Finding Legal (and Free) Torrents

Although bittorrent has a reputation for illegally distributing copyrighted content, there is a large, and rapidly growing amount of content in bittorrent that is legally distributable.  Much of this is issued under a Creative Commons license which allows you to copy, distribute, advertise and play as long as you give credit to the artist.  Some also allow altering for mixes as long as credit is given to the artist.

Most of this content is music audio and is from up and coming artists.  There are some current movies from independent producers, but most is older movies in the Public Domain.  There is some content from mainstream popular music, mostly live concerts, but a few popular artists have released their content over bittorrent. 

All of the content at these sites is legal to download and distribute.  I have never heard of a fake or infected torrent at these sites (but I suppose they could exist) and there is no worry about copyright legalities.

In addition to these sites, any torrent search site will index legal torrents.  A search for public domain, open source or creative commons will usually bring up a substantial list.  Any Linux distribution will almost always be available also.

Jamendo is a site that features albums directly from the artists.  All of it is issued under a full Creative Commons license.  This large collection is from artists around the world and features all genres of music.  A nice feature is that you can listen to any of the albums, in full, before downloading.  Speeds are decent.  They advertise that there is over 10,000 albums available and there are more releases available at isoHunt (below).  Excellent site for discovering new music.

isoHunt (Jamendo) features over 20,000 downloads of music originating from Jamendo (above).  
isoHunt Public Domain torrents (1762).  Download speeds are decent on both of these.

eTree is a community for sharing the live concerts of Trade Friendly artists.  It is a very large collection of many genres and has a nice mix of old and new.

Public Domain Torrents is a collection of classic movies and B-movies that are in the public domain.  The collection includes approximately 1,000 movies that are available in DivX, iPod, PDA and PSP.  Speeds are generally a bit slow.

YouTorrent is a torrent search engine that only indexes legal torrents.  There are just under 130,000 torrents indexed.

CanadianPirateTracker  is a creative commons torrent tracker, formed by the PPoC (Pirate Party of Canada) in order to promote artists over an efficient and inexpensive global distribution network.  There are only a few torrents there as of now, but hopefully it will grow (unfortunately it has not grown much in the past year).

Vuze. As of June, 2009, Vuze now carries only videos.    Videos that are free, with ads, can only be downloaded with the Vuze client.  There is a small amount of payable content.  Torrents downloaded from here come down at high speeds as the torrents are also supported by Vuze servers. 
This was my favorite download site, but they have completely re-done their HD network and there really is not much there anymore.  Both music and the excellent collection of anime are gone and there just seems to be a bunch of trailers and promos.  You can view the content through the link here, but still need the Vuze client to download.

MiniNova's Featured Content is a good sized collection of mostly music and videos, with some software and games and ebooks.  These torrents are issued under MiniNova's Content Distribution service.  Download speeds on these torrents are enhanced as MiniNova provides servers to help with upload.

The sites that follow are ones that I have not used.

GameUpdates.org carries legal patches, demos and mods for the latest games.  There are dedicated high speed seeders, so files are always available.  Looking at their forums, they weed out any illegal material uploaded quickly.

ibiblio torrents provides Bittorrent access to ibiblio's open source content

Legit Torrents is a collection of close to 1,700 torrents, which appears to be mostly software with some of the other content.  It bills itself as hosting 100% Legally Free Media. 

Linux Tracker bills itself as the Premiere Linux Bittorrent Website and hosts around 500 torrents of free and open source software, preferably Linux.

ClearBits about 1300 torrents of Creative Commons licensed digital media.

Vodo Bittorrent distribution of independent films and movies.

This is not a complete listing of free and legal sites.  If anyone knows of other sites they feel should be on this list, then please post here.

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