The Internet Archive is a totally, incredibly wonderfully awesome place. It is a vast digital library offering “free universal access to books, movies and music, as well as 150 billion archived web pages.” It’s what the Internet is for. Now it’s even easier to download these files as they have teamed up with BitTorrent.

Internet Archive has now partnered with BitTorrent to publish over 1 000 000 of its books, music and movies as legal torrents. It’s a huge whack of legal content in the torrentverse, and a major blow to the schemes of entertainment execs to have the whole BitTorrent protocol filtered away to nothing on sight. A massive fist punch for supporters of torrents, and free access to information.

BitTorrent is the fastest way to share files with large groups of people over the Internet, and this is one of the reasons that prompted the Internet Archive to start seeding well over a million of their files using the popular file-sharing protocol. Founder of Internet Archive, Brewster Kahle, said:

I think this whole thing will be awesome, and possibly very important.

The torrents link to almost a petabyte of data and all files are being seeded by the Archive’s servers. Kahle told TorrentFreak that turning BitTorrent into a distributed preservation system for the Internet is the next step.

This is especially useful for us here at the bottom of Africa as we will be able to download these files faster than if they were only hosted by Internet Archive. Internet Archive’s blog explains:

The distributed nature of BitTorrent swarms and their ability to retrieve Torrents from local peers may be of particular value to patrons with slower access to the Archive, for example those outside the United States or inside institutions with slow connections.

With recent news of raids, crackdowns, DDoSes and lawsuits related to torrents, positive moves like this are very welcome, especially by those who desire free, universal access to information. Basically everyone other than large nasty corporates.

[Source: Torrent Freak]