BitTorrent is a great technical advancement. It's a fantastic, brilliant, genius new invention that makes it much much easier to share data. It, paradoxically, gets faster the more people who want to download! It's a brilliant technical solution to a big, pressing, expensive problem.

I am annoyed when such a marvelous technical solution is seen as nothing more than a shady, illegal software. ☹

BitTorrent is like a lock pick set. There are valid uses such as if you've locked yourself out of your house, but if the majority of people use a lock pick set to unlock the back door to a movie theater and sneak in to watch movies without paying no doubt it would be perceived similarly.

Bad analogies are like Vietnam.

That's not entirely valid.

There is _one_ legitimate use for a lock pick set: to unlock something you own that you've accidentally locked yourself out of. There are literally billions of uses for BT: every large public (legal) file that's currently distributed via centralized server.

There is one legitimate use for BitTorrent: to efficiently transfer data that you have permission to access.

Some people use lock picks to unlock doors that they don't have permission to much in the same way that some people use BitTorrent to transfer data they don't have permission to.

Fair enough. But even if I accept your definition of a "use," there are millions of files you could legitimately download with BT. There are a handful of locks you could legitimately open with a lockpick.

Are you not familiar with Locksport?

No and neither is anyone else, statistically speaking.

(Personally I know exactly what you're talking about, but trying to hang your case on an obscure sport isn't doing it any favors. The lockpick analogy is bad and a car analogy would serve you much better.)

Not my analogy, and I agree it was terrible.

I would say it's like a car, it helps people get to places faster but every time there is a bank robbery the thieves get away in a car

BitTorrent is a pawn shop that sometimes sells guns to criminals. A lock pick set is more like a keygen, to go with the gun.

(You know, as long as we're speaking in analogies)

mostly sells guns - I suspect the ratio of dodgy/legit is worse for bittorrent that the average pawn shopp

It is a great way to distribute content. It more or less scales the delivery network in step with the number of content consumers.

There's also an interesting economic to torrents...the crappier the content, the fewer people seed. The fewer people that seed, the harder it is to get and the longer it takes. On the flip side, really great content gets seeded like crazy, and everyone can enjoy it quickly.

Although I agree with your post in general terms, I want to highlight is not great content gets seeded, its popular content. There is a diference. Specially since great old content decreases in popularity.

It's both. Great content and popular content both get seeded quite a bit, even as they age.

I've heard that popular content gets lots of leaches, but they don't seed for long. They delete the file once they've watched it, because it just wasn't that good.

Good content gets a lot of seeders, because they keep it for longer.