Don’t Download Copyrighted Materials
Video Transcribed:
Hey, this is Oklahoma Attorney, Brian Jackson. Today, I want to talk to you about torrent files. This has become, torrenting, BitTorrent, and other programs like that have kind of become the successors to the old peer-to-peer networks like Napster and its progeny where you could go online and download music tracks, movies, some images, things like that. And it would be downloaded from another user of the network. It sounds like a great deal. Right? You want to see this movie, you don’t want to pay the rental fee.
So I’ll just download it. And here’s the problem. If you download copyrighted material that you didn’t pay for, it does violate federal law. It’s actionable civilly because it’s considered copyright infringement, but it’s also potentially criminally actionable.
And one of the things to be aware of is a lot of those programs, torrenting programs, once you download something to it, they will allow it to then be seated back up to the internet again, which means someone else can download it from your computer.
So it’s not a simple matter of you pirated it for your own use. You could actually be found to be distributing it. Now there’s something else to be aware of with that copyrighted materials are one problem, but there’s also a lot of these sites are also used for distributing pornography.
And if you download something either intentionally or otherwise that’s of an illegal nature, like for example, it depicts underage minors just as a for instance if you download it and even if you realize right away you’re mistaken and go to delete it, if somebody else in the meantime seeds off your file and uploads it again, you are now distributing illegal pornography.
So if you use torrenting, you should do so cautiously. Don’t download stuff that’s copyrighted materials. And I would suggest don’t download pornography that way, because not everything is marked clearly on those sites. It may be marked as one thing and it’s something else.
So it’s probably a good idea to not download anything pornographic from there because you never know what you might be getting. But that being said, definitely be aware that you are not just downloading it, but you could be re-uploading it again to somebody else’s computer. And there are some serious legal issues that can come out of doing that.
And something else to be aware of is that under the DMA Act the federal government aggressively prosecutes these cases if you are a major violator. So be careful. And just so you know too, it is traceable. If you use those programs, it gives away your IP number on the network.
It is traceable. It’s not anonymous. So these are things to be aware of if you’re going to use torrenting software. If you have questions about that or any other legal issue, If you are looking for an Oklahoma Criminal Defense Attorney you should go to makelaweasy.com
