🆕 Never Post! News Post: A Primer on Torrenting

In the latest installment of Terms & Conditions, Georgia chats with author, professor, and digital piracy expert Aram Sinnreich about torrenting. Peer-to-peer file sharing isn’t new, nor is the legal controversy surrounding it. But what is torrenting? Why does it have such a marred reputation, and what role does it play in our online lives? 

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Terms & Conditions: On Torrenting

• Aram’s website

Never Post’s producers are Audrey Evans, Georgia Hampton and The Mysterious Dr. Firstname Lastname. Our senior producer is Hans Buetow. Our executive producer is Jason Oberholtzer. The show’s host is Mike Rugnetta.

Never Post is a production of Charts & Leisure and is distributed by Radiotopia

Friends, hello, and welcome to Never Post, a podcast for and about the Internet. I am producer Georgia. This intro was written on 03/31/2026 at 03:50PM central time, and we have a litigious show for you this week. In this episode, we're bringing back our series Terms and Conditions, where we spend some time with Internet related concepts, practices, and ideas to better understand how they work and the context in which they exist. Today, I am chatting with author, professor, and digital piracy expert, Aram Synreich, about torrenting.

Peer to peer file sharing isn't new, nor are the ongoing legal controversies surrounding it. But what is torrenting? Why does it have such a marred reputation, and what is its role in our online lives? But first, we're gonna take a quick break. You'll listen to some ads, unless you're on the member feed.

And when we return, we'll talk about a few of the things that have happened since the last time you heard from us. I have got six news items for you this week. Firstly, in show news, we've been nominated for a Webby award. Eagle eared listeners will remember that we won the Webby for best podcast live recording last year for our xoxo fest live show in 2024. This year, we're up for best individual episode in the news and politics category for Mike's incredible episode titled AI and New American Fascism.

If you'd like to vote for us, we will include the link to do so in the show notes. Huzzah. The Federal Communications Commission has banned all new consumer based Internet routers made outside of The United States. Importantly, the ban does not affect any foreign made routers that are already being sold in The United States, nor ones that already exist in American homes. But any new foreign made models are banned, unless they can be approved by the FCC and the Department of Defense and the Department of Homeland Security.

This comes as a result of alleged national security concerns around these newer models. With the FCC writing in a statement that, quote, malicious actors have exploited security gaps in foreign made routers to attack American households, disrupt networks, enable espionage, and facilitate intellectual property theft. But how real that threat actually is remains unclear. Virtually all Internet routers sold in The United States are manufactured at least in part overseas. And it is also unclear what elements of manufacturing process fall under this ban.

But as a spokesman from TP Link told Wired, quote, it appears that the entire router industry will be impacted, unquote. And that, invariably, includes us as consumers. Hachette Book Group has pulled one of its latest releases from shelves after suspecting that the novel was written by AI. The book in question is Shy Girl, the debut novel written, allegedly, by Mia Ballard. The book was first self published in February 2025, and later picked up by Hachette in the fall.

The novel revolves around a young woman who is forced to live as the pet of an abusive, controlling man. And in some corners of the internet, this shocking, brutal story was first celebrated as a kind of extreme feminist horror. But over time, more and more readers started to post online with theories that the story wasn't just badly written, but the product of AI slop. Flash forward to March 19 when the New York Times broke the story that Hachette was both canceling Shy Girls debut in The United States and removing it from shelves in The UK because of widespread allegations of AI use. Mia Ballard, for her part, has completely denied these claims, telling the New York Times that it was actually her editor who had used AI when working on the text.

But Ballard did not elaborate on how exactly this AI editing took place. A New Mexico jury found Meta guilty guilty of misleading its consumers about the safety of its platforms and enabling child endangerment. Now, Meta owes $375,000,000 in civil penalties. That would be a story worthy in and of itself, except that one day later, Meta was back in court again, losing big time. In the second trial, Meta and YouTube were found liable in creating addictive social media platforms that endanger the emotional well-being of its users.

