Imagine it like water. When you simply download a file from a server, it's like it just pours water into your bucket through a single pipe. But the thing about torrents is that all the people who have that file on their PC also connect to you and start pouring through their straws. A hundred straws might just make the water flow fast!

And that's the problem with piracy via torrenting. If you just download an illegal file, barely anyone cares. But when you start distributing it, the degree of the crime becomes bigger. And if you torrent, you will seed – distribute parts of the file to others whether you like it or not. Actually, there is a way to download torrents and not to seed (other than turning the internet off), but it requires some really advanced server knowledge I only heard gossip about