30 years ago we taped albums of friends and we knew it was wrong but we did it anyway. Everyone I knew had a few tapes of albums they did not pay for.
Now people have a variety of reasons they use to say there is nothing wrong with not paying for music.
It’s actually not apt at all.
You’re missing (accidentally?) subsection (A) which makes the deriving a “commercial advantage or private financial gain” the sine qua non of criminal copyright infringement.
[moderating]
STOP!
This is not Great Debates. This is not a discussion of the legality or illegality of file downloads in general. The OP asked how torrents work “in the most academic sense.”
If someone wishes to describe the technical details of how torrents work, that’s fine. If you keep debating the legality of file piracy, I’ll shut this thread down and let you open a fresh one in Great Debates.
Thank you.
[/moderating]
He probably should’ve been a bit more specific. There’s a very large difference between “illegal downloading” and “how torrents work”. It’s like titling a thread “how does murdering work” and then inside specifically asking how the mechanical parts of a gun work.
Heck, it’s not even clear if he wanted the end-user explanation (which Airman Doors gave) or an explanation of how the hidden process actually works.
Quick, non-scientific explanation: a torrent basically allows one to download different parts of a file simultaneously from multiple sources at once. As a crude analogy, if you were “downloading” a book, person A would give you page 1, person B would give you page 12, and person C could give you page 200, all at the same time. On the whole it’s much more efficient than downloading the file from one person because that one person is limited in their upload speed.
If you want to know more details I’d suggest starting with Wikipedia’s article: BitTorrent - Wikipedia
Bittorrent works because it is a protocol. It’s a very efficient way to distribute a file.
You can find the Wikipedia article explains how it works quite well
To oversimplify a bit here’s a run down
Let’s say Marcia has a file, but Greg, Peter, Bobby and Jan want it. Cindy is too dumb so she’s still trying to figure out why she always gets peanut butter and jelly sandwiches.
Now if Marcia wanted to give her file to the four others normally she’d had to share it four times over. In other words a 100mb file would take her 400mb to transmit. 100X4
But with bittorrent all that Marcia would need to do was to give Greg 25mb, Peter 25m, Bobby 25mb and Jan 25mb. Of course Marcia gives each person a different 25mb of the file. That way it only costs Marcia 100mb of bandwidth. Then Marcia could go away as there is a complete copy of the file, distributed among her friends.
Then Greg gives his 25mb to Peter and Peter gives his 25mb to Bobby and Bobby gives Jan 25mb and Jan gives her 25mb to Greg.
And so forth…
No of course in the real world it’s much more complex. Bittorrent protocol uses several methods to ensure that people share and not just download. Of course these are imperfect and can be defeated. And there are methods to defeat those methods.
The internet is formed out of a bunch of nodes. These nodes accept data, look at the address for where it’s going, and more-or-less send it off in that direction. We can consider the nodes themselves as having no address.
Off each node are other nodes and leaves. Leaves do have addresses.
A leaf might be a server or it might be your computer. Technically, there’s no real difference, both of you have an address and can accept data and send data. Generally, any data being sent is either a request for data or a response to that request. A personal computer generally only issues requests and only accepts responses. A server generally only accepts requests and only issues responses. But there is no particular rule against a personal computer acting like a server, beyond that most people don’t want their personal computer to act like a server.
The point being, though, any leaf can talk directly to any other leaf, so long as they know each others address. This means that if I have a file, I can send it directly to you without ever passing through a server, because I am a server.
You do need to find each other though, to begin with. For this you need a dedicated server (or two or three) that everyone knows about, to look for each others. These are called “trackers” in BitTorrent lingo, though “matchmaker” is a better term. They know who is currently online and what files each person has.
To make a guess, I suspect that trackers don’t actually “know” what files you have, they just know some long key that identifies a file. For instance if I want to share Avatar with the rest of the world, I might name the torrent “Blue Gully” and register it with a tracker. It thinks that I’m trading around something called Blue Gully–hence keeping the person who makes the tracker public free of guilt–and everyone who goes looking for “Blue Gully” can find it so long as they know what name I registered it as. In reality, some random key is generated rather than me actually coming up with a fake name, but the idea is the same.
People have to find out that Avatar is being offered up under the name of “Blue Gully” though, so what I do is post this bit of information on a separate website that is unaffiliated with the tracker. They aren’t hosting infringed information, so again, they can avoid guilt. A .torrent file is essentially just a glamorous version of a little file that says “Blue Gully” in it, though I believe they also include a list of trackers that the originator will be connected to.
