It's something we've come to embrace in the Linux world. Much faster than a single server and saves bandwidth at individual sites. Surprised this pragmatism hasn't reached the rest of you yet.
Even in your situation, if you're doing this for work and IT calls you up, you just tell them what you're doing. "I'm downloading a very large file over Bittorrent because it's 50% faster than the HTTP download and I'd like to do some work today. Is that all? Thanks. Bye."
In some places you'd get that call from IT just for downloading a large file. Getting a call doesn't mean you're doing something wrong, they're just checking it's you, not malware, and that it's for work. If they haven't already blocked it, have at it.