Free and Legal Torrent Sites

BitTorrent in its quest to become more legitimate and move away from the widespread view that the BitTorrent software is used only for piracy has become a commercial site, where users can purchase media to download through the torrent system. But what is there for people who want legal torrents but still want to download them for free?

Some people will tell you that there are no such things as free, legal torrent sites, and they're almost right. Finding legal torrent sites that aren't commercial is pretty difficult, and many of the few that have popped up have fallen by the wayside. Fortunately there are a few free legal torrent sites out there. Here are five of them in no particular order.

LegalTorrents.comLegal Torrents is a fairly small torrent site, but it is a good one. All of its torrents are licensed through Creative Commons for free distribution. They have movies, music, games, tv shows and software all available.

All the torrents are listed on a single page (their collection is small) and easy to browse with handy descriptions. The best thing about Legal Torrents, though, is that all the torrents are centrally tracked and downloads are wicked fast. Everything I have downloaded from the site has come very quickly and I've never found myself stuck at 93% without any seeders. Despite not having too many torrents I find it to be the best of the legal torrents sites.

LegitTorrents.infoLegit Torrents is a larger site than Legal Torrents, boasting 419 torrents on the site. Like Legal Torrents they supply a variety of torrents including software, games, movies, etc. The site has a fairly basic but decent set-up for browsing. My biggest problem with the site is that there is no search feature on the front page, you have to start browsing before a search bar pops up.

PublicDomainTorrents.com As the name suggests all of the torrents available here are ones that have either been released into the public domain or the rights to the media have expired. Currently Public Domain Torrents only hosts movies, of which they have 883. Most of the movies are either old movies, B movies or (more often than not) both. If you're into classic B cinema give PublicDomainTorrents a look see.

bt.etree.orgis for music enthusiasts. Etree is dedicated to providing torrents featuring live music recordings of artists who allow and even encourage bootleg distribution, such as Phish and the Grateful Dead. (Phish and the Grateful Dead make up a lot of the torrents available, and options to hide Phish, the Grateful Dead or both from torrent listings are available). Currently boasts over 2800 torrents.

publiclibrary.metamute.orgThis is a torrent site for the online magazine Mute. As Mute is a politics/culture magazine, most of the torrents available here have to do either with politics or cultural issues. Simple browsing features with icons to represent type of content looked for (sounds, music, tv, movies, etc.) Also has a search function.