So when I want to get Avatar, I go to a website that hosts torrent files. I look for “avatar” and see it listed. This allows me to download a .torrent file. The .torrent file lists some trackers and says that I should look for people listed there who list themselves as having “Blue Gully”. I load this file in my torrent software and it connects to those trackers, finds everyone who has all or part of Avatar, and starts requesting random chunks from everyone. If 50 people have it, I might request 50 different sections of the file, a different part from each person. The tracker never touches nor sees any of this infringed data, it goes directly from person to person. As I start receiving parts of the file, other torrenters start requesting the parts that I have. The original infringer himself may have long-since disappeared.
Besides all this method of blame-shifting from the people make finding data possible, I suspect that there may be some security measures to make it hard to discover exactly to whom you are sending data or from whom you are requesting it–but I don’t know how any of that works if there is. Once you do know someone’s address, you then still have to file for a warrant to get the information of who it was. Since most IPs change the address of their clients each time they reconnect to the internet, unless they keep logs, this may be impossible to determine.
No, it violates his property rights. For a closer analogy, say you own a field, one of several you own. Can I come in and build a house on that field without your permission and occupy it as my home? Remembr, you have other fields – and we’re emphasizing it’s totally my idea, you had no choice whether to permit me.
If there were a law saying that people without homes but with funds can make use of otherwise unused property on payment of a stated fee to the property owner, that would be a parallel to legal use of copyrighted material. But its use without consent and without payment is equivalent to the ‘takings’ of the previous paragraph.
[moderating]
I said to stop that in this thread, Polycarp.
Feel free to open a debate thread in GD to talk about the legality.
[/moderating]
OK, Sage Rat (or anyone) how does the torrent file know it is getting 50 different bits, and not 7 copies of one, 13 of another and 4 of another 5? How does it put them back in order? Is each file pre-cut into different sections to be requested, and labelled 1/50, 2/50 etc. If it is just grabbing random bits, how does it know its got a complete file?
Yes, the torrent app knows who many segments there are. The app requests which segment it needs, and at the same time says which segments it has, so that it can share those. If you leave it running, it will share all of the files you have downloaded.
So if one wishes to torrent without maxing out their bandwidth, how would one go about it? Remember this is all purely academic and I am not advocating the torrenting of illegal materials. This is only in the spirit of intellectual inquiry.
One uses a client that supports scheduling and limiting
There have been some good explanations and analogies put forth here. I like the one using the Brady Bunch kids.
There is one more thing that Bram Cohen, creator of BT did, though. He was bugged by the fact that the Gnutella network clients like Limewire allowed people to turn off sharing. There were many fewer people sending data than receiving. He keyed the priority in the “swarm” of traders to the person’s upload. The more you give, the more you receive. This alone was almost enough to revolutionize file sharing.
So, to recap: You search a website for a file that claims to be what you want. What is actually being traded is unknown to the search site; all it knows is there’s a file with some tracker addresses and a title.
You DL this file, open it with your Torrent client, and it automatically connects to the trackers. They give you addresses across the world of people who are trading this file. Your computer sends a message of “I’m the new one here. Please send me something so I can start to join in.” I’ve seen swarms of over 50K people, after the season premiere of a popular cable show set in New Jersey a few years ago.
======================
Everyone is sending something to everyone. The torrent clients know what pieces to request, at least as the file comes toward completion. I don’t know if you’re getting essentially random parts at first. I assume that your client is willing to take any part it doesn’t already have, which at first is almost everything.
The people with the whole file are called “seeders”. The rest are called “peers” or “leechers”. Of course the best swarms have the most people, especially the most seeders, as there is more chance of getting the key last pieces of the file, and seeder aren’t clogging their data pipes with downloads (at least not of that file).
There are private trackers, which require signup, and which often strictly enforce a sharing ratio. Should your DL to UL ratio fall to 70%, say, you will be restricted or even cut off. Most of these allow you to buy your way out of your trouble, and use the money to pay the server bills. The advantage of these trackers is that since people are encouraged strongly to seed the file, DL speeds improve. I’ve seen 1MB/s on British shows on my private tracker. (Relax, admins: it’s shows that you can’t even get in N. America.)
Many of the public search sites have gone down in recent years. Digital Distractions, specializing in British shows and more documentary-type shows disappeared. TorrentSpy is gone. Perhaps tied for the most famous downfalls are Mininova.org not being able to satisfy the Dutch courts that they could filter out torrents leading to copyrighted material, and the administrators of The Pirate Bay actually going to jail in Sweden. TPB is still operating (IIRC, the site moved to a server farm out of the country), but Mininova has cut loose their main database and now only shows torrents for files that have been uploaded by the copyright holders. This means that there are mainly just bands and films you’ve never heard of, whose creators just want to get noticed. There are also some public domain things like old NASA footage.
