Everybody torrents. It's fun. My question is, who's idea was it to make the file you download an actual torrent, rather then a simpler file such as a .zip or .rar which takes less time and you don't need a program for?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BitTorrent_(protocol)

You get stuff you need. You give stuff others want.

That wasn't my question. I was seeing why people don't use zip's or whatnot. Moose answered (kinda)

Because that takes way too many resources for a server to handle.
And there is a lot less error checking.

I'd've posted a long time ago, but...
I was confused. D:

In any case...
Torrents, in theory, provide faster download, presumably offload legal responsibility from the hoster ( as they are not, technically, distributing the song data, only its name ) , and most definitely offload bandwidth requirements from the hoster.

http://qntm.org/?bittorrent

With a BitTorrent Client, the server only needs to distribute one copy of the thing, and can stop seeding. Allowing the server to not die to bandwidth.
However, if no one else is seeding, the host may have to re seed to get the torrent running again.

They're usually virus free, too.

What I didn't understand with this is, why don't the evil powers-that-be that want this stuff stopped just write something that pretends to be a seed in the swarm of others, and totally fuck the whole thing up?(like if it's a giant .rar or .exe for example) what 's stopping them?

Uh. Actualy, I've heard of that relatively often ...

All they have to do is hash hack one piece to kill a torrent.

Often they send a torrent in zips, zips are just a means of compressing, and also sending lots of items at once, but they still take forever to download. The main reason for torrenting is that almost every ISP provides a very fast download rate, but not so fast upload, when you download from a site, their servers are uploading to you, so even if your download speed is 2 mb a second, they can only upload .5 mb a second to you.

A torrent, for one, removes the load off the server, by having you use both your download and upload when getting the file, and since you can download from many upload streams at once, you can also use your full download capacity, so it is much faster.