Legal Uses
There are several circumstances under which it is legal to distribute copyrighted material or parts thereof.
- Free distribution. Copyright holders may choose to allow free distribution of their works. Dedicated copyright licenses—usable by anyone who wants to upload own material—are available for that purpose. Such licenses are often used in situations with large numbers of copyright holders, like in online communities. For example, the Creative Commons license family for free cultural works in text, audio, video or image format; or software licenses for Free Software / Open-source software like the BSD License and others. Actually, Wikipedia itself can be distributed via BitTorrent for the same reason.
- Public domain. Works that are in the public domain and therefore not (or no longer) subject to copyright law can also be legally distributed. For instance, Project Gutenberg regularly collects and publishes classical cultural works after their copyright has expired (which depends on the country the work was previously published).
- Fair use. Some countries also have fair use provisions in copyright law, which allow people the right to access and use certain classes of copyrighted material without breach of the law.
There are also experiments at legally selling content that is distributed over BitTorrent using a "secure" tracker system.
Read more about this topic: Bit Torrent Tracker
Famous quotes containing the word legal:
“The disfranchisement of a single legal elector by fraud or intimidation is a crime too grave to be regarded lightly.”
—Benjamin Harrison (1833–1901)
“The steps toward the emancipation of women are first intellectual, then industrial, lastly legal and political. Great strides in the first two of these stages already have been made of millions of women who do not yet perceive that it is surely carrying them towards the last.”
—Ellen Battelle Dietrick, U.S. suffragist. As quoted in History of Woman Suffrage, vol. 4, ch. 13, by Susan B. Anthony and Ida Husted Harper (1902)