Analysis Of Bittorrent, A Nightmare For Copyright...

BitTorrent, a nightmare for copyright enforcement agencies Using BitTorrent has become a popular and effective way of downloading files over the internet. BitTorrent is a peer-to-peer file sharing (P2P) internet protocol that allows files to be distributed via an internet connection. The use of BitTorrent itself is a perfectly legal and legitimate process of downloading certain files. For example, if someone wanted to obtain a large free to use file like a Linux distribution, BitTorrent provides a fast and effective means to download the file legally. Another legal use of BitTorrent would be companies like Blizzard who use custom BitTorrent clients to distribute and update their games to avoid overloading their servers. The main†¦show more content†¦A swarm is a group of computers that all have the desired torrent file available for downloading. Computers enter the swarm by accessing a torrent file (file extension is generally .torrent) via a torrent client such as Bit Torrent, uTorrent, Vuze, Transmission, or many others. Trackers are located inside torrent files that keep track of connected computers. The tracker communicates with the other computers in the swarm and shares their corresponding IP addresses with everyone in the swarm so the computers can connect to one another. The tracker does not handle any of the data being transmitted, it merely provides a medium for the computers to keep track of which computers are in the swarm. In other words, when an individual wants to download a file, first they download a torrent file and access it via a client that contains a tracker allowing them to download the file from not one but many people at one time. The actual file being transferred is not transferred as one large file, but is broken down into many â€Å"pieces† when it is downloaded. After a computer has downloaded a piece of the file, they are then able to upload that piece to others in the swarm. Thus, computers in the swarm are downloading and uploading to and from each other simultaneously. Once the computer has all the pieces of the file, the client then assembles the pieces so the file is operable. BitTorrent clients can also utilize