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I added "in many areas" to the text "Downloading of copyrighted material is ILLEGAL." - because downloading of copyrighted material IS not "universally" illegal - it is only illegal in "many"/"some" areas - US beeing one area I believe. In sweden (where I live) and many other european/african and asian countries it is currently NOT illegal to download copyrighted material without the copyright holders premission - it is ONLY illegal to upload/distribute copyrighted material - only the copyright-holder may distribute his/hers copyrighted material (or license that right to others).

For example, if I were to download say metallicas new album from someones ftp - I am not the one that is doing something illegal where I live - it is the person that owns the ftp. However some uploading might be okay, for example distributing copyrighted material, like metallicas new album, to family and friends fall under fair use in many countries.

There are also countries that has not signed the berne convention (or whichever it is) that deals with copyrights between countries, North Korea beeing one and Cuba another, I believe. (wich means that in those countries you can freely copy anything from the rest of the world).

However it is wrong to state that it IS illegal in a universal sence, and it is more correct to add "in many areas".

The default behaviour of most bittorrent software is to redistribute while obtaining data. -- Honta 10:48, 2004 Aug 7 (UTC)

Yes that is why I had ftp as an example and not bittorrent. However the sentence claimed that "downloading of copyrighted material is ILLEGAL", which is what i was objecting to. (it did not say that use of bittorrent to download material is illegal). However it is not certain that downloading of copyrighted material via bittorrent is illegal either - since we are allowed to redistribute small sections of copyrighted works to others (like 30 seconds of a song), or even entire songs/movies to friends and relatives. (fair use, maybe not in the USA). Further on, from the users perspective, he/she is pressing a link on a web-page and downloading a song/movie/software/whatever. So even in the case of bittorrent it is not certain that downloading of copyrighted material via bittorrent *IS* ILLEGAL (*everywhere*). It is simply not a fact. However I am happy with the current text "ILLEGAL in many countries". :)

The article says: "While initially created to distribute legal files, such as GNU/Linux distributions or large movie trailers, BitTorrent is also being used by some to download copyrighted music, movies, and software, similar to many other peer-to-peer networks." Just because software is copyrighted, doesn't mean it can't be distributed legally. The copyright holder has to grant you a license to distribute the license though. The GPL, under which GNU/Linux is distributed, does this. Read GNU General Public License: "The GPL protects, using copyright law, the following freedoms for users and developers of free software". It should be changed to "to illegally download music,...". I'm making this change right now. Hopefully this comment will explain my change to people without legal background.

I think there is something strange with the current wording of the article. It says "BitTorrent can also be used for legal purposes", thus implying that downloading copyrighted material is an illegal purpose. However, in Sweden this is entirely legal, and distribution among friends (such as the 30,000 members of The Piracy Burea) could very well also be legal. Even if it might be illegal to download a movie with BitTorrent (because of the redistribution) the purpose (obtaining the movie) could be legal. Filur 22:27, 8 Jan 2005 (UTC)

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The MIME for the MNG file is "text/plain." Isn't this a server issue, not a browser issue?-- 64.108.0.242 21:03, 16 Feb 2004 (UTC)

Yep, it should be set to something (the MNG page suggests the unofficial "video/x-mng"). But we'd need an MNG enabled browser to test that - any suggestions about a "trustworthy" one? -- Finlay McWalter | Talk 21:20, 16 Feb 2004 (UTC)

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I dont understand web seeding. If the dot torrent file says a copy of the FILE is available on website X. What is there to stop me from grabbing the file from the website instead of using a bittorrent client?

The server won't respond to the HTTP request for the file from a web browser. Server-side trackers are actually software running on top of the web server, and as such they can be configured to respond in specific ways to: improper requests, requests from banned IPs, and requests from unknown/unregistered IPs. You can also configure a tracker to do other non-torrent-related tasks such as recording upload/download statistics and making them available in realtime on a website. It can be written in just about any language, although perl, php, and other languages with native web-serving functionality are the easiest (and therefore most common) implementations. Maybe I'll merge some of this info into the main article. ----

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The 'how it works' section ends with:

When there are no longer any nodes connected to the tracker server who possess the complete file (so-called "seeds" or "seeders"), the nodes cannot finish the download if they do not have a complete copy distributed amongst themselves.

