Is downloading torrent leagle?

If you are not planning to sell the work you download, you are free to enjoy torrenting as much as you like. The Netherlands has an interesting approach making it even more difficult to understand is torrenting illegal or not. The country decided to allow anyone to use torrenting to share works of art.

People are allowed to torrent artworks for personal use not personal gain. However, this law does not apply to other things such as software. The Dutch are allowed to download art but not to share it. So the next time you are in the Netherlands, remember that it is illegal to upload anything using a torrent.

But, you can simply download torrents from other countries. What is quite confusing is the way the Dutch authorities defined art. Torrenting in the United States is not technically illegal—unless you are downloading copyrighted materials —but the government is still doing its best to crack down on it.

The majority of ISPs throttle any torrent traffic that is detected on their network. In other words, they make downloading very slow, in an attempt to deter people from doing it.

You can get around this by using a good VPN and connecting to servers that are outside the United States. If you take Switzerland as an example, it is safe to say that you are largely free to torrent what you want, whenever you want. However, if you are in any of the other aforementioned countries, your safety could be much lower. In the Netherlands, your safety might become an issue as soon as you share something; in Mexico, your privacy might be affected, and this alone might become an issue.

Switzerland has privacy laws that make it illegal for third parties to spy on the IP addresses of people who download torrents. But not all of us are lucky enough to enjoy such perks. So here we are again asking ourselves is torrenting illegal or not, and here is the answer we all enjoy so much — it depends. If you want to remain anonymous and protect your privacy at all times, you should consider investing in the use of a Virtual Private Network for torrenting.

If you do this, you are likely to prevent any intrusion or possible legal action as a result of sharing copyrighted materials. Mikaela is an investigative journalist that likes to cover the ever-changing world of technology. She tries to keep her finger on the pulse of digital trends and share her insights on the most relevant topics, including big tech, security, privacy, and data breaches.

Your email address will not be published. Post Comment. This just goes to show that very few things are by their very nature illegal: it all depends on how you use it! Torrent wisely and keep up-to-date on changing laws. Torrenting is not illegal, Sharing files over a peer-to-peer P2P server is legal. But, when you share a copyrighted content it becomes illegal. Another security aspect with torrents is if you are not careful with your source, you might become prey to malware. For a small investment, you can have the piece of mind that your online privacy is secure.

Most countries ban torrenting but you rarely get in trouble if you download illegal stuff through p2p. Obviously, if you want to avoid ramifications, it would be best not to torrent at all. Note: choose a quality VPN for high-end protection. The Tor browser prevents anyone from tracking your internet connection. Tor encrypts the data multiple times via Tor relays.

Tor is a browser often used by journalists and activists in countries where internet traffic is tightly monitored. You can read more on setting up the Tor browser here. My last recommendation is to be smart when torrenting by avoiding the latest movies, games and music.

Copyright trolls are more likely to be snooping around in these torrents due to the high number of torrenters downloading the latest releases. Many avid torrenters have made the transition from uTorrent and BitTorrent to streamed content. Kodi and Plex are both open-source software media centers. The software allows you to stream and play all kinds of content, such as videos and music, on various devices.

Unlike Netflix, Kodi and Plex both stream copyrighted content without permission from the copyright holders. Because of this, Kodi is under a lot of legal pressure at the time of this writing, so you might have to look for an alternative in the future. What it comes down to is this: from a legal perspective, streaming copyrighted material from a pirated source is illegal. If you want to protect your online privacy and avoid potential legal ramifications when streaming, simply follow the precautions listed above.

Remember that your ISP and copyright trolls constantly monitor peer-to-peer networks such as uTorrent and may take action if they catch you torrenting copyrighted files. To protect your online privacy, follow the provided instructions. Visiting the Pirate Bay website itself is not illegal. However, what you do on the website can certainly be illegal. If you download content that you don't own the license to, that's illegal. It's absolutely illegal to torrent in the U.

Pixel Privacy Logo. Is Torrenting Illegal? The Definitive Answer T orrenting is a massively popular method to download the latest movies, TV series, music, books, games — you name it. What Is Torrenting? Most of us don't need all those. Let's say that we want a very specific version of the 'Night of the Living Dead' that we can't find through the search function, but found it on a torrent site.

In that case, if there is an icon of a horseshoe magnet, we can click it to download the movie using its magnet link.

The first time we attempt to download with a magnet link, Chrome will show us an 'External Protocol Request' to launch qBittorrent. We can check the 'Remember my choice' checkbox never to see this message again. If we are using Firefox, a simpler message will ask us to select an application. The 'magnet' option will launch qBittorrent, which is associated with magnet links.

Finally, if a torrent site doesn't support magnet links to download movies, we can always download a torrent file of a few kilobytes. We can choose to open it directly with qBittorrent. Whichever way we choose, once the file downloads completely, we are free to watch the movie with the movie player we prefer. VLC is an excellent choice.

Once the download is completed, we shouldn't immediately remove the torrent from qBittorrent or shut the application down. It is essential for the BitTorrent protocol that we leave the torrent client running, and 'seeding' the torrent. You see, when we download movies through a torrent file or a magnet link, we aren't downloading from a website or server. We are downloading from other torrent users, possibly with different clients, that are 'seeding' the torrent.

Proper BitTorrent etiquette dictates that we should leave a torrent seeding until we have uploaded at least double the data we have downloaded. For a MB movie, we should let it seeding until we have uploaded 1,4GB. Of course, seeding takes a toll on our limited upload speed, and if left without a limit, it could seriously slow down our internet connection.

If we have a faster of slower upload speed or can leave the PC open to seed while we are not using it, we can change the upload limit, or remove it altogether. Just avoid 'hit-and-run'. On publicly shared torrent files, it's just bad form. If we use a private tracker, though, which requires an account to download movies and files, doing a hit-and-run could get us banned.

We just need to choose our movies carefully. The only movies that are legal to download for free are movies that are in the public domain.

Works in the public domain have their intellectual property rights expired, forfeited, or the property rights are inapplicable. The version of the Night of the Living Dead we saw earlier is a famous example of a movie in the public domain.

This is not the only such movie, though. Any movie before is in the public domain by default, as well as several movies released later. We can find a list of such free and legal movies on Wikipedia We won't find torrent files or magnet links on the above websites, but we can search for torrents of these public domain movies to download. Granted, none of these lists will include the Captain America: Civil War or any recent blockbusters any time soon.

But the fact is that there are hundreds of movies we can download for free, legally. Different countries have different laws about the illegal download of copyrighted content by any means. There is also the possibility, albeit slight, that a movie studio can sue an individual for downloading a particular movie. This, of course, doesn't mean that anyone who downloads movies illegally will end up paying a fine or sued.

But you should be aware of your country's laws on illegal downloading. One way to avoid legal repercussions with torrenting, although still to be used with caution, is by using a virtual private network to anonymize and encrypt your online identity. You should ensure though that the VPN doesn't keep log files, as many do.

The BitTorrent protocol is only one of the ways to download movies for free. There are also streaming sites and apps that combine torrents and streaming, such as Popcorn Time.