A quick guide to file sharing for movie downloads

The internet is basically a huge network of web servers linked together and you use a web browser on your machine to access the information on these servers.

File sharing takes places using peer to peer networking (P2P for short).  This basically means that each computer instead of just accessing data on the internet becomes a mini-server in its own right!  Clever huh?

This works by just allowing others to have access to one shared area of your computer.  They can then download the files that you have put in that area. 

Likewise you can access all the files on all the other machines' shared folders.  That's a lot of data!  In fact it is so much that it would be impossible for it all to sit on these traditional web servers and the bandwidth required to service them would be massive!

Peer to peer sites provide a piece of software to allow you to access these huge networks of files.  That is why there is a one-off fee and the downloads are then free!

Consequently there are many millions of people connected to these networks enjoying access to huge amounts of data, songs and movies - you can become one of them too!  It is estimated that there are more than 300 million internet users with P2P software!