downloading from torrent sites

[julesrose]

This is all new to me. Friend told me can download stuff (TV shows, films etc) from Kick Ass Torrent but need to first download limewire.
Is this right? Is it safe and is it legal?

Probably not to both.

Depends what you are downloading. If the copyright holder has authorised it's distribution then it's probably ok. If the copyright holder hasn't then...

You are at the whim of the person who is seeding the torrent anyway - how do you know that it does contain what you think it contains?

Limewire I'd be wary of. Apparently it's highly monitored by various interested agencies. MPAA, etc.

(but then it looks like all Peer-2-Peer protocols are being monitored by ISPs)

Yes you can download shows, films and music from Torrents. However downloading films and so on usually isn't legal, downloading Kick ass certainly isn't. Things like that are illegal copies that someone else has made and then decided to spread around.

Aside from the legality its also just wrong so I ask you to please not do it.

It depends on what you are downloading. As mentioned, most television media is copyrighted, so downloading a copy of it without permission from the copyright holder is in breach of their copyright. Same way as you lending out a DVD is in breach of most film copyright laws.

Just for clarity though, torrents are just a method of distribution, and it is in no way illegal in itself. In the same way as posting a letter is perfectly legal, but posting anthrax is illegal. It's the content that determines legality, not the distribution method.

Just to add - kickasstorrents.com comes into that grey area (like The Pirate Bay some months ago) insofar as they list items which one can legally download (eg linux distributions of s/w) but also show links to items where downloading is going to cause the person downloading to be infringing intellectual property rights/ copyright acts.

I don't remember the full details of how the Pirate Bay came to be closed down but would simply urge caution.

I have used (and can recommend) utorrent not Limewire. You might laugh when you see the screen image at utorrent.com as it shows someone downloading Open Office and one type of linux called ubuntu :)

"Same way as you lending out a DVD is in breach of most film copyright laws."

Not sure about other countries but it's legal to lend to friends and family in the UK despite the impression you might get from those notices at the start of a film. There are various web sites that enable and encourage that sort of thing and they're not in any sort of trouble with the copyright people.

'The renting and lending of things like DVDs, CDs, Books, etc, is covered by UK copyright law. You can find the consolidated text of this law here. Under this UK copyright law it is perfectly legal to lend your DVDs, CDs etc to your friends and family. This may be a surprise to you based on the warning messages that usually pop up when you play a DVD or Video. In fact "lending" is only considered as an infringement of copyright when it is done "through an establishment which is accessible to the public". What this basically means is that it is totally legal to lend to your circle of friends and family.'

"I don't remember the full details of how the Pirate Bay came to be closed down"

I "think" that the Pirate Bay site is still up...

I tried it once, as the TV show that I wanted to see was not yet available to download legally. It took hours to download just one episode. I ordered the DVD from Amazon, it was probably quicker than downloading it. That was using utorrent.

It is tempting, not because I don't want to pay for the TV show, but because often the films or shows are not available for download where I live, but so far I found it unusable.

re Pirate Bay - I had not checked to seeif the website was up and running, but went on chatter I had seen that various torrent tracker sites (which I assume only record details of how many machines are sharing data) had stopped working.

Useful input, MmeBodyInTheBasement - I can understand the 'unusable' viewpoint. There are many factors which affect how well the torrent facility works, including how many other people are actively using that torrent (someone with the complete file(s) would be 'seeding'), and whether your ISP has some form of traffic restriction when using peer-to-peer.

Some set very low limits during the "peak hours" of internet usage. With many services that might mean 0800-0000 - the peak hours for household usage being the evening, while ISPs don't want their network too slow during the business day.

Torrent traffic may make up 50% of all data transfers for some ISPs and I saw some truly shocking graphs a few years ago which showed the extent of the problem.

It is a problem for ISPs as they need to manage their networks and limit traffic to some extent as they are charged based on volume, so have to know whether they are making a profit, breaking even, or might make a loss!

It may have been 'unusable' for you, but clearly it can be different for each ISP and for each torrent (as a high number of others with the same torrent would mean the download could go much faster).

You have to be careful that the files you want to download aren't copyrighted. There is some more info here: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BitTorrent_(protocol)

I notice that limewire has been shut down now.

Perhaps somewhat oddly I'm very worried about the shutting down of Limewire. The shutdown hinges on the claims that they were actively encouraging the sharing of copyright material and set out to deliberately encourage both existing users to do it and to get the people who did do it onto their network.

And I don't know enough about Limewire to know if that's actually true.

Just linking to copyright files shouldn't be a crime, if it were Google would be one of the biggest offenders. Just because a technology enables crime that doesn't mean that the technology should be banned and its creators punished.