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UPDATED AS OF 01/08/10: Please check 10 More Sites for Free and Legal Torrents for an updated list of free and legal downloading destinations.
Bittorrent downloads are either illegal or DRM-infected, right? Wrong. There are plenty of websites out there that offer free and legal Torrent downloads to save bandwidth and make file sharers happy at the same time.
Granted, sites like The Pirate Bay are still the major source for Bittorrent traffic. But legitimate platforms offer enough video goodies to clog your tubes for days. Here are 10 great places to get started:
Legaltorrents.com distributed 90 terabytes of Creative Commons-licensed content in the last seven months alone. The site features lots of music downloads, but also has some good video content like the South African TV show Go Open and the Firefly-Documentary Done The Impossible. All the files are centrally seeded, so your downloads will always have a happy ending.
Public Domain Torrents features hundreds of Torrents from out-of-copyright films in numerous formats. Unfortunately there is no central seeding, so you better stick to the recently posted items.
Legit Torrents is a new site that aggregates freely available Torrents, including video, games and Linux distributions.
Bittorrent has taken a beating for its recently launched download store, but the site still offers lots of freely downloadable content as well. Unfortunately the free stuff gets buried under the rentals and sales, which are for some reason deemed more “relevant.”
SXSW.com features music and video downloads to promote the South by Southwest festival. This year’s film trailers aren’t up yet, but there’s 3 gigabytes of MP3 music to get an idea of what’s gonna go down in Austin this March.
Speaking of music: Etree is hosting live recordings of bootleg-friendly artists in the lossless FLAC audio format.
The soon-to-be-relaunched Azureus home base Zudeo offers a mix of music videos, user-generated content, professionally produced movies and short films. Worth a look because of its extensive list of fan films and HD content. All downloads are centrally seeded.
Torrentfreak is known for its up-to-date coverage of the BitTorrent scene, but the site also operates an own tracker and regularly features legal downloads like the official Bittorrent release of the movie The Corporation.
Revision3.com is technically not a Torrent site, but the online video network utilizes BitTorrent like few others. Every episode page features a multitude of Torrent links, and you can subscribe to each show with an RSS-Feed including proper Torrent enclosures.
Finally, no list of legal Torrent platforms would be complete without a Linux ISO site like Linuxtracker.com. Advocates of the free operating system have been using BitTorrent for a long time to spread the latest releases of their preferred distribution. Linuxtracker lists all major flavors of Linux, including video-specific releases like the open source DVR system KnoppMyth and the multimedia production platform 64 Studio.
Related GigaOM Pro Research
Are Torrents a Tool for Predicting the Future?
Music and movie downloaders have more than once proven to be on the bleeding edge of connected consumer tech.
This one is great http://MeTorrents.com , I just recently found it and subscribe to it everyday
quickly please
General Torrents. Movies, music, tv shows, games, ebooks,software, etc.
legal schmeagle, I want illegal
wow, thats a massive list. I didnt knew that torrents can alos beomce legal and free
This is not a torrent site but it offers family-friendly vinyl recordings from the mid forties through the early fifties in legal torrent zip files.
http://www.kiddierecords.com
Good list, also don’t forget that http://www.wortharchiving.com has legal torrents too.
visita este sitio… ===>>> http://www.dante19.es.tl
I really had no idea that there were any truly “legit” torrent sites in existence. All the crackdowns on illegal sites must finally be paying off.
HAHAHAHAHa… he said the crackdown must be paying off …Only to make the best “illegal” sites better
HAHAHAH
I notice that http://www.legaltorrents.com/ is a dead link!
http://www.gameupdates.org
Torrent site with all legal gaming material as demos, patches and games. All torrents are seeded with dedicated seeders.
I couldn’t understand some parts of this article , but I guess I just need to check some more resources regarding this, because it sounds interesting.
I offer legal BitTorrent downloads of music licensed under Creative Commons and similar licenses at http://www.oggfrog.com/music
I invite artists looking for an affordable way to get their music downloads hosted to email me at [email protected] There’s no charge to host your torrents.
You the Best!!
come join our growing site bollytorrents.net its free to join download free mives music nad much more
I have just finished up a website called PeerIt.com. This is a legal torrent site where you can sell torrents of stuff you own. Along with how much you are selling your torrent for, you list how much of the proceeds you are willing to share (payout). For each sale, you payout what you have listed as your share amount, to those who helped distribute your file, according to how much they have helped. For more details, checkout http://www.peerit.com/learn/
Plz Help me, if anybody have desitorrent id. and the want to help me, then Plz invite me, i want an id. in desitorrent.
http://bollytorrents.net its free and best site for bollywood
this free and legal great site for BollyWood files
You missed out http://www.freelegaltorrents.com
Check out FreeLegalTorrents.com. It is a fantastic up and coming site, and torrent tracker for legal and 100% free torrents.
thepiratebay.org surves most, if not all, legal tottents, among the other stuff.
You must always know the law before you download!
Legit torrents is not legal: the movie icon in it is the copyrighted iMovie icon from Apple.
Wtf does “legal” mean?
If you want to start your own legal bittorrent tracker, you can find all the scripts (php or php/mysql) here:
http://www.borget.info
Easy to install, ready to use !
What about the Creative Commons licensed albums at Jamendo (http://www.jamendo.com/)? They’ve published more than 2,500 (two-and-a-half thousand!) albums, and legal BitTorrent downloads there are actively encouraged.
funny , my brain did`nt register legal torrent . hehehe
same lol
There is one host missing in this list :
http://www.jamendo.com/
5000+ free & legal music torrents.
We’re similar to Revision3. Every podcast at Podcast Spot (http://www.podcastspot.com) has torrent feeds, and every episode has torrent downlads.
To be more specific, since every episode at Podcast Spot is converted to multiple formats, there are torrent feeds/downloads for each format.