Whether it’s Hollywood studios attempting to prosecute people sharing movies or the music industry complaining about dwindling revenues as a result of illegally downloaded albums, the topic of file sharing is rarely out of the headlines.

It is easy to assume all forms of file sharing are illegal, but that is not the case. There is nothing illegal about file sharing or the technology that drives it. What is illegal, however, is the sharing of copyrighted files such as movies, music and computer software.

In this article, we are not going to show you how to download illegal material. What we will do, however, is explain the basics of file sharing, why it is so popular and how you can use it to download legal files quickly and easily.

File sharing basics
Traditionally, downloading a file from the internet involves clicking on a link and then having the file transferred directly to your computer from that website.

This is fine for small files, but problems soon occur if the file is large (a 500MB program, perhaps, or a complete operating system) and lots of people try to download it at the same time.

If the website in question cannot cope with the demand, download speeds slow to a crawl and the site may even crash under the pressure.

File sharing, however, uses peer-to-peer technology. This means the file in question is not downloaded from a central location, but obtained from several other computers on the internet that have the same file and are willing to share it.

This splits the necessary resources between many computers, making downloads faster and more reliable.

Perhaps the best known file-sharing technology is Bittorrent. This uses small files, known as torrents (these have a .torrent file extension), that point your computer in the direction of others that have the file you are looking for.

Simply add the correct torrent file to a program such as Utorrent (which we will cover in more detail in a moment), and the file you want will start downloading.

For a file to be shared using Bittorrent, someone has to first make the entire file available for download. They do this by putting a torrent file online that directs others towards the copy on their computer.

People who want the file can then start to receive pieces of the file sent from that original computer. It’s at this point that the clever stuff starts happening.

As these users start downloading the file from the original user, their computers start sharing the bits they have already downloaded. From this point on more people will be sharing more of the file, making downloads far quicker.