Sharing Is Caring, but Also Sometimes Illegal: Everything You Wanted to Know About Torrenting
Ever since the dawn of time, people have looked for ways to share and exchange stuff: that is how trade was born and whole civilizations were built on it. But nowadays, big bad corporations are trying to convince us that digital sharing, a.k.a. torrenting, is illegal. It is true that in the vast seas of the Wild Wild Web, it is digital files packed within smaller files known as torrents that people are most eager to exchange. Do not be fooled by their small size: torrents can contain infinite knowledge, elaborate software – or, in most cases, a Games of Thrones episode protected by copyright. So how legal is torrenting exactly?
Good News! Torrenting Is Definitely Legal
First things first: torrenting per se is not illegal. In fact, in some form or another, file sharing has existed since the 1970s, before Napster, the first centralized P2P file sharing platform that focused on media content, was launched in 1999. In fact, more than 20 million people engage in the activity every day and 6 billion every year, across several P2P networks. Most commonly shared files include movies (about 5 billion files in 2017), TV series (2.5 billion) and games (1.8 billion). This has led to wide crackdowns on torrent sites that are also used to access perfectly legal content – and to savvy users suiting up and rushing to get the best VPN for torrenting, which can allow them to change their IP address and connect through an AES encryption that ensures their activity is not tracked.
Source: Pexels
Bad News! Downloading Black Panther Is Unfortunately Not Legal – Yet
So, the act of filesharing is not illegal in itself – you would never think of shutting down filesharing services like Google Drive as illegal, would you? The same principle applies to torrenting sites – although for some obscure reason sites claiming to be proud “pirates” are much less popular with big movie production studios than Google is. As long as you download files that were shared legally and are not protected under copyright, you are not breaking the law. Yet while a large amount of the filesharing volume on torrent sites relates to free or private content, many of the torrents shared are in fact protected under copyright laws. It might come as a shock, but Hollywood seems weirdly proud of even the latest Star Wars Story flop, and they are very keen on nobody viewing it without paying (even though some of our readers have claimed that they would gladly pay not to have seen it in the first place).
Right. So, What Should You Do?
We have all been there: you have seen the movie twice already in theaters, but now for research purposes, you’d really like to re-watch that scene where that weird and confusing subplot takes place. (After all, it is supposed to be marginally important in the upcoming 24th instalment that takes place as a pre-sequel before the origins story). Before rushing over to the latest Pirate Bay reincarnation, take a moment to think: would anyone want that content copyrighted, even for absurd reasons such as making profit?
Source: Pexels
If the answer is yes, then it is probably illegal to download the shiny torrent staring right back at you – and at 1080p, too! Proceed at your own peril, read up on your country’s copyright laws and policies, or just take precautions – using your frenemy’s IP address should do the trick and hit two birds with one stone!
