Originally Posted by spindlegirl
Our culture in general has a relaxed attitude to "torrenting".
Depending on where you are on the internet. I belong to a knitting site, and I see conversations about people who torrented this or that show so they could "catch up", and wholehearted approval and pats on the back, but find one of the knitting patterns on a torrent site? Evil thieves! How dare they think they can get a designer's work for free?!?
I sometimes do a word search for the word "torrent" on twitter and I find tweets that from the same user "don't mind"' torrenting one thing, but other things are sacrosanct and they refuse to touch it.
Torrents are funny, though, because there is plenty of legal content. You can download Project Gutenberg collections via torrent--indeed, this is how I discovered torrents. Same thing with the material from the Internet Archive--I've downloaded tons of movies, TV shows, and old radio programs using their torrent links. Sometimes it becomes hard to tell what is legitimately public domain and what is not.