A young woman using the pseudonym Kaylee sued both tech giants, blaming them for her childhood social media addiction. Kaylee has now been awarded $6,000,000 in damages. In response, Meta released a statement saying that, quote, teen mental health is profoundly complex and cannot be linked to a single app. We will continue to defend ourselves vigorously as every case is different, and we remain confident in our record of protecting teens online. Sure.

Totally for sure. Where have all the doge bros gone? Turns out, they've gone viral. Earlier this month, video footage from the deposition of former Department of Government efficiency employees, Justin Fox and Nate Kavanaugh, spread like wildfire across the social Internet. The videos showed the two men admitting to using ChatGPT to filter out grants based on words like black or homosexual, but not terms like white or Caucasian.

They also struggled to answer simple questions about what exactly DEI even was. The videos from these depositions were originally posted on YouTube and shared across social platforms before a judge ruled that they needed to be taken down out of concern for the safety of Fox, Kavanaugh, and their families. This ruling was reversed a little over two weeks later, citing the first amendment. But what's most interesting was what happened in those two weeks. Because, yes, the videos were taken down from YouTube.

But it turned out that doing that didn't really make a difference because they had already been backed up online. Four zero four media reported that only a single day after the videos were taken down, the Internet Archive had already reuploaded a saved version of the videos. Plus, both depositions had already been saved another way. They had been torrented. Arrr.

And speaking of torrenting, oh, how far we have strayed from the days of Limewire. In a surprising unanimous supreme court ruling, the internet service provider Cox Communications was found not liable for the illegal downloading and sharing of copyrighted music done through its services. The case was brought to court by dozens of major music companies who claimed that Cox Communications hadn't done enough to sufficiently stop its users from engaging in piracy. But as it turns out, that wasn't enough to convince the court to put the responsibility of this behavior on any given Internet provider. Justice Clarence Thomas read aloud his opinion that, quote, under our precedence, a company is not liable as a copyright infringer for merely providing a service to the general public with knowledge that it will be used by some to infringe copyrights.

Hahar, medicate. This is exactly why the conversation you're about to hear felt so important to share right now. Torrenting is one of those countless Internet y things that gets talked about a lot, but at least for me, was something that was never explained clearly enough for me to feel like I really understood it. So for this installment of terms and conditions, that is exactly what we are going to try to do. So after the break, we'll talk Torrenting.

There's something you should know up top. Out of the entire Never Post staff, I undeniably know the least about Torrenting. Going into the research for this episode, this is basically everything I knew. One, Torrenting is a kind of decentralized file sharing done through peer to peer networks. So stuff like the now defunct platforms of Napster and Limewire.

Two, it's how a lot of people I know downloaded and watched movies. And three, once, my friend got a cease and desist letter from DreamWorks because she did not realize that the Torrent file for she's the man that she was trying to download never stopped downloading for, I kid you not, multiple years. But that's basically it. So this episode of terms and conditions is partially for my own benefit. Because as a kind of Internet journalist, it is ridiculous for me not to know more about torrenting.

And also, frankly, considering the ongoing news about the topics of file sharing and piracy, I don't really think I can afford to not know about this. So to better understand torrenting as a practice and as a concept within a broader cultural context, I brought in Erem Sinreich. Erem is a media professor at American University in the School of Communication. He's a musician and he's an author. But the reason I knew he would be the best person to talk about Torrenting is that he has spent decades covering Torrenting and file sharing and piracy.

Aram has written multiple books about those topics, including The Secret Life of Data and The Piracy Crusade. You'll hear the two of us talk more specifically about The Piracy Crusade in a little bit. Suffice it to say, I knew he would be the perfect person to help me understand the basics of torrenting and to contextualize it in a culture that has I mean, for my entire life, demonized peer to peer file sharing as something as unforgivably illegal as stealing a car. So I started out our conversation with a very simple question. In the simplest technological terms, how does torrenting work?

So in order to torrent, you have to first download a file that's like a little pointer file. You don't you don't go onto the internet and download an m p three. You download like a little like 100 k file that says, here's what the m p three looks like in a bit torrenting network and some of the places you could go to ask if anyone has one. And then you load that little file into a BitTorrent client and then the BitTorrent client asks everyone in the network, do you have this file? And then you get to download it.

