Torrents Legality
As with any downloading technology, you should not download copyrighted materials such as software, mp3, movies and so on. If you do not have the licence for it, it is illegal. There is an additional problem with torrents - in certain countries "only downloading" movies and mp3s is legal, however when downloading with torrents you also share (upload) your downloaded part - and that is not legal anywhere (you are distributing copyrighted material which you do not have a licence to).
Of course, torrents themselves and all around them is nothing illegal, until you download materials you shouldn't. Torrents are also used for fully legal distribution of certain data ( for example demo versions, trials and so on).
Various jurisdictions have pursued legal action against websites that host BitTorrent trackers. High-profile examples include the closing of Suprnova.org, Torrentspy, LokiTorrent, Demonoid, Mininova and OiNK.cd. The Pirate Bay torrent website, formed by a Swedish group, is noted for the "legal" section of its website in which letters and replies on the subject of alleged copyright infringements are publicly displayed. On 31 May 2006, The Pirate Bay's servers in Sweden were raided by Swedish police on allegations by the MPAA of copyright infringement; however, the tracker was up and running again three days later.
On 23 November 2005, the movie industry and BitTorrent Inc. CEO Bram Cohen, signed a deal they hoped would reduce the number of unlicensed copies available through bittorrent.com's search engine, run by BitTorrent Inc. It meant BitTorrent.com had to remove any links to unlicensed copies of films made by seven of Hollywood's major movie studios.
There are two major differences between torrent and many other peer-to-peer file-trading systems, which advocates suggest make it less useful to those sharing copyrighted material without authorization. First, torrent itself does not offer a search facility to find files by name. A user must find the initial torrent file by other means, such as a web search. Second, torrent makes no attempt to conceal the host ultimately responsible for facilitating the sharing: a person who wishes to make a file available must run a tracker on a specific host or hosts and distribute the tracker address in the torrent file.
Using torrent is perfectly legal, but when you select a file to download make sure you are not downloading any copyrighted information or materials. torrent downloads are not anonymous; information about your computer's IP address and the files you download can be traced back to you.
