BitTorrent is a technology where you as a user can download and share e.g. movies and music using a special computer program called a BitTorrent client. With a BitTorrent client on your computer, you can download small chunks (bits) of movie or music files from other Internet users who also have the program on their computer. The program downloads the individual bits of, for example, a movie from different users who also have their BitTorrent client open and the movie lying on their computer. Once all the bits of a movie have been downloaded, the program collects them for the total movie stored locally on your computer. Now the movie can be viewed on the computer – and passed on to others.
Thus, when a user plays or downloads a file from a website on the Internet and opens the file on his or her computer with the BitTorrent client, he or she is immediately connected to other users on the file sharing network. It is through the BitTorrent client that users meet and the file sharing takes place. The file-sharing users on BitTorrent networks are referred to as peers, which is why they often refer to BitTorrent networks as peer-to-peer, P2P networks or user-to-user networks.

When talking about BitTorrent network users, you distinguish between two different types of users. A user who downloads from others and a user who uploads and shares to others. A user who downloads files is called a ‘leecher’ after the English word for leech. This is a user who ‘sucks’ files from the other users. Conversely, a user who uploads and makes files accessible to others is called a ‘seeder’. This is a user who ‘sows’ files so other users can harvest them.
Most BitTorrent clients operate so that active users are automatically both leechers and seeders. Active users are constantly sharing what they are downloading with other users. When the user finishes downloading, the user must manually turn off the continued seeding, otherwise he or she will continue to make the file available to others, even if the user has finished downloading.

BitTorrent technology is an effective form of file sharing because it distributes the network load by downloading file bites individually from different active users from different locations rather than downloading the files in one place. In this way, the user can get a high download speed, which is used legally by, i.a., many computer game manufacturers to send updates to their users.

A cyberlocker is a service on the Internet where you can upload and store files, such as text documents, music, or movies. ‘Dropbox’ is one of the most well-known cyberlockers. Cyberlockers can be used in a completely legal way, such as sharing personal photos or videos, but are also a widely used technology to distribute content illegally.
E.g., when a movie is uploaded to a cyberlocker’s website, it gets its own unique URL, where it is stored and can be downloaded from. This URL can be shared with others, who then have the opportunity to download the movie to their computer. In pirate environments, these URLs are spread as links on forums and networks specifically designed to gather links and give users access to the content they store. Such types of forums and networks are often referred to as link sites and thus do not store the content themselves, but link to the unique URL of the cyberlocker where the file is stored.

Streaming is one of the most popular methods in Denmark when it comes to using illegal content. When a movie or song is streamed, it means that the product is played – viewed or heard – while being delivered to the computer you are streaming from. The word ‘streaming’ comes from, e.g., the movie or song being delivered in a continuous ‘stream’ to the consumer. Spotify and Netflix are examples of legal streaming services.