So those websites where you download the little Torrent file became social websites. And they actually developed their this whole very well articulated system of social credit where people would have like credit scores, and those credit scores would then be interpreted through the technology to say how much permission people had to download how many files and how quickly. And people developed reputations for being seeders rather than leechers, That is people who are willing to upload as well as download. And and all this kind of social language and these social protocols emerged around this practice. But again, because it wasn't built into the tech, people had to kind of build it themselves.

I like that there's this community component here. But I also have to imagine that this process isn't one that's smooth every single time. Right? Like, I have virtually no experience with torrenting, but I do know that it comes with a certain set of risks. Obviously, you have the possibility that the file you download is actually a virus.

There's also, like, legal threats in the sense of downloading a movie might get you unwanted attention from a giant movie studio or something. So in that case, what are the best practices for torrenting? What tools do you need?

The number one thing you need is to use a VPN because all of the litigation is based on IP addresses. So you need to effectively mask your IP address and you need a VPN that doesn't log your own online traffic, make sure you have good antivirus. Scan everything that you download. And then there are some BitTorrent trackers that are laden down with malware and scammy porn ads and and sports betting ads and stuff like that. And you want to kind of figure out which ones those are and go to more altruistically oriented BitTorrent trackers to download, you know, the little 100 k file.

So so I would say like, look at a blog like Torrent Freak, which has been out for a long time, and get their advice about the best software to use, the best websites to visit, the best VPNs to employ, and and practice data hygiene.

I wanna shift us to a more cultural context with Torrenting because it has, I mean, it has a reputation, you know? Like, I synonymize torrenting with piracy. So does torrenting always mean piracy?

No. No. Of course, it doesn't. In fact, the vast majority of torrenting has nothing to do with so called piracy. These days, most if you took a look at Internet traffic and you analyzed it, most of what is classified as torrenting is really kind of back end content management for big media companies.

Say more about that. What does that mean?

So the thing that torrenting is really good at is taking big files and breaking them up into super tiny pieces, and then spreading them through the network and reassembling them. And as it turns out, companies like Spotify and Netflix need that kind of back end infrastructure in order to manage their huge content libraries and move them seamlessly all around the world. So in addition to kind of edge of network service, servers, and peering arrangements, torrenting and similar technologies have for the last fifteen years been an important part of that back end.

I had no idea that a place like Spotify uses torrenting.

I think they replaced it with a torrent like protocol a couple years back.

Okay.

But they did use torrenting for many years as so did Netflix, so did I think YouTube, if I remember correctly.

How ironic.

Yeah. It is. It is. Even as they're all the Hollywood studios were were demonizing it. It's funny, you know, one of the things I've done over the years is I've been an expert witness on a bunch of court cases about file sharing.

Woah. Actually, first one was Grokster, which went to the US Supreme Court back in 2003.

Oh my god.

I know. Yeah. Had I didn't know it was gonna go to the Supreme Court, you know. Otherwise, I would have done a better job. But you know, I still do I still do a fair amount of expert witnessing and and Torrenting still comes up.

And what you see, I can't reveal the details of any of these cases because a lot of it is under seal. But generally speaking, the arguments that you see the plaintiffs make in these cases is, we looked at this traffic analysis and it said 7% of all internet traffic is BitTorrent. Therefore, it's a massive piracy problem. And then my job is to say, actually, out of that 7%, you know, 6.85% is like back end systems for the Spotify's of the world. And that remaining point one five consists of all kinds of other stuff of which music is only this teensy little piece.

So like, you know, don't get like too exercised about it. This is actually a tiny tiny problem, not a huge huge problem.

That's that seems so different than my, like, layperson understanding of what that means, what that practice is. And I'm curious kind of why that is. Like, if if torrenting isn't always piracy, and if anything, like you just said, it kind of often really isn't at all, and is used by these massive companies that would otherwise, you know, take legal action against something like torrenting as piracy. How did torrenting come to be defined by its use circumventing access and copyright restrictions? Like, how did it become synonymous, at least from my perspective, with a kind of piracy?

There was a sustained public relations campaign undertaken mostly by the music industry from 2003 to 2008, which resulted in a massive change of the framing of this technology in mainstream media. And that framing has stuck with us ever since.

