Is it legal to download programs and
music files from limewire? I worry about copyright
and piracy.


Joshtheprinter

It's not legal to download copyrighted songs or software from LimeWire.

How do you know what is legal to download from limewire?

Well, if you google for the thing you want to download and you find that Amazon or some similar site is selling it for a lot of money, chances are that it's copyrighted.

Generally legal to download is free software (e.g. linux distributions), music from artists who are dead like a hundred years, movies that were made more than 50 years ago and the like.

There is also a small fraction of music put on Gnutella by artists themselves, - you can find some of it at http://www.magnetmix.com .

BBC recently started putting certain documentaries online but I don't know which ones they were. TV Episodes are also sort of a grey area, because it would be legal if your friend taped them and gave you the tape but they are still copyrighted. (Unless it's pay-tv it's pretty safe.)

TV series are no more white or black then anything else. Giving copies of music, films and similar to your friends was always legal and still is in most parts of the world.

Archive.org has for example "Night of the Living Dead" from 1968 a well-known zombie movie:
http://www.archive.org/details/night_of_the_living_dead

Unfortunately, it's offered at several encodings that are not very useful - either much too high compressed MPEG-4 or over 4 GB as MPEG-2 which has probably great quality but is a little heavy for downloading. The size of the MPEG-1 might look OK but MPEG-1 offers really bad quality. Well, just download a few megabytes and compare yourself.

However, traffic doesn't seem to be a problem for them at all so you might just go for the MPEG-2 if you care about the quality - it's b/w anyway. Although files over 4 GB are still a problem for many applications and filesystems.


I looked for an alternate encoded version on Gnutella. There was one but too few reliable sources to download it. And most of the results are for a newer version from 1998 (or so) which is of course not public domain yet!

A problem of P2P is that non-free content gets so much publicity and hype that people are not even aware of the free alternatives and then P2P gets blamed because people use it for copyright infringement.

There's some great non-copyright material out there. If people were bothered to check it out. One example of a good place to look is the magnet links from here: http://www.magnetmix.com/video.shtml

Some sites I haven't fully checked out for free movies, etc:

http://www.farscapefantasy.com/video...t=video&id=512

http://www.riefenstahl.org/downloads...efenstahl.html

http://tesla.liketelevision.com/

http://emol.org/movies/

http://www.movieflix.com/

http://sfy.ru/

http://www.indianchild.com/free-movie-downloads.htm

http://www.slumdance.com/blogs/brian...downloads.html

There's lots of unsponsored material out there you just need to be able to find. Some of it's very good!