.
This can lead to legal problems. Some of the major industry organisations will pursue BitTorrent downloaders through the courts, a costly and time-consuming business that would inevitably cause some stressful hair loss. But last year, the ISPs spelt out their course of action against people who are believed to be illegally downloading entertainment files.
A deal was struck between four of the UK's largest ISPs with the BPI and Motion Picture Association, which starts with a strongly worded letter and then leads to three more should any of them be ignored. This, they hope, will go some way to tackling an issue that, at the last count, has seen the average person download 2,900 music files and 90 films.
The procedure is clear. The rights holder must identify the IP address of a device being used to download files illegally, and they will do this by using software to monitor activity on torrent networks. If an alleged infringement is identified, then the rights holder is able to pass the information to the ISP in the form of a Copyright Infringement Report. The ISP will not give the rights holder any identifying information about an illegal download but it will write to them.
The number of overall letters that can be sent out by an ISP is 2.5 million, and the scheme is due to be reviewed in 2017. Should the scheme be found to be unworkable, it is likely the industries will push for sterner measures, although given that it took four years for the two sides to come to this agreement, a more permanent solution is likely to be some way off.
That doesn't mean that people can feel they can relax, throw a few letters in the bin and carry on as normal, perhaps behind a proxy, though. The moral thing to do would be to look for the legal BitTorrent websites, and there are indeed plenty of those. These will only contain files that are legal to share and download and, far from being filled with rubbish, there are some gems to be had (check our boxout for some starting points).
And yet even though these websites exist and despite there being some brilliant apps around and lots of legitimate content, some rogue services continue to spoil the party. In the last couple of weeks, Spain ordered service providers to block access to the Pirate Bay (but users simply changed their DNS settings from the one provided by the ISP to another and said OpenDNS and Google DNS worked well).
Denmark blocked popular file sharing sites such as KickassTorrents last month, alleging that they were allowing pirated downloads. Denmark had tried to block the Pirate Bay - a site that many UK ISPs will not allow access to - but it was unsuccessful. One of the problems is that BitTorrent portals can switch from one domain to another and so remain one step ahead of the ISPs and their attempts to bring them down. It frustrates anti-piracy groups like the Rights Alliance, and it also brings a badge of honour to BitTorrent portals, with one administrator telling a Torrent Freak reporter, "Blocking is the greatest thing that can happen to your site."
Even so, it remains a growing and popular distribution method. Drafthouse Films told the latest SXSW festival that it was releasing its latest feature on BitTorrent - horror-romance Spring - and the reasons for doing so are compelling. Its co-founder Tim League is quoted as saying, "There are people who want to go out, there are people who want to stay in their pyjamas and watch a movie on their laptop. I'm a big advocate of trying to make our content available wherever people are consuming content. If you're an iTunes loyalist and want to see our content there, I want it to be there. If you get your content on BitTorrent, I think it's interesting for us to be in that space as well."
Pretty soon, like the MP3 service Napster before it, torrents will be as common and as legal as all of the other methods of distribution, and the negative connotations will have slipped away. It's a good time to download a client if you haven't already done so and explore the world of files that await you out there. You may be surprised at what you will discover.
Legal Sites
Archive.org
Archive.org is perhaps the best of them all. It is sporting a brand new look and it allows you, at the time of writing, to access 1,927,494 movies, 139,330 concerts, 2,387,054 audio recordings and 7,785,213 texts. There are curators choices and reviews from users. BitLove is also growing in popularity, offering "torrentified podcasts" with an increasing number of English-speaking offerings (many of them are in German).
bt.etree.org
For those who enjoy music, bt.etree.org is a brilliant site that enables people to share live concert recordings of trade-friendly artists. This means artists who do not mind people recording their concerts in the first place. Anyone uploading content would have to scour the pages of artists and delve into what they do and don't want people to do, but you can rest assured that you would be able to download anything from the site without any legal issues coming to the surface.
