I want the latest movies, NOW! I don’t want to wait for them to come to pay TV, and I don’t want to pay through the nose to rent the DVD.  Besides that is a real inconvenience to go down to the DVD shop on a Saturday night, when most of the good ones are already out anyway.  I prefer to stay at home in my jammies. Hey,  even the pizza guy comes right to the door, I can even order it online and not even have to wait on hold.  Well you can download the movies you want.  Perhaps you or someone you know has been doing this using peer to peer or torrent.  I know a few people who do this, they always have the best movies for “free”. I don’t do it myself, and here is why:

1. IT IS ILLEGAL!   Peer to peer and torrent downloading is not in itself illegal, in fact torrent is a great way to download popular large files like shareware programs and public domain material, however downloading copyright material, for example a Hollywood movie, without the appropriate license is illegal.  It is stealing.  I know, in the internet age everyone thinks everything is or should be free, but if noone pays for it, noone makes it.  Some would say its all ok as long as you don’t get caught, and they would not bother prosecuting a sweet little innocent guy/gal like me.  Here is my take on that one: they prosecute those that are easiest to get.  That means sweet li’l ole you and me, not the shady dudes selling bootlegs, they are slick, sneaky and shrewd.  Your buddy bragging about all his latest downloads is an easy target.  Just remember now that the governments have spent all our tax money for the next three generations, they will be looking for some more money.  An easy $100 000 to $250 000 fine sounds pretty tempting?

2. THEY COULD CATCH YOU!  Now most people think they wont bother trying to find and prosecute the average domestic downloading-for-personal-use pirate because it is not worth the effort.  Well there is not much effort required actually.  Just think of  how easily our governments have stripped away a lot of our basic freedoms in order to “protect” us from terrorism for example.  Just a stroke of the pen means they can get your browsing and download history from your ISP.  Wont happen? Well in Australia it is already being talked about in the senate.  They will tell us it is to protect our kids from predators or something to make us feel better, and they will do it in US, Canada, UK, Germany and everywhere else they can find an excuse to follow the precedent. There you go, a days work for a government official, or five minutes from a contractor and they have a lazy hundred grand prosecutable case lined up.  That’s my conspiracy theory for today, I digress.

3. You could get malware, viruses, spybots and all sorts of nasties invading your computer from downloading from unknown sources.  This to me is not as bad as going to prison, but still not good.

I hope I have discouraged you from following that path, but here is the good news.

You can download movies legally. 

Review of a totally legit movie download site

Beware of Scams!

Next we will look at some ways to get legal movie downloads