Legal Movies Download: Your Membership Downloads May be Illegal

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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.

Avoiding amateurish and spammy movie download sites is not enough. Even when using professional looking web sites that are technically conducting a legal business, it is still possible to download illegally. It doesn’t matter that the owner of the download membership has great intentions or that you’ve paid a fee, it can still happen.

So how is this possible? If the membership site offers access to a ridiculous quantity of movies (millions) for modest a fee of about $25, then he’s probably setting you up with the means for accessing and downloading movies off a peer to peer (p2p) file sharing network. He is doing nothing illegal since there are an almost infinite number of downloads on p2p and the knowledge and means to exploit p2p is certainly worth the fee.

The risks begin to build up after you’ve become a proficient and active user of p2p networks. A naive user of p2p is vulnerable to all of its associated dangers such as odd computer behavior due to a virus, or an odd looking bank balance due to spy ware. And 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.

A good rule of thumb for determining if a movie is legal for download is that if it is older than 4 or 5 decades, it is probably in the public domain without a copyright. If you find a free movie on a p2p network that is a recent Hollywood blockbuster, then it is illegal to download. Locating the odd movie that is the exception to this rule will demand a lot of research on your part.

So it is not exactly a relaxed and effortless affair to download movies that are safe and legal. You aren’t enjoying yourself if you’re constantly worried about threats to your computer and your personal information. Researching the copyrights of movies isn’t exactly entertainment either.

Perhaps it’s time to look around for a real movie download site that guarantees safe and legal downloads and has nothing to do with p2p networks. A movie download membership that sets you up with p2p cannot make any guarantees about safety or legality. If you are downloading movies from p2p file sharing networks, you are on your own.