High Quality Content by WIKIPEDIA articles! Torrent poisoning is the act of intentionally sharing corrupt data or data with misleading file names using the BitTorrent protocol. This practice of uploading fake torrents is sometimes carried out by anti-piracy organisations as an attempt to prevent the peer-to-peer (P2P) sharing of copyrighted content, and to gather the IP addresses of downloaders. It can also be carried out by BitTorrent users in order to "free-ride", using clients such as BitThief. Using this method, users are able to download content via BitTorrent without contributing reciprocal uploads.