Are torrents illegal?

It will be illegal if you earn money from it. for example. you download a windows Xp installer and burn it and sell to other people.

Is Torrenting Illegal

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Are torrents illegal?

Are torrents similar to file sharing programs like Kazaa in which copyrighted files are illegally shared with other people? Do torrents largely only offer illegal or copyrighted files or do they also offer a large amount of perfectly legal files? Also, aren't the files offered on torrents...

Are Torrents Legal

Torrents aren't illegal unless they're used to download unauthorized copies of copyrighted files. As a general rule, you have to assume that ALL files available on the Internet are copyrighted unless you can prove otherwise (the copyright has lapsed after 95 years, US government documents, whatever).

It is completely legal to use torrents or anything else to download/share copyrighted files for which you are the author or for which you comply with the license terms of the copyright owners.

Making torrents illegal would be like making cars illegal if they can exceed the speed limit anywhere.

Torrents are not illegal. Torrent files are basically lists of users that have the same file you are requesting and share responsibility to transfer you the file in segments. Unlike Kazaa you do not connect to one person sharing that file but many people which decreases download time and distributes the network load to many people.

Torrents are frequently used to transfer illegal material but torrent technology has grown over the years and are starting to become increasingly used by Software companys to distribute legitimate and free software to users.

Any file has the potential to house corrupt or virus ridden files. Main stream torrent sharing sites are usually very good at keeping an eye on this issue and frequently take bad torrents down.

The torrent system in itself is not illegal. Its simply a method of distributing files using lots of small hosts with low speed connections, rather than one big download server with a big connection.

However if a torrent is used to distribute copyrighted material which you haven't paid for then the downloading of the file itself is illegal.

Some ISPs don't like torrent traffic on their network as the torrent protocol can cause congestion on their networks. Some ISPs will look for torrent activity and penalise users by moving them onto slower connections to limit their network connection, some ISPs even ban torrent completely. Its worth checking your ISPs fair usage policy before using torrents.

I can think of several legal applications of torrents for supplying open source software such as linux distributions.

However most torrent traffic is related to illegal copyrighted material, hence the perception that torrents are illegal.

Torrents CAN be legal. Open source and free software is often distributed that way. It can also be used to distribute pirated software which may harbour trojan viruses, yes.

Copyrighted materials are illegal to download. You can be sued and put in prison

no its not illegal