1) This is a run-on sentence 2) Is it true? - It is saying if !exists(some(node with all parts)) whereas i think it should be saying if !(for all parts(exists(some node with that part))) 3) It implies that the tracker is not obliged to serve specific parts of the file on request. Is this true?

my rewording would be:

Download of the complete file is only possible if other nodes in your group can supply all the missing parts. The tracker, though in posession of the entire file, is not obliged to support requests for specific parts of the file.

A BitTorrent tracker is not neccessarily in possession of the file. In fact, many simply have the IPs of the seeders/peers and information needed to verify the data. If a tracker is also seeding, it is a separate action.

This should not be mentioned: "the standard eDonkey2000 protocol provides little "leech resistance" -- there are no benefits in providing upload bandwidth, just a UL:DL speed ratio when the upload speed is below 10 kB/s." This is not accurate! All edonkey supporting clients I know prioritize upload to people uploading to you, and try to validate clients as well. It does a lot more than BitTorrent to stop leeching and is a lot more efficient for large groups of files.

Ofcourse it *can* fully replace BitTorrent: if you make an edonkey server to share a small collection of files, and let people connect to it, that will do it. I wont get into technicality, but you can limit people from sharing their files, and you can get people to connect to a server by clicking a link, just like a .torrent file without actually having to download a file.

Further more about leech protection. In mldonkey, I *dont* upload to BitTorrent, since I think edonkey is more efficient. What does BitTorrent do to stop me leeching? But if I try not to upload to edonkey, my download speed drops significantly.

Also speaking about efficiency: have a look at this:

Client Downloaded  Uploaded
eMu 8376563  19087360
OVR 4239362  4359714
eDK 3151872  3502080
tML 1299456  1474560
sZA 359424  274432

This is just taken right now, from my upload list: 22:30pm, 30th June. What efficiency! -- I'm downloading 23 files, download maxed out at 60KB/sec, upload is set to 20KB/sec (bandwidth limit 26KB), also maxed out.

So please dont slander and say things like edonkey offers low leech protection, the original protocol was a little weak on leech protection, but it is of no relevance today. All ed2k clients now offer maximum leech protection, and older clients just get banned.

And as far as I know the only client that exploited the original edonkey protocol was mldonkey =<1.16, the reputation kinda stuck :) -- ofcourse using that client today, gets you banned.

Anyway, please review the bias against edonkey in the article. Although I'm also biased against BitTorrent, I wouldnt post such information on a non discussion page.

- Comment: I believe you would get different results in comparing edonkey to bittorrent if you where to try to max out the bandwidth of 10 mbit upload and 10 mbit download (which is a surprisingly common type of broadband in some countries) on a single file - for example the latest episode of a tv-show. For this bittorrent is, in my experience, superior.

I think in that situation, it may win depending on the source number difference. At the very least, finding sources for a single file is indeed faster on bittorrent since there is a tracker that keeps a separate list of sources for each file. Hardly efficient for tens of millions of files though and on edonkey, you get the benefit of finding sources on *any* server, not limited to the current tracker.-- User:Hackeron 22:35, 30 Jun 2004 (UTC)

--Spinoza12: My objections to the discussion above is about details not the discussion in it self. In particular the speed between the clients and the leech resistance of them.

The speed of bittorrent above edonkey has nothing to do with share ratios or leech resistance (assuming the speed of the peers are the same between the two clients). It is rather a function the size of the chunks of data every client announces. Chunk sizes in a torrent file is on average somewhere between 128K and 512K whilst in an edonkey file the chunk size is always around the 9MB mark. Each of these two clients won't announce a chunk to the crowd of peers until it is downloaded locally. This makes the spreading of the complete file a function of it's chunk size primarily. The spreading is also affected by the frequency of the clients announcement of chunks.

One other consequence of this fact is that files tend to be available for longer periods of time on edonkey than bittorrent. This is simply because it takes longer to download a complete copy. One advantage of edonkey is however that the servers are searchable within the network without having to rely on separate servers for torrent announcements.

