Let’s say that an individual – call him Mr. X – was a fan of a TV show – call it ‘Dr W’ – of which a considerable number of episodes were made over the past few decades. Say that while most of these episodes were available (second hand) on video, only a tiny fraction had been released on DVD.
Now, say that Mr. X had discovered that pretty much every single episode of ‘Dr W’ in existence was available to download from the Internet in torrent form - would it technically be wrong for him to try to download as many as humanly possible, bearing in mind that were the episodes available on DVD he would either rent or buy them anyway because of the extras?
Also, given that the hypothetical Mr. X only has a small amount of space left on his hard-drive, does anyone have any general advice on DVD writers?
Wednesday, May 02, 2007
A hypothetical question
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9 comments:
I think the laws on copyright allow you to make a backup for your own personal use. And not for resale. I think its ok. They have bigger fish to fry like the chinese people selling ve goo copy dvd u wan. As you say your going to buy it anyway.
Flippant maybe, but perhaps one of those external hard drives would be useful.
AS far as I am concerned if something is not available legitimately and not likely to be in the foreseeable future then why not take advantage of bit torrents. Stuff legitimately availalbe is a different matter of course.
Okay people: it's Mr. X doing the downloading, not me. Hypothetically speaking.
Thank you both for your advice.
I'd considered an external hardrive, Jams, but it's quite possible that it'd be soon filled up - whereas with a DVD writer I'm only limited by the number of discs I can buy/store. Also, with the right software, you can convert an .avi file (which most TV shows are stored in online) to play on a normal DVD-player. Which would come in handy should Mr. X wish to indulge in a 'Dr W' night round a friends house.
Morally it would be fine in my opinion, since it is not available elsewhere.
But personally I got busted last year and had to pay huge damages.
I never thought I'd be caught, since I downloaded so little (roughly 1000 songs and two films in 3 years). I kept an eye on the news since then and it appears that p2p stuff and things like torrent do get monitored (mostly by the legal firms who get awarded x-amount of money for fish caught). Every couple of months a bunch of people (not necessarily those who download most) get busted to set an example.
In most countries you are allowed to make back-ups of DVDs in your possession, provided they are for your own personal use.
If I were Mr X, I'd be patient and wait for the DVDs to come out. They'd have better quality anyway and look cooler on this shelf.
Ouch.
You're in Germany though, aren't you? From what I've been reading, they've adopted a particularly harsh approach to p2p, going after as many people as they can.
Efforts in the UK have been focused more on uploaders, those putting thousands of songs and films online.
I'd be patient and wait for the DVDs to come out
At the current rate, that'll take decades.
Other isues aside Matt,DVD rewiters aren't too expensive now and will provide mr X with all the capability he needs.
Morally, I'd say it would partly depend on whether Mr X was living in Britain and paying a licence fee.
Let's say that he's a licence-paying British citizen.
I would personally recommend getting hold of peer guardian. It's a packet blocker that uses a list of known anti-p2p ip addresses and blocks those. It also blocks some spam and spyware sites. But of course I would never condone downloading illegal stuff, now where's that copy of Spiderman 3. :D
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