[vonseel]

What planet have you been living on? Bittorrent is widely used to distribute copyrighted material - movies, TV shows, games, programs, porn... I'd imagine a large majority of bittorrent traffic worldwide is pirated material, with a small portion being datasets as you describe, and other legally-shared data like actual Linux distros, etc.

[chaxor]

I suppose there could be many things happening on the internet that we are unaware of; however, torrents are very good and specifically tailored as a protocol for scientific data and ML.

It solves the link-rot issues that occur due to moving institutions, it allows huge storage for essentially free (ever tried to store 9 TB of training data or CERN data on Dropbox?), and it scales extremely beautifully.

It's really the absolute perfect solution for reproducible research in large data studies.

[AlfeG]

Torrents are no longer main source of copyrighted materials, at least for shows and movies. There is a bunch of illegal services that provide Netflix like experience against pirated content.

[mandarax8]

Don't these services usually use torrents under the hood though? Thinking about stremio and popcorntime.

[loxias]

Now I feel old, using bittorrent and soulseek.