A torrent, which is another name for a bittorrent, is a type of peer-to-peer sharing, which involves many people passing their files around over the World Wide Web, that has gained a considerable amount of publicity over the past couple of years. Due to copyright laws, the MPAA and RIAA have gone after people who download torrents, college students being the group most heavily targeted. Since torrents tend to be pirated, copyrighted material, people who do transfer them amongst peers are breaking the laws.
Torrents work in a more detailed fashion that traditional file sharing. In traditional file sharing, a user goes to a web site and notices a file that they want. They click the download button and the file is transferred from the central server to the user’s computer. Then, once the download is finished, the user can access the file.
Torrents, on the other hand, work differently. A torrent is actually a bunch of tiny fragments of a file. To begin with, a piece of software needs to be used to access torrents. When the user finds a file that they want, such as a MP3 song, they click the download button. Instead of getting all of the file from one source, bits and pieces come from different sources.
In essence, a torrent works by thousands of different computers that have the same file making it available to other people. The person takes the file from thousands of different sources to speed up download speed and then the program bunches it together into one larger unit. Then the file can then be transferred to other people. However, if the person turns off their sharing ability, they become a “leech” which means they download, but don’t allow the transfer.
