LegalTorrent

Written by Eric Olsen
Published December 11, 2003

We mentioned the groovy counterintuitive download technique known as BitTorrent back in May:

    BitTorrent is a "swarming" file download system. After you download the file, your computer automatically hosts it for other people to download, instead of everyone downloading from the same congested server. The more people there are downloading a file, the faster everyone's downloads will be! Sounds too good to be true, right?
Right.

Now BitTorrent is offering free, fast, legal music at LegalTorrents - freaky!

    Welcome!
    This is a collection of legally downloadable, freely distributable 'net.label' electronica MP3 files which we've made available via BitTorrent. Our server provides the initial seed and remains a contributing uploader. From there, everyone that grabs the BitTorrent client and downloads helps contribute more bandwidth, because BitTorrent utilizes your unused upload bandwidth.
This is what music on the Internet is supposed to be about - give it a try.

Career media professional Eric Olsen is honored to be the founder and publisher of Blogcritics.org, which, quite frankly, rules - as do his wife and four children.
Keep reading for information and comments on this article, and add some feedback of your own!
LegalTorrent
Published: December 11, 2003
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Section: Sci/Tech
Filed Under: Sci/Tech: Internet, Music: News
Writer: Eric Olsen
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Comments

#1 — December 11, 2003 @ 10:52AM — Jonathan

I replaced kazaa with bittorent a few weeks ago :)
Suprnova.org is a good site to download off of too..
the only problem with bittorent right now is that sometimes the selection sucks and its har dto find what you want. But most popular stuff is easy to get

#2 — December 11, 2003 @ 11:04AM — Tom Johnson [URL]

I've been using BT to download tons of bootlegs (live/rare material - absolutely no official releases) from Sharing The Groove, all of which are lossless FLAC or SHN files. The system works - for a while. Something pops up to download and a bunch jump on it. It'll take a day or two for a full show to download, but once it gets out to a handful of people, speeds can increase almost exponentially. I was pulling something down the other day at 140k a second! I had the full, 700mb worth of files in about 3 hours. The problem is, of course, that once many people have the show people will gradually stop sharing, and eventually it's back to one uploader and tons of people leeching off him at 3k. So yes, it does work, but only for a short period of time. I'm amazed it works at all - I think this is more due to the "sharing and caring" nature of bootleg traders, and if it were on a larger scale it probably wouldn't succeed quite as well. Sure is fun when the gettin's good, however.

#3 — December 11, 2003 @ 11:05AM — Tom Johnson [URL]

By the way, Eric, no baby news yet?

#4 — December 11, 2003 @ 11:06AM — Eric Olsen

Today is the "second" due date and nothing new yet, other than a very frustrated mother.

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