LegalTorrents
Cameron Parkins, April 24th, 2008
LegalTorrents, “an online community created to discover and distribute Creative Commons licensed digital media”, has re-launched in exciting fashion. Originally founded in 2003 as a means to distribute “hand-picked .torrent files that were approved by content owners“, LegalTorrents revamped its infrastructure to be more friendly to content creators looking to spread their works far and wide, a goal which included a clear articulation of CC-licenses in relation to relevant torrent files. From LifeHacker:
Each torrent submitted to LegalTorrents is reviewed by moderators for the proper licensing and then posted to the site. Additionally, LegalTorrents hosts a high-speed seed for each torrent, guaranteeing that you should always be able to get fairly high-speed transfers; in my tests the downloads were indeed very fast (downloading over 400 KB/s).
As with most content directories, LegalTorrents becomes more relevant the more people use it. With that in mind, check out their growing pool of CC-licensed work, contribute your own, and offer any feedback you may have that could improve what LegalTorrents is trying to accomplish.
remotegurus.com
April 28th, 2008 at 12:39 pmWell, this is an interesting side of things — when usually torrents have a bad name for itself, LegalTorrents seem to be trying to clean the bad name and doing the right thing. I do wonder though, when they begin getting a large amount of traffic as most torrent sites do will they begin charging or seek ways to monetize thus falling into the pit of most do-the-right-thing torrent startups. They have a road ahead of them, but I do like the concept as of right now.
Jonathan Dugan
May 9th, 2008 at 3:50 pmre: comments by remotegurus.com
We offer users the ability now to Sponsor the Content Creator - and we pass the money through to them. We take a portion of those Sponsorships to maintain the site.
Our plan is to offer membership services for premium offerings and information access once we have more content and more regular/periodic content postings.