Legal BitTorrent Communities for Class Presentation?

OnBeyondBeing asks: "A few of my friends and I are taking a class at a local university called 'Internet and Society' and we have to do a 'Technology Tour' on innovations that have social aspects or uses (like Google Maps, Kiko (an Internet-based calendar), LiveJournal and Frappr). We chose to do our presentation on BitTorrent. As part of our presentation, we have to do a lab in which the students and teachers use BitTorrent in some way. I was thinking of having people join some BitTorrent community that interests them and join a torrent, but most of these communities contain material that is not suited for an academic presentation. Aside from places like CommonBits and Etree (and others that were mentioned in a previous Slashdot post), what sites have you found that use BitTorrent as the basis of a community that are clean and legal enough for a class presentation? Alternatively, what other interesting, legal uses of BitTorrent have you found?"

Comments

Linux Torrents

[SocialEngineer]

There are always Linux Torrents

Cringely's NerdTV

[headkase]

Cringely offers NerdTV as a bittorrent download. As it is legal there's usually a ton of seeds on each download - nothing better to demonstrate the speed possible with bittorrent.

(From my bookmark list)

[TheDarkener]

http://www.legaltorrents.com

ETree - Legal Bootleg Torrents

Open Source Torrents

Re:Anime

[kinzillah]

Not legal, but the companies look the other way because they recognize the advertising value.

Re:Anime

[theNetImp]

Them not being licensed to an american distributor DOES NOT MAKE THEM LEGAL. They are still protected by international copyright law. Use some common sense.

Legal Torrents

[Bullet-Dodger]

Legal Torrents is quite good. Creative Commons-licensed music, movies, books, and such.

electric sheep has novel use of torrents

[spot]

The Electric Sheep server uses BitTorrent to distribute results of aesthetic evolution. Get the torrents of the RSS feed of torrents here. It's currently delivering about 150GB daily by torrent.

Damn!

[Zadaz]

When I was in school I had to do research for papers by my self.

But then again, we had Gopher, not Google, so I'll shut up.

Anyway, off the top of my head, Democracy player is a combination video player, RSS reader and torrent client that hooks up a community of legal (well, most of it) video distribution.

It was also announced this week that Steven Soderbergh will be releasing a short through BitTorrent. (I'll let you find the link, you hard working student.)

Fandom

[magefile]

I've found a bunch of fan movies on BT. Star Wars: Revelations is one, and I believe it's unofficially smiled upon by LucasFilms. Star Wreck: In The Pirkinning is another. Star Trek: The New Voyages. I suspect the Blender/Maya/3d-animation communities also have torrentable media available, as do various machinima communities. Another possibility is backup. Bittorrent is a semi-decent protocol for moving a shitload of stuff from one computer to another; in that case, you're not taking advantage of a swarm, you're just taking advantage of the fact that resumability, NAT traversal, etc., are made simpler (if you don't want to deal with, or have access to, something like rsync). I've moved my iTunes library that way a few times.

promotion of music

[scum-e-bag]

www.djmixes2k.com

Re:We have a winner.

[Directrix1]

But at the same time looking for a bittorrent "community" with no illegal downloading is like finding a job to fit a tool. The approach to the problem is completely wrong. He should be showing that bittorrent is a tool. It is only a tool. It can be used for legal and illegal things. It just so happens that many illegal downloads' needs are fullfilled by this tool. He should be showing how it can be used any place where large frequently accessed files are in use to save bandwidth, since that is all it really does.

Re:Anime

[PylonHead]

Wow, did you even read the article you linked to? Let me post the conclusion for you:

Conclusion

Legally, there is no difference between "fansubs" and "bootlegs". In the eyes of the law, both could be seen as damaging to the market. Regardless of whether or not a title has been technicaly licensed in North America, it is illegal. Lack of enforsement of copyright laws in terms of unlicensed fansubs maybe the result of several different factors. Some companies may believe that the early introduction of the title to North America is beneficial. Others may simply tolerate a "fan-activity" as long as it does not become too damaging to sales. And yet other companies may not want to or be able to invest the time and money necessary to prosecute foreign violations of their copyright.

In the end, regardless of ethics, or motive, fansubs are technicaly illegal.

Ibiblio

[nitrocloud]

Ibiblio has torrents for a lot of their content. The seeds are some of the main servers and therefore are fast, plus the added client bandwidth probably helps a lot too.

Public Domain Torrents

[optikSmoke]

Public Domain Torrents has torrents of movies in the public domain in various formats. Some hidden gems in there, though I don't know how much of a "community" you could say they have.

AMPFEA.ORG

[torpor]

We use Torrents on AMPFEA.ORG, which is a community made for people who want a way to put their original-content (only) material online free of charge.

If its free to the world, its free to use AMPFEA.ORG .. we discourage mis-use and abuse by active community audits, and we've got a veritable stash of interesting material - music, images, video - online for people to peruse.

(Archives Made Persistent For Everyones Access..)