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Google and Bing Have No Obligation To Censor Searches For Torrents (betanews.com)
Microsoft and Google are under no obligation to weed out 'torrent' results from their respective search engines, the High Court of Paris has ruled. BetaNews adds: French music industry group SNEP went to court on behalf of a trio of artists, requesting that Microsoft and Google automatically filter out links to pirated material. The group had called for a complete block on searches that include the word 'torrent' as well as blocking sites whose name includes the word. The court found that SNEP's request was far too broad, saying: "SNEP's requests are general, and pertain not to a specific site but to all websites accessible through the stated methods, without consideration for identifying or even determining the site's content, on the premise that the term 'Torrent' is necessarily associated with infringing content".The court added that 'torrent' is a common noun, which has a range of different meanings.
Not everything bittorrent is pirated content. Lots of Linux distributions offer torrent files as an alternative download method (often much faster than the mirrors), for example.
My office employs mostly nerds who are into comic books, StarvWars, video games, etc. When a major new game version comes out, the office mostly shuts down for the day as everyone stays home to play the new release of the game.
If a dozen of my co-workers are downloading the new Star Wars fan flick the day it comes out, Bittorrent is much more efficient than regular ftp or http downloads. Only one copy need be downloaded from the far-away server to our office. Mostly everybody copies it around the office, downloading from each other over the local LAN. That's WAY more efficient than downloading a dozen copies from a server 1,000 miles away. (In actual practice maybe twice the file size may be downloaded over the internet, which is six times more efficient than downloading a dozen copies over the internet).
In less extreme cases, it's still more efficient to download mostly from other people in Texas than from the origin server in California.
On the other hand, there is some overhead. In worst cases, Bittorrent can use more bandwidth than ftp.
Also there are of course several ways to measure efficiency. Bittorrent is normally time-efficient. It's bandwidth efficient in that rather than requiring someone to buy a high upstream speed connection, it uses the idle upstream bandwidth that people are already paying for anyway. It can often be less bandwidth efficient in that there is overhead, using more total bandwidth.
So whether or not it's efficient very much depends on a) the specific situation and b) which type of efficiency you're interested in.