Followup regarding using BitTorrent: why and what for?

[chopper]

<>>

Yeah, racing is for me, too.

[pinion]

decay wrote:
when i used it, it was for lossless live audio recordings and sometimes video concerts. every so often an out-of-print cult movie that was otherwise unavailable for purchase or rental.

This here. I use http://www.dimeadozen.org/ to find live lossless torrents of bands that are ok with their shows being recorded and shared so everything on that site should be legal. They certainly have a lot of bands that are not allowed on there because they've been asked by the band/label/manager to not allow it and they respect that.

If I'm looking for something that is incredibly hard to find I'll use btdig (which, interestingly, you can't find if you google it) but that will return results that might have copyrighted material since I think it basically just indexes every torrent from every where it can find and then let's you search.

Finally, the internet archive has so much stuff on it that it's fun to just go look around. All of their downloads have a torrent link and most that I find you can also just direct download. But since I already have BitTorrent going if I do find something interesting there I'll grab the torrent and keep it going to help other that may want to download the same thing. There is some controversy around the internet archive though about copyrighted material. I think book publishers recently (2020?) sued them because you could download books from there and I believe they're response was basically that they are like a library which would allow them to do that. I'm not sure of all the details but I think maybe the internet archive implemented some sort of check out system for those books in question? I can't recall but there is definitely some stuff that is in a gray are there.

It doesn't hurt to have torrenting software installed. I'd recommend https://www.qbittorrent.org/. That way if you do come across something you want to download it will be trivial to get it started. Do be careful about other public sites that obviously have material you shouldn't download because you will get a notice sent to your ISP and then they will send you a nasty gram or worse.

[mrbigstuff]

Yeah, I use internet archive a great deal, too, but you definitely can't get HD recordings there of commercially released albums. Not that I've seen anyway.