Finally, bittorrent is more leech proof during the initial seeding phase but that is about all. It is in no way, shape, or form more leech proof during the second phase after the which more seeds have sprouted. And neither is edonkey. -- Spinoza12 22:44, 11 July 2006 (UTC)

"While illegal ideas" Think about this for a sec. What's an illegal idea?

Ask the Attorney General. It is his job to know everything that is legal and illegal, after all, isn't it?

Well, planning a murder is illegal, and it's an idea, so I guess planning a murder(Or other crime(s).) could be called an "illegal idea", although I'm not a lawyer, and also isn't it that the Supreme Court's job, because you can't interpret the law if you don't know it.-- Dp462090 00:32, 19 March 2006 (UTC)

Check the site, then put it on here. It's simple, and green. 70.17.38.39 03:23, 12 March 2006 (UTC)

We need to cleanup the whole torrent sites section, alot of it just seems to be some crap added by the representitives of those sites.

Torrent Sites

• [http://www.torrentreactor.net/index.php Torrentreactor.net] - Categorized list format (very popular.)
• [http://www.bogaa.org/ Bogaa] - Similar to suprnova
• [http://trackerwww.prq.to/ The Pirate Bay] - Created by piratbyrån, they [http://static.thepiratebay.org/legal/ document] all legal threats recieved.
• [http://www.bitoogle.com/ Bitoogle.com] - Search engine
• [http://www.animesuki.com/ AnimeSuki] - keeps track of almost all (unlicensed) Anime Torrents
• [http://www.digital-update.com/ Digital Update] - Internet forum format
  • Needs registration.
• [http://www.filerush.com/ Filerush.com] - All the latest game downloads with high bandwidth seeds.
  • Valid, works a charm.
• [http://www.filesoup.com/ Filesoup.com] - Internet forum format
  • Forum.
• [http://bittorrent.frozen-layer.net Frozen-Layer Network] - Spanish Anime distribution page.
• [http://isohunt.com/ isoHunt.com] - IRC and BitTorrent search engine, P2P releases system
• [http://www.sharegroundz.com/ ShareGroundz.com] - Linux iso's, games, apps, movies, series, music
• [http://www.tlm-project.org/ The Linux Mirror Project] - Loads of Linux distribution ISO images as downloadable torrents.
• [http://kov4eg.net/ Lucky Ark] - The great russian bittorent project and community.
• [http://bittorrent.mafiotzii.ro mafiotzii.ro] - The first Romanian Bittorrent community.
• [http://www.solidz.com/ SolidZ.com] - Linux torrents and various other open source apps.
• [http://www.torrentbits.org/ Torrentbits.org] - A torrent tracker with leech resistance.
• [http://sourceforge.net/projects/webtorrent/ WebTorrent] - A PHP Frontend for Bittorrent, serving as a centralised BitTorrent download server.

down

• [http://www.suprnova.org/ Suprnova.org] (shutdown on the 12/19/2004)
• [http://www.corruptlogic.com/torrents/ CorruptLogic.com] - Light mirror of suprnova
• [http://caffeinated.homelinux.net/ Caffeinated Music] - Trade Friendly Music Torrents.
• [http://www.btorrents.com/ Btorrents.com] - Large BitTorrent community. Internet forum
• [http://www.lokitorrent.com/ LokiTorrent]
• [http://strikingcomic.com/torrents.html Nabasu's BitTorrent Bookmarks] - A good complete list with the biggest and the not so big trackers.
• [http://www.tvtorrents.net/ TvTorrents.net] - Tracker with RSS feed, focused mainly on tv-series.

The bit about Kazaa and Participation Level should be a footnote or one sentence long, not a paragraph and change. That belongs in its own page (which it has) or in Kazaa; this is the BitTorrent writeup.

I took out this image:

because it's not at all clear what it's showing

Please sign your posts AaronSw.

It's supposed to show the distribution of data among computers sharing data via bittorrent, the botttom computer being the tracker. -- Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason 09:49, 2004 Nov 22 (UTC)

In that case I don't think it's very helpful. I don't see why I should sign my posts -- this isn't a personal position.

Why do you not think it's helpful? With a good explanation I think it would be very useful. And please see the signing guideline. violet/riga (t) 23:22, 22 Nov 2004 (UTC)

A graphic could be helpful, but this one is too fast and noisy to understand. I guess I oppose the policy, then. I do sign my posts when I want people to respond to me personally, of course, but not in cases like this one where I don't want to be drawn into a discussion.

