Legal aspects regarding torrent creation and distribution of customised linux distro
 

Hi,

I am remastering knoppix so that i can clone the entire fedora electronics lab into debian environment (a hobby project).

is it legal to distribute this distro, and what about torrents, is it legal to distribute torrents of such free software.

i am from india so any one from india, please make me aware of laws that are pertaining here..

thanxx in advance :)

If the distro is FOSS, it is perfectly legal.
Even some distros can be downloaded from torrents.

It is legal to distribute a distro if and only if it is legal to distribute all its components. It probably will be, but you should check. The most likely source of restrictions tends to be trademark law - you may have to change branding of certain components. Read the Fedora Trademark Guidelines. I have not been able to find any for Knoppix.

In most countries that have freedom on the internet, this should be legal. To my knowledge, no country has outlawed the use of Bittorrent for legitimate purposes, let alone the distribution of .torrent files for such distribution.

Never heard of BitTorrent itself being illegal.

A lot of distros offer a BitTorrent download, some even don't have any other choice!

Exactly. It's just gained a reputation for being used for illegal downloading of music, movies, pirated software, etc. The protocol itself is perfectly legal.

I've used it before to download Linux distros, and it's much faster than HTTP/FTP, at least in my experience.