It seems that many of the industrialized countries have court systems that are interpreting the law as prohibiting even the encouragement of illegal downloading, which is an important distinction. The site admins pointed out that they don’t know what file is actually being traded, but that is starting to come up short.
On the other hand, BT completely unhooked file trading from a centralized system. With fiber optic to your house, and a $2K computer, you too might be able to be a serviceable search engine for torrents, or a small tracker. The actual .tor files are very small, and as noted above, the actual file data bypasses the tracker, making the transfer as efficient as possible.
As for not maxing out the data pipe at home, every client I’ve seen allows the setting of maximum upload, which as I said also restricts the download. Of course, you could just stop a file’s DL if it’s preventing others from getting online.
Your little test worked, Stickler. Don’t push it.
Some places for legal torrents (Please let a mod know if I’m incorrect) From http://wiki.vuze.com/w/Legal_torrent_sites
General Sites
* http://www.vuze.com/content/BucketBrowse.html
* http://www.wortharchiving.com (free)
* http://www.LegitTorrents.info (free)
* http://f.scarywater.net/ (small)
* http://torrent.ibiblio.org/ (torrent front-end to selected ibiblio.org archive files) *RSS
* http://www.peerit.com/ (content costs money)
* http://www.legaltorrents.com/ (provides hosting/seeds, financial sponsorship for Content Creators)
[edit] Sites with limited scope
[edit] Music
* http://bt.etree.org/ (hundreds of recordings of concerts and gigs) RSS
* http://www.jamendo.com/ (Music community for artists and enthusiasts)
* http://2006.sxsw.com/toolbox/schedules/ipod/ (South by Southwest festival)
[edit] Software
* http://torrents.freebsd.org:8080/ (FreeBSD)
* http://www.slackware.com/torrents/ (Linux distro)
* http://www.debian.org/CD/torrent-cd/ (Linux distro)
* http://torrent.unix-ag.uni-kl.de/ (Linux distro)
* http://torrent.gnome.org/ (gnome GUI)
* http://borft.student.utwente.nl:6969/ (OpenOffice.org) RSS
* http://distribution.openoffice.org/p2p/ (OpenOffice.org)
* http://torrent.fedoraproject.org/ (fedora ISOs and talks)
* http://autopatcher.scarywater.net/ (AutopatcherXP translations)
[edit] Video Games
* http://tasvideos.org/ (video games played perfectly)
* http://www.planeshift.it/download.html (Open Source MMORPG)
[edit] Art/TV/Film Shows
* http://www.fromtheshadows.tv/
* http://www.panicstruckpro.com/revelations/revelations.html (fan produced Star Wars movie)
* http://newvoyages.mine.nu:1701/ (Fan produced Star Trek episodes)
* http://www.publicdomaintorrents.com/ (classic movies,B-Movies)(PDA/SMARTPHONE/PPC/Ipod versions)
* http://www-fi3.starwreck.com/ (scifi parody)
* http://www.mariposahd.tv/episodes (HDTV produced Internet show in Argentina)
* http://revision3.com/ (Revision3 IPTV programs including Diggnation, InDigital and Geekdrome)
* http://www.bittorrent.com/ (BitTorrent, now teamed with Warner Brothers)
Torrent clients like uTorrent are very powerful. You can limit how much bandwidth you give each torrent, how much upload and download you give to each torrent and even what time of day you can download and well you should just look at uTorrent and you can see your option.
Most people fail to maximize their torrent connection simply because they forget, it’s a two way street.
Your bittorrent client has to ask for each piece as well as to get a piece. This requires a two way street, some try to clog their bandwidth so much that the client can’t ask for a piece.
There’s also a thing called “intial seeding” which limits the original person’s ability to send a part.
For instance, if a torrent is sent with “initial seeding.” You’re bittorrent client can tell not only what parts you’ve sent out but if they’ve been distributed again.
So let’s say I’m the original person and part 200 (we’ll call it), has been given out. My bittorrent will limit giving out part 200 again, till that person it gave it to distributes part 200 to another person.
This makes it so the originator of the torrent give out less bandwidth but it can make a torrent very slow if there are only two or three people trying to download it. It’s rarely an issue if there are lots of downloaders.
Bittorrent is amazingly fast and effective for legal torrents. I know as when I was the hotel administrator for system, our GM forced us to use a torrent model. I know darn well he used to use it for “other” things, but by demanind I use bittorrent to distribute my downloads he could have the client on his computer and use the (Very fast) Internet connection at work.
nm. wrong thread.
I could have sworn that BitTorrent favored people who share more files. If demand is higher than supply, the more you seed, the higher up you are put in the cue. Is this mistaken?
Granted, I’ve never used a more private torrent site, and I haven’t torrented much since I decided to only use freeware or software I’ve paid for.