Nov 21, 2018 - Download your torrents straight to your smartphone with the best. App install on your device, such as Avast Mobile Security for Android.
When it comes to torrents, one of the most commonly asked questions is “Is downloading torrents legal or illegal?” Torrent clients, such as uTorrent Vuze and the official BitTorrent client, are used to download immense amounts of data on the Web, and there’s no question that much of it is illegal. Here we’ll talk about how torrent downloads work, when they’re illegal, and how to protect your privacy when you’re using them.
So What Is Legal and What Is Illegal?
The short answer: as long as the item is copyrighted and you don’t own it, then downloading it (for free) via torrent is illegal. Using a torrent client and downloading torrents in itself isn’t illegal, as you could be downloading things that aren’t protected by copyright.
The long answer: This varies from case to case. Most countries have basic common laws against intellectual property theft. If a piece of music is copyrighted and you don’t own it, you can’t download it legally. The same goes for a movie, a game, or anything else you may want (unless the copyright-holder decides to make it free either temporarily or permanently, as is often the case with video games). The line gets kind of fuzzy here, since people ask themselves many different questions about their own country’s laws.
In general, a copyright is registered to an individual or organization that creates something. This copyright has a time limit, usually equivalent to the lifetime of the creator and a set amount of additional years. Some copyrights are for life plus fifty years. Others are for life plus seventy years. Look up your country in the previous link if you’re unsure of your laws. Of course, your mileage may vary, as some things may not be protected by the law where you live, or copyright law may not be enforced at all.
Kickasstorrents
So if you’re downloading a free Linux distribution through your torrent client, you don’t need to worry. But if you’re getting John Lennon’s “Imagine” from The Pirate Bay, you’re doing something that in all likelihood is breaking a law.
Related: How to Download Torrents onto Your iOS Device Without Jailbreaking
Torrent Privacy
Whatever it is you’re doing is not any of my business. But it is my business to make sure you know just how “anonymous” you are in the torrent network. The short answer is: you totally aren’t!
It’s handy to have a basic knowledge of how the torrent protocol works. Theoretically you should have some level of privacy since you’re not downloading any data from one particular server (in contrast to downloading something from a central server like you’d find on Microsoft’s website, where they’ll know exactly who it is that’s downloading their products).
But through the torrent system you download directions to a file. That means that the torrent file is actually just a list of trackers and some hash codes. It doesn’t really prove that you downloaded the torrent file. What you do inside your torrent client is more important, and that’s all managed by a decentralized list of servers. Once you start the download of the actual file you want to get to, you end up downloading little pieces of the file from a bunch of people.
Can You Get Caught?
Government agents and copyright trolls tend to snoop around the Torrent networks, and some of the more popular sites hosting Torrent files, downloading files and listing all the IP addresses they find under the Peers (downloaders) and Seeders (uploaders) lists. This will, of course, compromise your address eventually.
The actual number of people who get caught is miniscule, but if you want to secure yourself and don’t care much to contribute to the Torrent community, then you can disable seeding which stops your PC uploading files to the torrent network. Avid torrenters would call this selfish, and maybe they’re right, but you’re also covering yourself.
Another good option is to use a proxy or VPN, then set your torrent client to connect to peers through that. This essentially makes you anonymous by routing your connection through a different IP address.
Then there’s the onion routing network (Tor) that you can configure as a proxy for your torrent client. However, since the Snowden revelations it’s become known that even Tor has been targeted by the NSA and GCHQ for illegal activity. While the network is mostly secure, there have been incidents of these spy bodies attacking individual computers, so it’s not as anonymous as it once was.
Conclusion
Rest assured that torrenting does not equate to piracy. It does, however, provide a very convenient way to do it! The torrent protocol is just a clever transmission method for users to download files more easily. If you’re worried that you may be downloading something that’s against the laws in your country, ask below.
This article was first published in Jun 2013 and was updated in Nov 2017.
Image credit: Pirate Bay main page
Disclaimer: we don’t advise anyone to download or distribute copyrighted material on the internet illegally. After all… it’s illegal…
Millions of people are using torrenting websites to looks for files on the internet and download them. As I write this there are 6.761.168 registered users on The Pirate Bay (the most popular torrent website) and over 6 million torrents to choose from. Whether it’s movies, music, software or anything else – there’s a torrent for everything. But how do you download a torrent file to your computer anonymously and without leaving footprints that would lead right to you?
