GoKawiilThe kids' guide to piracy
Hey kids! Have you heard of piracy but don’t know how to do it cos you grew up while streaming worked okay? Well this is the guide for you!
DISCLAIMER: It is only my intent that the advice offered here be used to download media that is in the public domain. While it’s true that the advice here could be employed to download recent movies and TV shows that are under copyright, and that that is its primary application, it’s cerrrtainnnly not my intention that you use it for such purposes. You wouldn’t want to deprive a media megacorp CEO of his second yacht would you?!?!
ALSO KIND OF A DISCLAIMER I GUESS: I’ll be describing how to do this on a personal computer of some sort (that includes laptops (that includes your macintosh-books and so on)). You can probably do it on the portable telephones you all seem to love so much, but I have no idea how because I am old.
What is torrenting?
Torrenting is how we used to get movies and TV shows and games back before streaming and Steam were things and before we realised the error of our ways and bucked our ideas up.
I’m going to be nutshelling this pretty hard, describing things very broadly, so don’t come “Well actually…”ing me about details, I don’t care. And if you’re not interested in how it all works, just skip down to the numbered instructions.
Movies and TV shows, in digital form, are just files. And you want to download those files to your computer where you can do what you like with them. Watch them whenever you want, copy them to other devices, back them up, take clips and edit them together to some horrible pop music and upload that to TikTok. Whatever you like.
Torrenting lets you do that. The downloading part. A torrent is a description of how to download those files from other people who have them. When you are torrenting something, you are simultaneously downloading it from other people who have it and uploading it to other people who want it. The uploading and downloading stop when you close the client or remove that particular torrent from the client.
Popular things, which lots of people are sharing, will download more quickly (often as fast as your internet can go) than niche things. But pretty much anything should download eventually if you just leave the torrent client running.
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