So this dovetails very nicely into something I know you've written about, which is this notion of this legal affront on piracy and on, I guess, torrenting in in some capacity as part of that as a kind of crusade. Why why is the term crusade so apt?

So so the fight against torrenting by media industries, it kind of puts this moralistic screen on what's really a form of economic self interest and and short term economic self interest that doesn't really pay attention to the kind of knock on consequences of waging the war itself. And in my book, The Piracy Crusade, I squander a lot of ink talking about all of those knock on consequences and the way that they in in unexpected ways come back to bite the industry in the butt.

Yeah. I'm curious to hear a little bit more about that because I was very interested to see in the introduction of your book, how you specifically say that this is a short term solution and that it doesn't actually protect the long term interests of these so called crusaders or the government that serves as their allies. So so why is that?

I mean, you have to remember the context in which peer to peer file sharing first emerged in The US and elsewhere. You know, flash all the way back pre BitTorrent to 1999 when this thing called Napster comes out. Some kid in his college dorm named Sean Fanning invented this little piece of software that allowed anybody who had access to it to freely share all of their m p threes with anybody else on the internet and to download all of the m p threes from everyone else. Prior to that time, in like May 1999, the music industry estimated that there were half a million m p threes on the entire Internet. And and then June, Napster comes out and by like August, there are billions of m p threes being transacted every day among tens of millions of active users of this platform.

Wow.

Modernity was born that day. Like the world that we now live in was was born in June 1999. Now, at the time, I was a music industry and Internet industry analyst. And along with a bunch of other of my contemporaries, we were arguing that because of the Internet and because of digital technology and the kind of low cost of storage, the future of media wasn't going to be the kind of like pay for access to a single thing model that we've seen during the twentieth century where you walked up to a store and you gave them $20 and they gave you a CD with 12 songs on it, And then you went back the next time your allowance was topped up. But that now, the problem was that there was so much abundance of information that the business model had to be prioritizing this song or this movie over all of the other millions of ones that someone could have access to.

And that meant you were switching to a model that we now think of as the streaming model. And I was an early and, you know, loud advocate for that model. So I did some research, big survey at the time, and I found out that by the 2000, people who'd been using Napster were actually buying more music than the people who weren't using Napster. Even if you controlled for like how much money they made, how much music they bought in the past, Like every other factor, people who are demographically identical to each other, if they were using Napster, they were like half again as likely to have increased the amount of money they spent on music in the last year. So people were like actually discovering and learning about it.

And I I went running to my record label clients and I was like, you guys, the best thing in the world just happened. Like, I know that you've got record revenues now, but you're about to grow your revenues by 50% just by licensing to this cool new platform. And they literally, not only stopped being my clients more or less overnight, but issued a press release about how I was full of shit and and I was I was not to be listened to.

Oh. Oh, yeah. Oh my god.

Yeah. Like a smear a genuine smear campaign. The first of several that I've experienced at the hands of the music industry over the years. Yeah. And then this interesting thing happens where all of these people at the record labels would call me up or or meet me for lunch or whatever and be like, you know what?

You're a 100% right. I wish you'd come in and tell like the higher ups in my organization what's going on because they don't understand it.

So let me get this straight. The short term reaction by these like bigwigs in, I mean, the music industry, but also it sounds like in Hollywood and all these entertainment industries, is basically just a financial one of being like, we can make so much money by suing these people. Like, we don't care about this model.

Right. And damn the future. Like, what what why license and make a little when you can sue and make a lot? There was so much pressure on companies to show massive quarterly growth that they were strategically compelled almost by through fiduciary duty in the case of the public companies to do whatever it took to just boost those numbers. And like, we'll worry about the future when the future comes.

Well, mean, then the future came, especially with streaming. Because I mean, now that's the standard.

It took a decade. Right? A decade during which the the music industry as we were talking about before, spent its resources demonizing technology rather than embracing it. But the real change didn't happen until Spotify came to The US and integrated with Facebook in 2011. So reintegrating that social function back into the tech, which had been missing since Napster had been sued and shut down.

Because the the tech that replaced it, which was mostly Torrenting, was decentralized and didn't have a social component in it. It was much more utilitarian.

