Has anyone here ever downloaded tv episodes and is it ok to do this.

I missed Ugly Betty and really want to watch the last episode. I am in Canada so can't use ABC's free downloads or whatever they are called. Thanks if anyone can help.

Mininova.org + µTorrent = Good

The legality of it doesn't bother me. Take Alias for example.. I used to watch every episode. Then I took a night class and missed a few episodes. I stopped watching the show(it was a very linear). Missing a few episodes confused me enough to change the channel. If I could have download the missed episodes I would have kept watching.

:thumbsup:

and I don't see anything wrong with it at all, but I think its illegal.

I don't own a TV and even if I did I wouldn't pay the outrageous cable bill! So, I d/l all the TV shows that I enjoy (e.g. Lost, Boston Legal). And, no advertisements! Bonus!

Interpol can, has, and does prosecute in any nation that allows it to do so, and Canada is among them.

It just won't be RIAA coming after you.

That said, it's harder to get caught downloading the stuff than uploading it, partly because worldwide the people that investigate this sort of thing go after the distributors more deliberately than those consumers on the theory that shutting down distribution takes care of the consumer problem. Distributors are also fewer and easier to pinpoint.

It's more or less part of the business.

Advertisers do not cut checks so they can produce TV shows - they cut checks so they can purchase your eyesight.

One could make the argument that it's "stealing" to watch the shows without the commercials that pay for their production (in fact, some TV industry choda laughably tried that a couple of years ago), but if that's so, everyone with a VCR or DVR is a "thief" for forwarding through ad breaks, and folks without those devices are "thieves" for using ad breaks as a chance to go to the john or get a snack from the kitchen. I say get a torrent of the episode you missed and just download and watch it.

Period.

That said, it can be done if you know where to look and have the right tools. I know of a source that is updated daily with pretty much everything you could ever want to watch on television. (And you can get pretty much everything that's ever been shown in the past if you have enough patience and wait for it.) That is, the show airs, and within an hour it's there. Or a show that you're wanting to see but haven't seen in years will have, eventually, all its episodes show up. It's not secret by any means, but you have to understand there's more to the Internet than just the Web.

Cryptic enough? :-)

Oh, and despite what others have advised, stay the hell away from torrents. Unless you clearly know what you're doing, you will end up being defined as a distributor if you use a torrent. Even if you don't, your IP is easier to pinpoint, and people are actually employed as "distributors" of copyrighted or other illegal material and make lists of those who connect to them to partake. Do it enough, and you *will* get a knock on your door.

Peer-to-peer file sharing is one of the worst ways of sharing files that are not strictly legal to share. It's user-friendly, sure, and you can search for and usually find pretty much anything you want. A price goes with that sometimes that's not measured in terms of money.

For promoting an illegal activity.

Respectfully submitted,
CaliforniaPeggy
DU Moderator