What is the different between legal and free?

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» What is the different between legal and free?

[Last update on 04/02/2010, Thu]

What is free?

- Things which are available without charge such as software, video clips etc.

What is legal?

-Things that you able to get for free without breaking the law of piracy. (You paid for it AND to the copyright holder.)

What is illegal?

-Things that you get for free which usually we have to paid for. (E.g. Torrent, downloads from file hosting website such as Megaupload,hotfile,rapidshare etc which have be uploaded illegally.)

*Torrents are not illegal but are the contents that users downloads that determined it.

So how do we get "full version" which are both free and legal?

-For software, we can get it through:

1) TrialPay [More information]

2) Online promotion [More information]

3) Giveaway of the Day [More information]

-For movies, we get it through:

1)Online websites(Youtube, veoh etc)

Is watching free movies online illegal?

The key is if the copyright holder has authorized the movie to be shown for free online. If they have not, it is a violation of the copyright laws and it should be therefore, illegal.

Copyright holders hold the right to determine how something is distributed.


Is it forbidden to see something that was given without any request of payment without paying? No, watching FREE, which implies FREE movies in any means is not illegal.


Illegal would be watching something that has been illegally obtained and present without consent of the owner (theft).

For example in Czech republic is all online viewing legal (even that of the copyrighted movies) under one condition and that is you may NOT ask for any payment for it, nor present it in public, when you have not been given the permission of the owner. This is done because everyone is presumed guilty of copyright violation by paying extra fees on CD, DVD, hard-disk drives, removable memory media (memory cards), USB FLASH disk to the copyright association.



So, it really depends on the website you use to watch the movies on, for example veoh.com has some full movies for online viewing, but if you try to watch from a country that is not on the "allowed list" you will get a message that the movie is unavailable for your location. The same happens on some movies and music video clips on YouTube.


Check laws of your country first, there are 233 countries, and the regulatory laws are different in each one.

Reference:

http://wiki.answers.com/Q/Is_watching_free_movies_online_illegal

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