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Torrenting refers to the BitTorrent protocol, which supports the practice of peer-to-peer downloading. Peer-to-peer (abbreviated as p2p) downloading benefits from the very basic nature of the internet - which is all the computers being connected to each other in some way.
This means that if you want to share a file, for example, you can make it (and only it) available to others for downloading. This is a huge help to the internet community, as in this way, you can find and most importantly get virtually everything you need. BitTorrent has an user base much larger than Facebook or Youtube combined: 250-300 million people use it within a month. However, its strength is in itself its weakness: if there aren't many people who are sharing the file you need, it will take ages for you to download it.
Here are some terms that are used in torrenting:
Leeching: Downloading without giving anything in return.
Seeding: Uploading, sharing the file constantly
Peers: The other users that are connected in the P2P network
Ratio: The upload percentage of the recently downloaded file
There is a policy that all torrent users should abide by. Whenever you download something, you should seed it until your ratio is at least 1. This means that you should not cancel the torrent right when you got what you wanted. Instead, help the others get it faster by keeping it in the seed line.
Downloading files via torrent is very easy. You'll need a torrent client, the most popular one is uTorrent (Nanotorrent), which is free, lightweight and absolutely safe. You can download it from the link above. When it is installed, you'll only need to search for torrent files via the most popular torrent search engines or Google. Just open the torrent file as you normally would. This will start up uTorrent, where you need to confirm the download.
Legally, this is very controversial. Mostly it depends on what you are sharing on downloading. Sharing a new, leaked Hollywood movie is of course different from sharing a free game with your friend. However, torrent files do not store data about the shared content, so in themselves they are not illegal. Torrent files contain the "waypoints" towards other peers and trackers that make the downloading available to you. To quote Wikipedia, "whether the publishers of BitTorrent metafiles violate copyrights by linking to copyrighted material without the authorization of copyright holders is controversial".
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