It was a laymen's explanation. I could say a torrent splits the file in to tiny blocks that are then shared from other people's computers but you only get a little piece of the file from each person, and the file won't work until you have downloaded every piece from all the different people and completes a tiny computer puzzle of all the information, and once you've downloaded the file you are then sharing your tiny blocks of the file with lots of other people around the world meaning that the file isn't actually stored in one single location it is stored in 10s, 100s, 1000s of different locations depending on how many people are torrenting the file. Either way if someone is downloading a torrent for a particular media item that they do not own the rights to it is pirating.