Legal Torrents

Factual Questions
1

There is are a couple of interesting discussions going on talking about the Pirate Bay court ruling and file sharing in general. And that made me think. File sharing per say is not illegal. Novell for example has been distributing software and patches via torrents for a couple of years now. So even if the bulk of the use is for copyright violation, there is true legal use going on (no matter how small a percentage of torrents the legal ones are).

So my question is, is there a legal version of Pirate Bay where all the torrents are legit? I would love to have access to something like this.

2

One big one is called (surprise) legaltorrents.com, and they have lots of stuff released under Creative Commons licenses.

Another one is Public Domain Torrents, which has lots of old, out-of-copyright movies and music.

3

Thanks friedo those were exactly what I was thinking about.

4

Yes their are several as friedo just posted. However I still tend to use Pirate Bay for things like my Ubuntu .iso downloads because it still tends to have much higher seeds than other sites.

5

The music isn’t obvious on the frontpage.

Besides which, no music recorded after 1924 is in the public domain in the USA. You either pay for it through normal channels if the owner wishes it to be available, or through the nose if he does not wish it so. There are no other legal options.

6

The problem with these sites is the “claim” to have legal torrents, but there is no real way to police it. Even legal torrents can have claiments on them.

Copyright law has become so complex people don’t always get it and worse, anyone can sue you and you have to defend yourself.

For instance if a work is in public domain the performance of said work may not be. Or a movie could be in public domain but the music in the movie not be in public domain.

Even if it’s an obvious original work, there’s no guarantee that the person in that work is the one who submitted it