It would be much better imho if it was slowed down a lot -- PopUpPirate 22:33, Feb 7, 2005 (UTC)

I agree that it needs to be slowed down especially when it starts to get busy with all those connections (lines), but it's otherwise not a bad illustration. Some labels or a good description would also be helpful. -- WurdBendur 01:15, Feb 8, 2005 (UTC)

The illustration should be changed because it is either wrong or misleading. There are no servers in BitTorrent, only peers. The tracker is a broker service, it does NOT provide content! The text under the animation is also wrong for the same reasons. /ama

I believe that this picture could be redone, gifs have a tendency to be large, so make one that expresses and visually shows fragments of the "file" moving along (and more of them). I believe the gif moves too fast anyways. Perhaps showing a small example with 10 or so leeches, then zooming out to hundreds, helping to seed them. (just my 2 cents) -- x1987x 22:54, 22 May 2005 (UTC)

There should be something to explain the things in the image, for example the colors. ripa 02:04, 22 Apr 2005 (UTC)

I find this picture straight forward and easy to understand. The machine at the bottom is the initial seed for the file. It distributes the whole file to the network of peers by alternatively giving them chunks of the file. The file is represented in the grey boxes that fill up with colored squares, each square representing a chunk . The process of transferring a chunk of the file is represented by a colored line corresponding to one of the chunks. Looking at the animation you can see the way the BitTorrent protocol schedules transfers between peers.

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I changed it a bit to make it more clearer. Hopefully this helps 70.56.249.159 08:19, 29 December 2005 (UTC)

I think it's changing way too fast to follow the individual "arrows". Animation speed should be around 5 to 10 times slower. -- anon, 2 Apr 2006

i second the above comment uri budnik 03:39, 3 April 2006 (UTC)

Uploading to Commons

Could you upload these images to Commons so that we can use them in Wikipedia of other language?

I've seen the term "choking" used quite a bit... Can we have an explanation of it?

It refers to the state of an uploader, i.e. the thread that sends data to another peer. When a connection is choked, it means that the transmitter doesn't currently want to send anything on that link.

I've added it to the definitions section, along with some others. :-) splintax ^(talk) 14:48, 28 November 2005 (UTC)

In this page are many links to sites tracking specific copyrighted content, such as the South Park or Simpsons trackers. Is it legally appropriate for Wikipedia to provide links to sites which enable copyright violation?

As has been noted before, this is legal in many countries. Even in the US, I don't think there is any law preventing linking to a site that provides links to material which are protected under copyright. I suppose the question is rather whether it is appropriate for an encyclopedia to provide links to resources rather than links to other pages that describe the given topic. I think the links are helpful to anyone trying to understand what BitTorrent is. Many other wikipedia pages have external links like this. I say keep them.

i agree. the same argument (that wikipedia shouldn't provide information which can be used to infringe copyrights) holds for bittorent itself. i think it is critical that a distinction be made between Italic textinfringingItalic text copyrights and providing the Italic textabilityItalic text to do so, especially when the information provided can be used for legitimate purposes.

In the past it's been safe to link to an infringer. With the current legal climate, that might end. Caution is advisable.

—The preceding unsigned comment was added by 24.2.110.92 ( talk •  contribs) .

My personal opinion is that linking to generic trackers that may contain copyrighted content is OK, as long as they are notable, but linking to the Simpsons trackers etc, mentioned above, which specifically intend to infringe copyright rather than just track what users upload is unencyclopædic. splintax ^(talk) 14:50, 28 November 2005 (UTC)

Under Decentralization, I saw this little beaut:

"Try it here: http://www.exeem.com/"

I pulled it out because it is clearly an advertisement. I'm also sure this text is also...

"eXeem marries the best features of a decentralized network, the easy searchability of an indexing server and the swarming powers of the BitTorrent network into one program. It also does this in a way that makes the whole system very easy to use. Something that has always prevented mass adoption by the surfing public."

