Which DVD Review Blog

Never before has entertainment been so widely available to so many people. The adoption of high speed Internet access in greater numbers of homes as well as the Internet's rapid emergence is responsible for this. With this abundance come issues that concern safety and ethics.

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 does this come about? If the membership site asks for modest a fee of about $25 in exchange for access to a ridiculous quantity of movies (millions), then he's probably setting you up with the means for downloading and accessing movies off a peer to peer (p2p) file sharing network. Because the number of downloads to be had from p2p is enormous, he really is telling the truth and you are getting value for your money if you previously lacked the means and knowledge to use p2p networks.

The risks begin to build up after you've become a proficient and active user of p2p networks. A naive user of p2p is vulnerable to all of its associated dangers such as odd computer behavior due to a virus, or an odd looking bank balance due to spy ware. And unbeknownst to you, those movies that you're happily downloading were uploaded illegally.

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 only rule of thumb for knowing whether or not a movie is legal for download, is that if it is a very old movie (preferably in black and white) then it is probably in the public domain and is therefore legal. A movie is illegal to download if it is a recent Hollywood blockbuster and if you find it for free on a p2p network. A lot research will be required if you'd like to find the exceptions to this rule of thumb.

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 time to look around for a real movie download site that guarantees safe and legal downloads and has nothing to do with p2p networks. A movie download membership that sets you up with p2p cannot make any guarantees about safety or legality. If you are downloading movies from p2p file sharing networks, you are on your own.