“[Leechers are] engaging in perfectly reasonable and non-destructive behavior and the site is trying to punish him for it, thus fostering the creation of clients which lie about their statistics. This is the site's fault, and the result could do serious damage to the value of BitTorrent statistics generally. Sites which do this are being extremely destructive, and the way they grandstand about how they're fostering sharing really ticks me off,” he said.

Bram argues that the tit-for-tat nature of protocol is sufficient enough to stop destructive leeching. The BitTorrent protocol is robust enough to handle file sharers who limit their upload and do not seed after the file has finished downloading.

“Even if almost everyone quit the instant their download was completed you'd still have decent download rates, they'd just be closer to everyone's upload rates,” he explains.

By definition this means download speeds will be slower, which could easily be classed as “destructive”.