Hell, the whole Exeem part should be rewritten. I'll leave the link out and let y'all decide what to do. -- Ghost Freeman 17:51, 25 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Since Exeem is in beta now, perhaps it's not premature to write an Exeem article. Most of the above can be converted into "these are the program's aims; whether it lives up to it is too early to tell and probably a matter of opinion even afterwards." -- Antaeus Feldspar 18:01, 28 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Make sure to write how much it's a overmarketed FLOP! I still miss suprnova -- x1987x 22:55, 22 May 2005 (UTC)

Exeem is hardly having a major impact as yet, it seems to be not all its cracked up to be imho -- PopUpPirate 00:10, Feb 6, 2005 (UTC)

Without disputing your conclusion, I must point out that that is in fact your conclusion on the issue. -- Antaeus Feldspar 19:27, 6 Feb 2005 (UTC)

As I re-read the entry, it strikes me that the whole Exeem discussion is off-topic. Exeem doesn't purport to be a BitTorrent client, just a BitTorrent replacement incorporating some of its features. As such, I'd like to see a link to its own entry, with the discussion/debate about the program's merits there....not here. -- Barte 16:41, 14 Feb 2005 (UTC)

Bram Cohen's website says BitTorrent is released under the MIT License, not a "BitTorrent License." -- somebody

Huh? It does say BitTorrent Open Source License, and the content most definitely is not the MIT License. -- 82.103.211.85 05:10, 2 February 2006 (UTC)

LokiTorrent shut down today. http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/02/10/loki_down_mpaa/ Jooler 23:22, 10 Feb 2005 (UTC)

On several BitTorrent and P2P forums we have noticed reports that LokiTorrent actually has been holding out hoping that the MPAA will make an offer to shut them down rather then wage on with the expensive pending lawsuit. We have decided to research this rumor ourselves to see what this popular torrent site is up to. Original this was posted on p2pforum but has vanished... We are posting this story for the public awareness. Some things we have noticed about the popular bit torrent site Lokitorrent that have raised some red flags is that they started collecting a US$30,000 legal fund to defend their site before they even were being sued! Even more odd was once they were sued they raised this amount to US$30,000 per month in legal fees plus US$4000 per month in site costs. To us this all sounds kind of fishy. Our question is why? After several failed attempts to reach Lokitorrent site admins looking for answers we went and contacted the MPAA which was more than happy to state that yes Lokitorrent and the MPAA were in negotiations and that the current offer could not be disclosed nor could the terms if the deal were to be reached. We all know bit torrent site admins take pride in their grassroots, non-profit image however most sites make huge amounts of money. Suprnova which claims to have shutdown due to MPAA pressure and to finish working on their Exeem project for their client is completely just lies. Suprnova was making alot of money. Figure if they had 2,000,000 visitors per day (which is what lokitorrent claims to have, suprnova many estimate had closer to 5,000,000) they would have made close to US$90,000 per month just from per-click ads. Do the math, (all you blog site admins will be kicking yourself because you know this is true) if even only 1.5% (my blog site even gets about 6%, so 1.5% is really low estimate) click an ad, even if by mistake they get an average of $.10 per click so they would be making US$3000 per day times 30 days, not to mention those annoying high paying popups. So now you are asking why would Suprnova shutdown if they were making so much? Well the answer is simple, with Exeem they have much lower costs as their whole system can run on 2 or 3 servers and their effort to maintain those 2 or 3 servers is alot lower as well when you consider they had more then 25 servers going at their peak. Exeem also will make them a ton of money through Cydoor. Some estimate they can easily make $1 per user per day which would put them at close to US$300,000 per day with their current user base. Cydoor is a information harvesting company. They harvest the users info to either sell to marketing companies and spammers or to use your info to hit you with ads directly for their clients. By using Exeem these companies know everything about you just by monitoring your online actions. You go to your email, they now know your email address, you fill in a form they have your name and home address, the information they can harvest is limitless and it is totally legal because when you install Exeem the user license informs you of this if you were to actually read it. If you dont believe us click here and read the part about Cydoor carefully. So why do Lokitorrent and Suprnova care so much about the public knowing about all this? They care because if you knew about it their image as being modern day Robinhoods would be tarnished and they would not be able to sucker you their user into donating Thousands of dollars to them. Our prediction is this Lokitorrent will sign a deal with the MPAA to shutdown, they will claim to shutdown saying that do to lack of donations they ca not afford to fight the case. The Lokitorrent admins save face with the BitTorrent community and continue their mufftorrent porn site and everyone goes on thinking they were just underdogs that could not afford to fight. We would actually like to hear a reply from lokitorrent or suprnova on this actually and we welcome their reply. Again this is all just still brain food and speculation at this point.

