How to use legal file sharing sites

Power in numbers
Speed is one of the biggest advantages of Bittorrent, but it is not the only reason to use peer-to-peer downloads.

It also makes downloads more resilient: if a company puts its program online as a standard download and thousands of people flock to get that file then the website will often fail, leaving users with no way to get the download.

With a Bittorrent download, the original user can disappear once the entire file has been shared out among the other users – it will still be available to new downloaders.

This is great for people who want to offer files for download, but there is a bigger advantage if all you want is to get files from the internet without fuss. Standard downloads start by sending you the beginning of the file, then work onwards from there until they have sent the end.

If you interrupt the download or turn off the computer it is normally impossible to pick up from where you left off. However, Bittorrent downloads send the files in whatever order is most convenient, and can be paused at any point, whether that’s for 10 minutes while you do something online, or two weeks while you go on holiday.