I was mostly referring to the technological illiteracy of some people. Kind of like if you say "evolution" to a Creationist, they'll start thinking about it in their terms instead of yours. Torrent is one of those hot words that people have given meanings and implications that aren't inherent in it.

I can't tell if that would be technically feasible (and if so, how exploitable the result would be), but Adzeth does raise a very valid point. No matter how secure GOG could made a hypothetical torrent client, it still would mean that GOG needs to convince publishers to sell their games that way, which would probably double the publishers' resistance.

GOG: "Hi! We are a digital download shop, and we want to sell your games."
Publisher: "Ah, yes. We are very interested in digital downloads, but we are concerned about the ease of pirating such products. Which methods of protection have you planned?"
GOG: "None actually. We sell all our games DRM-free."
Publisher: "NO protection? Are you crazy? Illegal copies of our games would be all over the place!"
GOG: "It works, trust us. Ah, and by the way, we also plan to distribute your game on torrents."
Publisher: "Torrents? Isn't that the thing that the Prate Bay uses to distribute all those unauthorized copies of our games?"
GOG. "Yes. Why?"
Publisher: "..."

You realise that, due to the nature of the internet, every single GOG release is already downloadable via bittorrent?

If you really want to use a torrent, just find one and only download the games on your account. Technically you'll still be a dirty pirate, but the end result is no different really. Apart from the increased risk of viruses and lawsuits.

This; people are already torrenting it illegally, and if anything, offering the option to do it legally would only increase customers, not decrease them.

The problem is, most companies don't think this whole "piracy" thing through and just look at short term profits.

It would be nice to me!
If someone wants to download an illegale copy, he probably already does anyways.

Fine, then one can do that. It is still no reason for GOG to make it even easier to obtain them without paying, than what it is already today.

In the case of PBay piracy, the people who are sharing GOG games there can be prosecuted. It would become interesting if some of those sources would be legit GOG customers who didn't even know they were sharing them also to pirates, who were able to tap into the GOG p2p network.

Ps. PBay is blocked by the ISPs from where I am sitting.

Legally it is funny. You are not a pirate as you clearly own the license. Yet most "anti piracy laws" don't bother with that little technicality. They only make the "copying from a dubious source" illegal. Therefore you can be punished for pirating a game you actually own.

Now, with torrents there is the whole issue of sharing, which is a whole different can of worms.

The most important thing, that others mentioned, is that publishers may not be that eager to allow legal downloads of their games via BitTorrent.
Logically or not, I imagine they would have a problem with that. And we don't want GOG to have to convince every single publisher that distributing games via torrent is a great idea.

By the way, in Polish law it's unclear, but most IT law experts say that you are not disallowed to make your backup copy from any source you want. So you may download a pirate as your backup copy legally here. But rather not via torrents, unless you disable the upload completely.

I think the High Court of the Netherlands has recently asked the European Court for clarification on the matter of "copies of legally owned software obtained from dubious sources". It should be interesting to see how that pans out. But you probably know much more about that inquiry than I do. :)

I'm curious, why exactly? It's an excellent protocol.

Or use a limit on share ratio as 1.0 or less.

As for GOG adding a tracker on their own I actaully sent a feedback about it when I started here. It's not necessary by any means but the fact that you can help the community by letting your own internet seed the games you and the downloader own would be great, after all it would be a third download option, not a mandatory one.

No. Why? I have a license. As long as I'm not uploading anything, I'm fine.

They don't have to call it "torrents" anymore than Blizzard is calling their own Battle.net p2p implementation "torrents". They could call it "GOG-2-GOG" or something similarly fancy.

Also at this point I'd like to remind everyone that while "bittorrent" is currently the most widely known p2p protocol/system, it is definitely not the only one around. So it isn't like that if GOG decided to offload their server loads to their customers by using p2p technology (like Blizzard has done), "torrents" would be their only possibility. It would probably make more sense to them to come up with their own proprietary p2p implementation that they can control better.

Straight transfers from Gog are already pretty quick. Torrents would possibly slow that (depending on seed/leecher ratio) that and torrents are normally associated with piracy....

It might make more sense but it might also put a strain on financials. As it is now, all they would have to do is add a tracker that requires login with the same credentials as your membership here and then use a public tracker with bittorrent protocol. I hardly think this would increase piracy on GOG's games at all but as others have mentioned it has to be informed to publishers and therefor not a good idea at the moment.