Bit Torrent has gotten a bad rap lately, due to its rampant use in copyright infringement. That’s why it wasn’t surprising to find sites like SuprNova.org shutting down, rather than face the wrath of music and movie lawyers who are turning the legal system into a volume business.

This is unfortunate, because Bit Torrent is one of the neatest developments to hit the net in a while — it’s an Internet representation of memes. For those not in the know, Bit Torrent is a distribution system, where you upload parts of the file while you download parts of the file. So, say you download the first quarter of a file. You can then act as a server for other people who are looking for that first quarter, and provide it to them for download, while you’re trying to download the remaining three quarters of the file. You, in turn, are downloading the remaining three quarters from others who have downloaded the file. The more people who try to download, the better off everyone is, as this gives you more places to download from simultaneously. Hence, the more in demand a file is, the larger and stronger the torrent. A meme in action! This has the benefit of not forcing the provider of the media to pay for all of the downloaded bandwidth, which is a good thing. It distributes that bandwidth load to the downloaders, which seems to be a sort of poetic justice.

So, despite the bad press that Bit Torrent seems to draw, this technology is quite good. Fedora allows people to download the latest versions of their Linux via Fedora torrent. South By Southwest provided their entire SXSW 2005 Music Festival catalog of 750 songs in a publically available torrent. If more people would use this system, providers of media could reduce their costs (allowing them to provide more media in the future), and downloads would be quicker for all.

The following sites provide legal Bit Torrents. As torrents need people participating to have power, install Bit Torrent and jump right in!

bt.etree.org: Live concert recordings of trade-friendly artists are featured here. Looking for a recording from the last Phish show? This is a good place to start.

LegalTorrents: LT is a clearinghouse of various freely available music, books, and movies.

Prodigem Torrents: An eclectic mix of mostly tech-related torrents.

torrentocracy: Mostly political torrents.

Click on, download, upload, enjoy. Not everything is evil, despite what the news tells you.