The ‘Free and Legal’ District

Torrents! They’re everywhere! Oh, the horror! Thousands upon thousands of terabytes of copyrighted content transferred by lawless college students bandits devouring ripped DVDs and music albums faster than they can ingest delivery pizza and beer. How does civilization survive?

We don’t know. Magic, maybe. What we do know is that not all the stuff happening as a result of Bram Cohen’s ingenuity is laden with the stamp of the RIAA, MPAA, or both. A relatively new blog on the Web, dubbed NewTeeVee (one of the brainchildren of Mr Om Malik) showed that, though they are but a few drops in the bucket of torrents flowing freely every second of every day, there are at least 10 sites running in the digital ether that play by the rules. Their rules? No copyright allowed.

It’s obvious that illegal stuff is happening on the Web every moment of every day. People are clicking ‘download’ buttons to obtain copied content that wasn’t OK to copy in the first place faster than you or I can blink, and the rate at which they’re doing so isn’t slowing, it’s speeding up. Bigger tubes aren’t helping the copyright titans’ cause, either. But not all media is being procured through criminal means. Have a look at Legal Torrents, Public Domain Torrents, Legit Torrents, SXSW, Etree, Zudeo, Torrentfreak, Linuxtracker, Revision3, and the original BitTorrent itself to get a taste for real and truly free files.

Each site does its thing:

Legal Torrents offers a wide range of downloads.

Public Domain Torrents provides visitors with one stop access to anything divested of its copyright tag.

Legit Torrents does video with a side of games and Linux distros.

Among the paid-for content now featured on BitTorrent, you can find the free stuff that’s been there “from the start”. You may have a difficult time finding those items, as they are now often buried beneath the mounds of copyrighted material, but it’s there if you’re willing to dig.

SXSW is all about the music and the video that gets featured at the South by Southwest festival, taking place later this month in Austin, Texas.

Etree runs its show with the graces of bootleg-friendly artists, and highlights its lossless FLAC audio torrents.

Zudeo delivers movie trailers and the odd television show and movie, some in high definition (which Zudeo touts as its biggest draw), all to your desktop.

Torrentfreak is another destination for legal downloads, and operates its own tracker, which some lack.

Revision3 is a VC-infused startup that offers a variety of video blogs like Diggnation and The Broken both in direct-download and torrent formats. The latter option is surprisingly popular, as many broadband subscribers frequently commend BitTorrent technology for the superior Mbps rate they achieve over a direct-from-server request.

Linuxtracker gives you, well, Linux stuff. Distros, programs, utilities, updates, games, etc.

To the readers: If you have any recommendations about the above-mentioned sites or any other places you prefer to get your legal downloads, let us and fellow readers know in the comments.