I mean, it again, as an as a outside observer, it certainly seemed like torrenting was sort of, yeah, the work of an individual person for individual needs or desires.

Well, when it's used for that function, yes, to a certain extent. There is a social para network surrounding torrenting that was not imminent to the technology itself, but that people built around it because people like to be social.

Right. Like sort of what you mentioned earlier. This self created system that also has this very communal component. Like, it's a a practice that is, I mean, very trusting, like one based on trust.

Yeah. That's a good way to put it. Right? Mutuality, reciprocity, and trust in so far as you don't think you're downloading a spoof file or a piece of malware are integral to it. And and also all of those, like like all human systems of trust, and interdependence, it it got exploited by all kinds of bad actors.

Right? So BitTorrent has been used to seed malware, which create botnets and are used for denial distributed denial of service attacks, you know, basically since day one.

I mean, it it seems like such a to use, I feel like, the often used way of codifying things, like a true neutral tool. And that you can use it for these sort of beautiful free access egalitarian desires, and then also can be used kind of quite literally as, like, a almost like state sanctioned, like, cultural Terrorism? Assault. Yeah. Terrorism.

Yeah. Yeah. Both of those things are true. There's so many reasons why people, you know hold a knife or drive a car. Right?

It's a piece of technology that has many uses. We haven't even begun to plumb the depths of the kind of altruistic functions of it. You know there are all these people and institutions that began using BitTorrent as a kind of, distributed archival system. So that, you know, if if, Amazon Web Services went down or somebody's hard drive crashed, all of their valuable content wouldn't be lost. It would be distributed throughout the cloud using BitTorrent.

So there's a ton of public domain stuff. Know, the bible is on BitTorrent and, you know, silent films are on BitTorrent and, you know, all all this, you know, government websites and and government archives are on BitTorrent just to keep them because some altruistically oriented person decided that that would be a safer place to store it than in one in one spot.

I mean, and then you kind of also touch on the now contemporary troubles with streaming and very much platforms owning and distributing this content, which is, you know, the movie that you love Netflix right now, they can decide to just take it down and now it doesn't exist.

Well, it doesn't exist on Netflix. It's still on BitTorrent. And, you know, I'm not gonna lie. There are times where, you know, I lost access to streaming media that I had paid for access to, and I resorted to BitTorrent to find it because it wasn't available anywhere else. But morally, I feel absolutely fine about it.

Why do you feel that way? Like, why why not feel dissuaded by the technical illegality of of torrenting?

Well, am dissuaded by the technical illegality because if somebody identified my IP address with that Torrent, I could be sued. And I'd probably have to settle for a couple thousand dollars, which is what usually happens when the hundreds of thousands of people who have been caught like that get sued. But also, this is a movie that to your point had been removed from streaming and download services perfuncturally without my knowledge, without without taking the interest of consumers or the interest of the our cultural legacy to heart. And I felt that whoever is distributing this film via BitTorrent is doing a mitzvah because they're keeping the film in the public eye.

I know you've written in the Piracy Crusade about kind of the extremely high stakes of this. I mean, you you've written about how it affects, like, democratic institutions. So how does something like piracy or torrenting affect something as enormous as literally democracy?

I think the the most important way to answer it is to think about what is the collateral damage in these battles. Sharing information is part of how we exert power, especially in a democratic society. Right? That's why The US has a first amendment. So that battle always becomes especially pitched at moments of technological, ecological change.

When it's possible for people and institutions that have been constrained to exert to have newfound powers, and it's possible for institutions that have been powerful to become even more powerful. If you look at the technologies that have been put into place to limit consumer access to information, And if you look at the policies that have been put in place to reify those technologies and support them, they tend to be very censorious and surveillance. And censorship and surveillance are anathema to a healthy democracy. In a free society, torrenting and similar technologies are tolerated because the cost of policing them is not worth the benefits.

And the benefits are cultural, societal?

Well, I I guess what I'm saying is the cost to society of policing them is not worth the benefits to society of policing them. I'm not pretending that torrenting is like an unalloyed benefit to the world. Right? It has upsides. It has downsides.

