Free, legally distributed books, movies, and music are just waiting to be discovered online, so it’s a shame that fans aren’t aware of all of the Bittorrent tracker sites where this content is freely available. By downloading from the sites on this list, you’ll support artists and avoid a copyright infringement lawsuit from the RIAA.
Clearbits.net
Clearbits distributes torrents ranging from indie movies, to Creative Commons-licensed podcasts, to documentaries and music. The Clearbits community filters the content and only accepts professional quality, broadly appealing, and member requested content. For users, this helps to increase the quality and appeal of the site's content. For content creators who submit to the service, it means that their content will be listed on a website where all the other content has a similar consistency and quality.
Currently Clearbits facilitates the download of 10-20 Terabytes of content per month. All files are centrally seeded, so your torrent client won’t idle out on you. The media categories are neatly listed, and there is a search box that you can use if you need to find something specific.
Public Domain Torrents
Public Domain Torrents features hundreds of torrents from out-of-copyright films delivered in a variety of formats. All torrents listed are believed to be in the public domain; however, torrents are often de-listed when users report that a film still has a valid copyright. The torrents aren't seeded centrally by the service, so only the most popular and most recently posted files are likely to finish downloading without any hassle. The site itself also has a few kinks in it occasional giving errors.
Legit Torrents
Legit Torrents aggregates torrents of music, movies, books, and games and Linux distributions that can be legally distributed. The site is a bit hard to navigate because the front page isn't conducive to browsing. Overall, the site is well trafficked and contains a lot of interesting content.
One tip for browsing is to use the 'Extra Stats' menu (on the top-left of the site) to see what are the most popular torrents on the service are right now. Popular content includes the NIN concert DVD Another Version of the Truth and the Michael Moore film Slacker Uprising.
Etree
Etree hosts live recordings of bands, particularly much sought after sets from jam bands like Phish and the Greatful Dead, in the lossless FLAC audio format. FLAC files are a bit difficult for the average user to use, but the audio quality is just as good as the master recording. The community is very artist supportive and only releases torrents of “trade friendly” artists.
Linux Tracker
Linux Tracker is a Linux ISO site that describes itself as “The Premiere Linux BitTorrent website.” Because of the open nature of Linux and its many releases, BitTorrent has proved to be Linux's preferred distribution method. Linux Tracker includes all of the major flavors of Linux, including the open source DVR system KnoppMyth.
Mininova
Mininova's intuitive navigation makes it easy to browse. Mininova serves over 10,000 legal torrents, including HD space mission footage from NASA. The site primarily features music and software. Mininova once featured torrents of copyright-protected content but removed all of its unauthorized content after a copyright infringement lawsuit.
YouTorrent
YouTorrent searches torrent sites for legitimate authorized content available on the various BitTorrent sites. This is a great place to find high definition versions of movie trailers.
Game Updates
Gameupdates.org features mods, patches, updates and demos created by major video game publishers as well as the gaming community itself. In addition, the site features torrents of high definition trailers, and sometimes even whole, full-version games.
The Miro Guide
The Miro Guide has thousands of video and audio shows for browsing. Miro is a free, open-source internet TV application that features a built-in BitTorrent client. While some content is distributed directly via BitTorrent, the Miro program is usually necessary to download the files.
Photo Credit: System Of A Down - Most Honest CD Cover by Anirudh Koul
Photo Credit: Bit Fiddling by CodeMonkeyWithACanon
