illegal showing of movies

Have you sat through these movies? Sometimes the picture is awful, sometimes it's the audio. Sometimes the people sitting around whoever is taping are so noisy that you cannot hear anything but them. And then, the worst of it, you get halfway through a movie, finally truly interested and that's it, no more movie. What the heck??
Occasionally you will click on the link and it will say the video has been removed because of copyright infringement

Unfortunately there are a lot of people who are a happy to download movies, usually illegally, just so that they can either see a movie before it's scheduled release or just so that they don't have to pay. Although I disagree with this practice I can see why many movie fans do this and so there is a huge demand for it, even if the quality of the download is usually pretty poor.

What annoys me more is the general ignorance about what is illegal when it comes to downloading movies from various site. Firstly the company who actually host the download on their server are breaking the law for holding copyrighted material. Secondly any site which offers links to these downloads are also breaking the law as they are promoting copyrighted material and finally the minute you download the movie you are in possession of an illegal movie so again you are breaking the law.

There are some exceptions and there are legal download websites but as these tend to cost money to join the illegal sites are flourishing.

Just last year the owners of a website which linked to illegal downloads were prosecuted for aiding the distribution of illegal material, I think it was a site called Pirate Bay. The owners were found guilty and had to pay a huge amount of compensation to various organizations. I guess that those owners who continue to offer illegal downloads, either directly or through links think that they wont get caught.