There’s something I’m missing in this Boing! Boing! post by Cory Doctorow,
Bram: BitTorrent use up, it’s not all warez
Bram Cohen, the creator of BitTorrent, notes, “I’d like to point out that although a number of very large BitTorrent-based web sites have been taken down recently, downloads of BitTorrent have only gone down slightly. There’s a widespread belief that BitTorrent is used almost exclusively for warez, probably a perception of people who themselves use it almost exclusively for warez, but that impression is simply untrue.
Maybe I’m missing something, but I’m not sure how “downloads . . . have . . . gone down slightly” leads Cory to conclude that “BitTorrent use [is] up.”
On the other hand, the overall point is absolutely correct — there are a ton of completely legal things to download via BitTorrent. I used it the other day to download ISOs of the CDs that Baen packed in some of their books, which the company allows to be freely distributed.