Legal Movies Download: Are Your Membership Downloads Legal? | Video

By MarcSandford
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Never before has entertainment been so widely available to so many people. The adoption of high speed Internet access in greater numbers of homes as well as the Internet's rapid emergence is responsible for this. With this abundance come issues that concern safety and ethics.

Safety and ethics are the primary motivations for a lot people that look for legal sources of movie downloads. However, you may be making illegal downloads of movies by accident even though your intentions might be in the right place. Therefore, you may be placing your privacy and computer at risk through exposure to spy ware and viruses that may accompany these downloads.

It isn't enough to stay away from amateurish and spammy download sites. It's possible that you're getting movies illegally even though you're using a legitimate download membership at a professionally deigned web site. It can still happen even if the business owner has honest intentions and you have paid a membership fee.

So how can this happen? If for a one time fee of say $20 or $30, the web site offers access to astronomical quantities of movies, then in all likelihood, he's setting you up with the know-how and software for downloading and accessing movies from peer to peer (p2p) file sharing networks. Since there really are an almost infinite number of downloads on p2p, he is doing nothing illegal and the means and knowledge to exploit p2p is certainly worth the fee.

When you know enough about using p2p to get yourself into trouble, the problems begin. The stage is set for damaging your computer with a virus or suffering from identity theft because of spy ware if you use p2p naively without an awareness of the associated risks. Unbeknownst to you, those movies that you're happily downloading were uploaded illegally.

You won't get complete protection from the viruses that are set loose on p2p with the anti-virus program installed on your computer. Your computer is only protected against the specific spy ware and viruses that the anti-virus software was programmed to recognize. Viruses that are obscure, new, or a modified version of something well known, will not be recognized by your anti-virus software.

The rule of thumb for determining whether a movie is legal is that it is probably in the public domain and has no copyright if it is extremely old (a black and white movie is a good indication of this). If the movie is free on p2p and is the latest Hollywood blockbuster, then it got there illegally. It will take a lot of research on your part to locate the odd movie that is the exception to this rule.

Downloading legal and safe movies off of p2p networks is not the most relaxing thing to do at the end of the day. Life is too short to be worrying about the safety of your personal information and of your computer. You're doing work rather than relaxing if you are researching movie copyrights.

Perhaps it's worth your while finding a well established movie download site that guarantees the legality and safety of all of their downloads and doesn't fix you up with p2p downloading. No guarantees about safety or legality can be made by a movie download membership that sets you up with p2p. You are on your own if you're using p2p networks.

About the Author

See my review of two well known legal movie download sites that do not rely on p2p networks. One collaborates with the big Hollywood heavy hitters in order to build a great movie selection. The other does not. If you're looking to download legal movies, this review is a must.

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