The italicized paragraph in this section is odd, as there is no citation for the quote. It should probably be re-written. -- Paraphelion 11:13, 13 Feb 2005 (UTC)

I believe it's from the original WebTorrent paper here; unfortunately it 404'd when I checked it just now. -- Antaeus Feldspar 17:52, 13 Feb 2005 (UTC)

WebTorrent doesn't appear to really exist. The link points to a directory for old term papers from 6.824, which is a class in distributed algorithms at MIT. Many classes such as this at MIT require students to design hypothetical applications. The author's website shows no indication of the software nor can it be found elsewhere on the web. The name WebTorrent also belongs to this bittorrent client. RSpeer 05:13, Feb 15, 2005 (UTC)

Does anyone else think all links to existing torrent sites should be removed? Given that most torrent sites are being shut down left and right these days, it's best not to advertise each address to anyone who may be reading. Ofcourse, by typing this, I'm not saying that I support any downloading, because I have a NPOV. - PSYCH 09:34, 20 Feb 2005 (UTC)

• No. Elfguy 18:04, 9 August 2005 (UTC)

I don't know why, but someone found relevant to remove info about eXeem, LokiTorrent and Suprnova. They are (or were) very important aspects of BitTorrent. -- Jolivierld 21:33, 6 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Well, you'd know why if you read this talk page. eXeem was getting too much discussion on the BitTorrent page for something that actually isn't and never was part of BitTorrent, which is why it has its own article now. -- Antaeus Feldspar 17:06, 7 Mar 2005 (UTC)

"and some other data." seems very unessesary. Phoenix Hacker

Some people may be confused that BitTorrent is the name of a program, yet it is also possible to use BitTorrent by using a program called something else (e.g. Azureus). I think this could be made clearer in the first paragraph, perhaps with "and the success of the protocol has led to many other clients being created by others". Or perhaps even by creating BitTorrent (protocol) and BitTorrent (client).

40% of this article are external links. We definitely have to remove 90% of these. Wikipedia is not DMoz. -- minghong 11:26, 5 May 2005 (UTC)

True, but you just removed all the links to the most active torrent sites, we should at least have the most active ones. — Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason 12:16, 2005 May 5 (UTC)

You know, it's hard to define "most". When you add back a few "most active" sites, someone else will add a few more. The list will be expanded again. So the best solution is to not list at not. I believe people won't come to Wikipedia looking for warez, fan-sub, pr0n, etc, right? -- minghong 18:54, 8 May 2005 (UTC)

Your argument doesn't hold water, we do just fine with external links on other topics which have alot of websites dedicated to those topics, we can remove obvious advertisement and prune other links by consensus just like we always have. — Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason 17:45, 2005 May 9 (UTC)

shouldn't we be weary posting any links to active torrent sites, given that most are being shut down? Do we really want to advertise these sites to the wrong people?

Large ones like the pirate bay frequently make tech news, you really can't justify a bittorrent article without a mention of some of them, since they're an integrated part of BT culture as it were. – Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason 04:30, 2005 May 10 (UTC)

I agree that links should be included, but if much of the article was links (which

I'm monitoring the page for link spamming. I believe it is reasonable to including external links to notable trackers, but many people are linking their own trackers (well, anon users are, I assume they're their own) for publicity, it seems. splintax ^(talk) 14:53, 28 November 2005 (UTC)

i read recently that the bittorrent protocol now accounts for over 50% of total net traffic. i think on /. - if anyone could source this statistic - would be worth quoting.

Try the new link to InfoAnarchy. SqueakBox 22:50, May 31, 2005 (UTC)

Check your sources: I followed the links that you've provided and they say something different: bittorrent accounts for 53% of all P2P-traffic and 35% of total net traffic. From these numbers one can calculate that P2P accounts for 66% of all net traffic. 193.190.14.94 09:48, 21 April 2006 (UTC)