Those who use torrents on a regular basis know, that everything they download can be traced back to them, and, if there’s any illegal file down/upload going on, they can face charges and some serious fees. However, there are ways to download torrent files completely anonymous, without letting anyone know that you downloaded anything.
Some suggest using an expensive VPN service or a proxy that would hide ones IP address, some tell you to move to another country with no extradition… There’s also both free and paid software (VPN proxy like BTGuard) that you can download onto your computer, but this is generally way too complicated compared to the method described below. You won’t need to enter any custom settings, download or even install anything at all!
Let me just share the best way I know how to safely download torrents without getting caught and setting off any red flags.
Best way to download torrents anonymously
How awesome would it be if you could just ask someone to download the torrent you like and then just get the file from them? Well, there is a service that does exactly that.
Myfastfile is a service that acts as a middle man between you and the file you want to download. Instead of downloading a file from any given server straight to your computer, which makes it traceable, you can just tell Myfastfile what to download for you and then take the file straight from their protected servers, absolutely anonymous.
It is as if you asked your friend to download something for you, and the only thing you would to is collect a thumb drive with the downloaded file on it. This way your involvement in the download is completely untraceable and no one will ever know that you were behind the torrent download.
With the feature officially unveiled, Eurogamer's Digital Foundry took a look at another huge game, Fallout 3, which is sure to be one of the most closely scrutinized thanks to its inclusion as a bonus for buying Fallout 4 for Xbox One. Digital Foundry studied the game over a few hours of play and found that the game sports far less stuttering than it did on the Xbox 360 and holds its framerate more steadily than many other games. Download fallout 3 dlc xbox one. In short, the Xbox team is recompiling the original game executable files, built for the Xbox 360's Power PC architecture, for use on the Xbox One's x64 architecture. They also got the skinny on just how the process of bringing games across works. Kotaku that Mass Effect seemed to run better on the Xbox One, with significantly faster loading textures, back in June.
Is Torrent Games Safe
How to use the Myfastfile Downloader
First of all, get yourself a Myfastfile premium account. It’s not that expensive actually: it can go as low as $0.21 per day with the 12 month plan. If you just want to test the service you can go ahead and purchase a 1 month premium account for $12.99. The most popular options are the 3- and 12 month accounts, which cost $9.99 per month and $6.57 per month respectively. These are one time only payments, not recurring!
After that, open the Downloader, paste your torrent link (or magnet link) inside the box and press submit. Now Myfastfile will download the file you have selected for you, and you can download it straight from their servers. You don’t even need to install a torrent client or any other software on your computer.
Since many people use the service, you will find that some torrents will download “instantly”, simply because Myfastfile already has the file on their servers. After telling Myfastfile to download a torrent for you, you will have around 3 to 6 days (always different for some reason) to download the file to your computer safely and without letting anyone know.
Download torrents even faster!
Download Bittorrent
When you download a torrent, you are usually automatically downloading it from multiple sources at the same time. However, you are often either limited by the speed of your broadband connection or the amount of people, who are sharing the file with you. So how can you download torrents even faster than you do right now?
As I already told you above, myfastfile stores loads of popular torrents in the cloud already, which allows you to download them straight from their servers. If the file is not yet in the cloud though, myfastfile will download it for you with an absolutely incredible speed: I saw speeds up to 200 Mbps!
Another cool trick myfastfile can do it streaming torrents. Since you’re probably using torrents to download movies in most cases anyway, there’s actually no need for you to download the whole file on your computer or mobile device. Just add the torrent to the Downloaded, let myfastfile download it for you and simply stream the whole thing without downloading it and needing to wait!
So, the fastest way for you to watch a popular movie torrent is simply taking the magnet link, adding it to the downloader and pressing Stream. All of that will take you 10 seconds (if the torrent is already in the cloud).
Myfastfile is the best torrent client replacement
Old-school torrenting methods are oftentimes not as secure as you think they are. By moving everything to the cloud you not only replace your uTorrent, BitTorrent or any other torrent client on your computer with a good looking web UI, but also hide your IP address from anyone who tries to find it without the need to use an additional VPN or proxy.
Torrent
If you have any questions or suggestions, please leave a comment below!