Disclaimer: We do not condone illegal downloading of any content or material whatsoever.
Many folks watched movies in the 70s and 80s using projectors and reels. That all changed with the introduction of Betamax and VHS cassette tapes. Fast forward to CDs, DVDs, Blu-ray, and later a plethora of online streaming sites for watching movies. Somewhere along the way, people decided to pave the way for unlicensed, unregulated, and often illegal access to copyrighted content. The Internet is awash with such websites where you can stream movies illegally and download them in torrent files or other formats directly to your hard drive. When did this come about? Why did it come about? If it’s available online, is it okay to download movies illegally?
The authors of this article are aligned with the rules and regulations associated with copyright material. However, think again if you won’t be prosecuted for illegally downloading content. Rather than risk huge fines, hundreds of hours of community service, and jail time, it makes sense to simply pay for a reputable and cost-effective streaming service and enjoy unlimited content.
The challenge, therefore, is picking a trusted provider. Of course, it all depends on personal tastes and preferences. For example, Netflix or Amazon Prime may serve the needs of broad-spectrum viewership across multiple categories.
But things are different if you’re looking for niche categories of movie and TV streaming services.
IF asian Movies and TV shows are your thing, we would recommend Viki: Asian Dramas & Movies. It’s one of the most highly-rated Kdrama app selections at the Google Play Store, with a rating of 4.1/5 from 845,000 reviews and 50 million downloads to date.
Korean movies have grown in popularity in recent years, thanks to the high-octane entertainment these films deliver. Overall, Asian movies are coming into their own thanks to deep character development, tremendous acting talent, and phenomenal screenplays. For a nominal fee, this app and others like it provide a veritable library of terrific content for viewers to enjoy.
Not Without Punishment
Consider these lawsuits, sentences, and punishments meted out by the courts to people who illegally downloaded material:
· In 2005, a student from a university in Arizona was convicted under state law for illegally downloading movies and music from the Internet. The University of Arizona student Parvin Dhaliwal went to court and pleaded guilty to possessing unauthorized copies of intellectual property, including counterfeit marks. He was sentenced to 3 months in jail, but the sentence was deferred for three years of probation. He also had to put in two hundred hours of community service and was ordered to pay a $5,400 fine.
· In 2011, a federal jury in Dallas ordered Jammie Thomas-Rasset, a single mother of four from Minnesota, to pay $1.5 million in damages for illegally downloading and sharing 24 songs using the file-sharing service Kazaa. This was the second time she had been found liable for copyright infringement; the first time, in 2007, she was ordered to pay $222,000.
· In 2015, a federal court in Virginia sentenced 25-year-old Hana Beshara to two years in prison and ordered her to forfeit more than $610,000 for her role as an administrator of the now-defunct site NinjaVideo.net, which provided links to pirated copies of movies and TV shows.
· Also, in 2015, Matthew David Howard Smith was sentenced to eight months in prison and three years of supervised release for his role as an operator of Zeus Tracker, a website that indexed illegal torrent files. He was also ordered to forfeit $127,232.16 that he had earned from advertising on the site.
While victimless crimes appear to be benign, they’re not. The law does not take kindly to Copywrite violations and intellectual property theft whatsoever. The Motion Picture Associations worldwide have deep pockets and tremendous resources to fight bootlegging wherever they find it. Of all the online misadventures one could stumble upon, pirate movies are possibly the worst choice.
