Mininova, bit torrent downloads, etc....is it legal?

Depends what your downloading. Downloading movies, games,music etc is illegal as it is pirating. i doubt there is much legal stuff on Bittorrent, apart from files that are freely available on the net.

Edit: I would also assume downloading episodes of Family Guy/Top Gear is illegal, as thay might have the series on DVD you should be purchasing? Not too sure about TV episodes

 

Yes, it's illegal. There was question about it and some circuit courts in the USA said it was legal to share P2P, but the Supreme Court recently held that such file sharing was illegal.

 

Ryan is correct. For the most part everything available through the torrents is copyrighted material and shouldn't be there to begin with.

RMX

 

my understanding is that the courts ruled (and i'm grossly paraphrasing) that a company who produced software whose primary purpose was clearly to violate copyright law could itself be held liable for copyright violations its software enabled.

i thought it meant that grokster INC could be held liable for violations involving grokster the product. did it in fact make grokster the produt illegal?

would we need a judge to rule on each piece of p2p software? there are companies that use torrents to distribute demos and whatnot - totally legally. are they violating the law by using torrents?

curious,
doody.

 

no that's like saying Smith & Wesson can be held liable for some street punk shooting your grandma.

 

The programs are legal as long as they do not have a torrent search within the program. The websites that host trackers and have torrent searches are not legal if they have copyrighted stuff on them.

As a result, the program BitTorrent is legal because all it does is download, while the website bittorrent.com is not because it has a search that yields copyrighted material. Similarly, torrentspy.com and mininova.org are not legal, but legaltorrents.com is. Most other programs such as BitComet are not legal because they have a search incorporated into the programs themselves.

Getting TV shows or movies or games is illegal, but some companies use Bittorrent for the original programmer's "purpose" which is to help them save bandwidth. Who knows if that's why he really programmed it or if he knew/was planning for it to grow into a huge illegal thing like Kazaa.

This was a little unclear on bittorrent.com's website... I thought it was 100% legal (I was a little confused as to how this could be but I was happy with it and didn't want to probe further), but now that I've read it more carefully I realize that only the program itself is.

Thus why I don't use it anymore and deleted the movies I downloaded with it.

 

What I find most amusing is that for all legal chasing of software companies by the RIAA to stop d/l'ing it's not a drop in the bucket compared to the pirating of software,movies, music, CD's, DVD's etc that go on outside North America. I read the pirating in China alone is worth 10's of billions of dollars.

 

I'm not sure they could really do anything in those countries. IIRC the FBI and other police groups are working to fight it overseas.

Suffice it to say, it's difficult to establish intellectual property rights in countries whose cultures believe that everything is/should be common property and that no one has individual/independent creation. I had an econ prof who taught for a few years in Asia and in China plagarism is everywhere and the excuse was that no one 'owned' the thoughts shared.

 

I'm not sure - I had to go over the early Grokster stuff last year but didn't pay too close attention to the text of this recent decision.