Peer 2 Peer Pirates

i think it should be legal to download these shows if you have the tv/sky/freeview to view them as normal, whats the diffrence between a copy on your pc and a vhs version?? or dvd recorded like me and a few others.

at the end of the day, you dont get thrown in jail for having a copy of ET on vhs from 1980 but you get thrown in jail for downloading the tv show you watched last night on your tv but forgot to record......

someone needs to fix the rules, legal to record it yourself but not to have a recording someone else made, a reminder not to lend your uncle that home video from spain.....

Not sure how to deal with peer to peer piracy but the piracy of dvd films etc could go some way to being dealt with if film companies made original films cheaper to buy instead of charging extortionate prices, for example my 3 year old daughter loves the barney dvds, just before xmas we went to woolies and bought her barneys night before xmas at a cost of £13, i know it doesn't sound a lot but this is a kids dvd and if you compare it to a pirate u could probably get it for around a fiver a saving of £8, i call that a big saving.

Well where to start on this one.......

I do believe with my hand on my heart that if they lowered the price of all this copyrighted material, people will go and buy it rather than download it. Of course there are going to be people who will carry on because it is free.

The biggest problem is that it take so long for the TV programs to be shown over in the UK that you can nearly download the entire series from the states before it has even begun here, take prison break for example, a friend of mine could not wait for the new series to show in the UK so he downloaded the new episodes from the states on a weekly basis, by the time it was released here, he was on episode 20, thats 20 weeks later before the show was released here, why so long?????

As yoda said, why can we not download an episode we forgot to record? well i agree with him, if it is on a free to view channel then what is the difference if we follow the laws of recording (you know the one, delete it after 30 days as you are supposed to do with VHS) obviously channels that are not free to view would not come under this as you have to pay for the channel, thus theft.

Another question to ask is if it is illegal to download these episodes etc, is it also illegal to save to a hard disk like Sky+ and Windows Media Centre (which are built for that purpose) i do not really see the difference between the 2.

i don't see the difference between the 2 either, if your allowed to record it on sky+ and also allowed to save it like then why on earth can't you be allowed to download it from the net.

i know if there is something that i want that is able to be downloaded then i will do it as it's available from the net especially if it is like dozer used for example prison break it's a free tv programme available on the digibox and you don't have to pay for it so i don't see nowt wrong with downloading it at the end of the day

it's like music that is readily available off of different sites on the net, if people can get them off the sites instead of going into a shop to buy them then that is what there going to do at the end of the day as it's cheaper to go and buy the discs and burn them, instead of going and buying them

I must say that downloading itself is not really the issue, at least not in my country. Some TV shows from our public channels are now available on the internet and also at some point on digital TV.

The problem with TV shows like lost, prison break etc is that the channel broadcasting it on your tv bought the rights to broadcast it. They can not put this on a site as they will then be breaking copyrights themselves. When they would create own tv shows, soaps etc they have their own copyrights and then they can offer it for free on a site.

When you record an episode you do mostly the same as downloading it. You are allowed to do this because they do not expect you to sell these tapes or so.

However some people download a dvd or copy it and then sell it cheap. This part is illegal just like it is illegal to share material that has copyright (unless you have paid for the rights to do so) because you profit from it and you let others profit from it too.

This is also the reason why they try to close certain sites where music, tv shows and other stuff are available for your convenience. They do not pay for the copyrights and they do offer you the opportunity to download it. Artists and companies loose money because you do not buy the dvd or cd and others might profit from it.

However an empty dvd-rom or cd-rom also contains a mark up for lost profit on copyright and artist contribution after downloading became more popular so the sad stories of certain companies and artists should mostly be disregarded in my opinion. They earn lots of money and if it is any good people would still like to buy original dvd's or cd's, even though it is pretty expensive.

Nowadays some artists even decided to offer their movies or cd's for free just to promote themselves. Take for instance youtube, some movies were taken off the site because of violation of copyrights but also some people became famous because they added their own movies.

It is a strange world but still the boundaries of downloading and sharing are vague and to keep in track of all people downloading and sharing would be too much for the police and RIAA.