LegitTorrents.info
LegitTorrents.info is also an excellent way to find torrents that are entirely legal. It has a search engine atop some suggested downloads. You can find Linux distributions (check out linuxtracker.org too if you're after these), shows, movies, music, games, anime, books and apps for Windows, Linux and Mac. There's also a forum, although it is not the most bustling. Still, this is a website that goes a long way towards proving that 'torrent' does not have to be a dirty word.
PublicDomainTorrents.info
PublicDomainTorrents.info is one of our favourites. It's not much to look at, with an appearance that comes straight from the early web, but it does have an intriguing collection of B-movies and classic films that you can view in a number of formats. Sticking with the movie theme is SXSW Torrents. It's connected to South by Southwest, a music festival that has artists playing over 100 venues across Austin Texas. The websites has thousands of songs, with more than a decade's worth of torrent files of festival talent. The entire archive is as large as 55GB, and the torrents are broken down by year.
Gameupdates.org
Finally (although you can search around for many more), Gameupdates.org is brilliant for finding legal game patches for your games. It's a community-based site that allows anyone to upload and download patches, mods and games, and the search facility should be able to locate the enhancement that you're after.
Best Software
There are many BitTorrent clients, but it's important to choose the right one. Going for a recognised name is the safest option, since there are some BitTorrent apps that contain viruses.
It's also worth bearing in mind that one of the first things you'll need to do when you download an app is set the software up. The clients open up a network port, which allows other clients to connect to your machine. Your computer will become part of the sharing network as a result, so make sure your security settings are well managed. So what should you download?
BitTorrent Client
You could go straight in and download the original BitTorrent Client at bittorrent.com. It offers free, unlimited downloading, fast delivery, a bandwidth booster and remote downloading so you can start to download something to your computer from a different location which, as the software blurb notes, is great for when you're leaving the office and getting ready to go home. There's a Pro version available too, which plays HD media inside the BitTorrent client, removes ads and provides anti-virus protection. It can also sync to many platforms from OS X to Android to Kindle Fire, Linux and more.
Vuze
Vuze is also a great choice if you want to view, publish and share top-quality video content including 1080p. It allows you to find torrents in a single click via a search engine, letting you enjoy AVI, Quicktime and Xvid files. It also lets you subscribe to content, which is great for episodic and related content. When something new appears, it will appear in the sidebar, which takes away the frustration of having to keep on top of fresh content.
Many users of Vuze love the speed of the downloads and the fact that videos play smoothly. It's possible to watch content offline and drag and drop content to an iPhone, iPod, iPad, games console and TiVo. Vuze is able to automatically detect these devices, including iTunes, so it works out the format and converts the video for you. For those who want to burn DVDs, check for viruses and remove all adverts, there is Vuze Plus.
uTorrent
uTorrent is another worthwhile download. It's a very small client that weighs in at just over a megabyte, and it runs in the background (as does Vuze), so you can get on with whatever else you're doing. What makes this app worth considering is that if gives direct access to more than 10,000 artists and two million pieces of content. All of this is entirely legal, with bundles including Tomorrow's Modem Boxes, the aforementioned new album by Thom Yorke.
If you want to view your files on a smartphone and tablet, then uTorrent allows you to download an Android app (Vuze is available for Android as well). This way you can play audio files and search for torrent files and magnet links. One thing to be careful of when downloading uTorrent, though, is its use of the OpenCandy installer. As you install it, the app recommends other programs that you may want. If you blindly follow the process, then chances are you will end up installing something you don't want. It won't ruin your computer, but it is an intrusion, and you will end up with the hassle of having to uninstall something.
Deluge
Finally, we come to Deluge, which you can download at deluge-torrent.org. It runs on Windows, Unix, OS X and Linux. Additional features can be installed via a collection of plug-ins, and you can also manage your torrents well, speeding up any downloads by fiddling with the settings. This was the first app to get around the problems of ISP throttling, which deliberately slows downloads that are being made through torrents. While this is not a standard feature for most BitTorrent clients, it still gives this app a dollop of kudos.