By: David Hutchinson
Introduction: On March 18th 2012 “the galaxy’s most resilient Bit Torrent site,â€Â The Pirate Bay declared war on copyright laws around the world. It threatened to take its Bit Torrent piracy programs to the sky in order to avoid jurisdiction.
Bit Torrent is a system by which Internet users can connect to one another’s computers to share files. Users visit a website, such as the aforementioned The Pirate Bay, and can then access torrent files from the website’s network of users. One user must create a Torrent file of the content he or she wishes to share. That file then serves as a guide for other users on a given network to access and download the content. Each time a file is downloaded from the user, a copy is made which increases access for the next user seeking to download the same content. A user can then download a number of fragments of each file from a number of different users until the download is completed, making the process rather quick. The more users in a given network, the more access a user has to fragments of a desired file, and the faster that user is able to download that particular file. Due to the quick nature of the downloading process, as well as the user driven content stream, Bit Torrent has become the most popular type of peer-to-peer downloading system for copyright protected files.