Internet Archive BitTorrents (webseed swarm)

Free allowance: Free, unlimited distribution; ~1.4 million items already torrented, 'comprising almost a petabyte of public domain materials'.
Verdict: caveatusable, with a named limit or an unprobed read path
Cost: free tier
Identity: email?placeholder, not evidence; card unknown, phone unknown
Binding limit: noneno named constraint binds
Evidence: reported3 sources; a third party said so
Freshness: stale on 2026-11-05checked 2026-10-21 (inherited); stale on 2026-11-05

Free tier	Free, unlimited distribution; ~1.4 million items already torrented, 'comprising almost a petabyte of public domain materials'. Egress is unbounded because the swarm and webseeds share the load. unit unlimited; metered on unstated
Price	none stated
Identity	email (placeholder) not published
Egress	Free — 'our Torrents rely heavily on webseeding (download directly from our servers, when no peers have the files you are seeking)'. Peers carry the rest at zero cost to anyone.
Per-object cap	not stated
Retention	not stated
Interface	rest, rclone rest
Tooling	Any BitTorrent client with Getright-style webseed support (qBittorrent, Transmission); IA generates the .torrent per item and runs trackers bt1.archive.org; rclone not involved
Composes with	Combine with #1: upload once via IAS3, then distribute via torrent so a 1TiB/day fetch load is carried by peers + webseed instead of a single HTTP stream. Torrent + webseed is also the only path that can exceed the ~1.7 MB/s per-connection shaping.
Reliability	Old torrents for a mutated item loop forever re-downloading mismatched pieces; seeder counts are cached ~5 minutes and include webseeds.
Parsed numbers	has-free-tier 1

Evidence 3

date	source	what it proved
2026-10-21	help.archive.org/help/archive-bittorrents/	(snapshot 2026-09-13) — 'over 1.4 million Archive Items are available via the BitTorrent protocol, comprising almost a petabyte'
2026-10-21	help.archive.org/help/archive-bittorrents/	'Our Torrents rely heavily on webseeding ... rTorrent do not support Getright-style webseeding'
2026-10-21	help.archive.org/help/archive-bittorrents/	torrents for changed items 'become obsolete ... files will fail to download completely'

Unknown values 4

per object cap notes: the field may be stated in a source that was not read
per object cap stated: the field may be stated in a source that was not read
retention notes: the field may be stated in a source that was not read
retention stated: the field may be stated in a source that was not read