It helps the industry. It hurts the industry. It's complex. But the question is, what are we willing to At what price are we willing to stop this technology and this behavior? And if the price is surveilling the whole internet and creating these systems of electronic gates that prevent different people from spreading and accessing different kinds of information, right, to me, the cost of putting that in place is so great that it's not worth whatever benefits accrue from putting it in place.

But it does feel like piracy is is part of I mean, is a political conversation. And I'm curious what your thoughts are for, like, the near future of piracy and torrenting, especially at a time when a lot of corporate media is being consolidated and turned into these just like enormous monopolies.

I think most politics are small p politics, not big p politics. And most people who are engaging in political activities don't conceptualize it as such. Right? I think most of people torrenting and and most of people, you know, secure online platforms are not really thinking about the kind of larger picture so much as they're just trying to live their lives and be free. And they want they want to watch what they want to watch.

They want to listen to what they want to listen to. They want to associate with people though, you know, freely and to participate and to feel like meaningful participants in the public conversation. And all of that is political, but it's not framed politically. And it doesn't need to be framed politically for people to to feel that reflexively. So I I think that that we are at a moment as you point out of such extreme media consolidation and monochromatic overdetermination of the public sphere that there will be increasing popular resistance to that, and that decentralized systems like BitTorrent will play a role in that.

I also think that The US is busy squandering every last shred of goodwill it's ever had around the world. And because of that, there is going to be an increasing interest, big big p politically, from foreign governments and corporations, not to mention general citizenry in how do we get big tech out of our lives and especially American big tech out of our lives. And platforms like BitTorrent are gonna be part of that as well.

I was gonna say it. In a world of big tech, it feels at least to me like something like BitTorrent is like little tech or like accessible for everybody tech?

Very much. At some point soon, I think we're gonna see a real breakout kind of popularly embraced unlicensed streaming service that that has BitTorrent on the back end. And then history will repeat itself. There'll be a moral panic about it, and there'll be lawsuits, and maybe I'll have to testify before the supreme court again. And, you know, the cycle continues.

Well, in that case, as someone who has watched this cycle already happen, if someone was just going to start getting into torrenting right now, what advice would you give them?

I would say, first of all, you need a good reason. Streaming, especially music streaming, has now become like a commoditized kind of add on for other kinds of online service relationships. So so if you have free streaming, you you know, unless you want that, like, documentary that you can't find anywhere else, there's not a really good reason to use BitTorrent at this point for those kinds of functions. And you have to balance your tolerance like, what's my tolerance for advertising? What's my tolerance for Melania's face versus my tolerance for like malware?

Right now in this current environment, adding BitTorrent to your life increases your threat surface meaningfully. So if you're concerned about the integrity of your laptop, your phone, and if you're keeping sensitive files on it, you might not want to open that window. And and even if you do, be aware that you are undertaking a level of risk that you might not be tolerant for. There is not a safe version of BitTorrent. There are only safer ways of approaching it.

That is the news we have for you this week. We'll be back here in the main feed next week on or around April 9. I want to say a huge, huge thank you to Erem Syndreich for talking with me about the ins and outs of Torrenting along with its history within culture. If you wanna learn more about him and find more of his work, head on over to his website, synreich.com. And thank you for listening.

What could $4 get you nowadays? Well, at the food co op in my neighborhood, you could buy exactly one single vegan chocolate chip cookie, or you could get an entire month of membership to Never Post's bonus content, and in the process, help your favorite Internet theorists and critics keep this beautiful show a rolling. If you know us, you love us, and you wanna support us, head over to neverpo.st and become a member. Never Post's producers are Audrey Evans, me, Georgia Hampton, and the mysterious doctor first name, last name. Our senior producer is Hans Buto.

Our executive producer is Jason Oberholzer. The show's host is Mike Rugnetta. I improvised. I never remembered. Now it's your turn to be driven.

You're the one who demands to know. Why do I suffer? Why am I ignorant? Cells in a great darkness. Some machine made us.

It is your turn to address it, to go back asking, what am I for? What am I for? Excerpt from Mother and Child by Louise Gluck. Never Post is a production of Charts and Leisure and is distributed by Radiotopia.