@mother

The former recognises that torrents can be used to share both material legally and perhaps not so legally.

The latter only thinking that torrents are for piracy shows a lack of technical understanding, the latter worries me more, if i say I downloaded LinuxMint froma torrent as it is easie and helps spread it, they think it is somehow illegal.

I don't support sharing movies or music via torrents, however if I have got a legal copy of something say an LP I should be able to have a digital copy too, given the choice between torrenting a set of music files vs trying to convert a vinyl record to mp3, i would opt for the former.

After all I can rip a music cd to mp3.

I do believe in fair usage.