Internet Business Optimization Tips and Ideas | Legal Movies Download: Your Membership Downloads May be Illegal

Legal Movies Download: Your Membership Downloads May be Illegal

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by Marc Sandford

We are currently living in a golden age of easy access to information and entertainment. The Internet’s rapid emergence as well as the adoption of high speed Internet access in greater numbers of homes is responsible for this. With this plentitude comes issues that concern our ethics and the safety of our computers and privacy.

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.

Your instincts to stay away from download sites that appear suspicious and amateurish are correct but they’re not enough. Even using a legitimate download membership at a professionally deigned web site can result in your getting movies illegally. It doesn’t matter that you’ve paid a fee or that the owner of the download membership has great intentions, it can still happen.

So how can this happen? If for a one time fee of say $20 or $30, the web site offers access to astronomical quantities of movies, then in all likelihood, he’s setting you up with the know-how and software for downloading and accessing movies from peer to peer (p2p) file sharing networks. Since there really are an almost infinite number of downloads on p2p, he is doing nothing illegal and the means and knowledge to exploit p2p is certainly worth the fee.

Once you become proficient at using p2p networks, the dangers begin. A naive user of p2p is vulnerable to all of its associated dangers and may start to notice peculiar things: an odd looking bank balance due to spy ware or odd computer behavior due to a virus. You’ll be happily downloading lots of movies illegally in complete ignorance because you’ve paid your fee to a legitimate membership.


You can’t count on 100 percent protection against all of the viruses that reside in p2p networks with your anti-virus program. These programs can detect and protect your computer from only the specific spy ware and viruses that they have definitions for. New, obscure, or modified viruses will elude your anti-virus program.

The rule of thumb for determining whether a movie is legal is that it is probably in the public domain and has no copyright if it is extremely old (a black and white movie is a good indication of this). If the movie is free on p2p and is the latest Hollywood blockbuster, then it got there illegally. It will take a lot of research on your part to locate the odd movie that is the exception to this rule.

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 worth your while finding a well established movie download site that guarantees the legality and safety of all of their downloads and doesn’t fix you up with p2p downloading. No guarantees about safety or legality can be made by a movie download membership that sets you up with p2p. You are on your own if you’re using p2p networks.

About the Author:
Read my review of two well known legal movies download sites that do not rely on p2p networks. One has a big movie collection because it cooperates with the big Hollywood heavy hitters. The other does not. If you want to download legal movies, see this review.