Legal to download tv shows?

[jasong]

This is something I've always wondered about. There are a lot of people that believe once something shows up on the public airwaves, that automatically makes it public domain.

What do you guys think?

Edit: Btw, I'm thinking specifically of United States law. I'm in no way familiar with other countries policies or public beliefs about their legal systems.

[LAURENU2]

So what are you asking you posed two question

Legal to download tv shows?
You download when ever you view online So Yes

But that does not mean you can use it for what ever you want



that automatically makes it public domain.

No it does not

[paleseptember]

It all comes back to copyright laws, concerning which, most countries haven't maintained pace with changing technologies. There is conditions of personal use (ie. recording a tv show for future viewing is generally considered fair use, and people are generally allowed to do this) and conditions of fair use (said temporarily tv show isn't burnt to dvd and sold for profit).

It gets sketchy when you consider new technology. You buy a CD, should you be allowed to rip it to .ogg and load it onto your media player? Should you be allowed to create compilation CDs for use in your car? Most countries copyright laws still see these things as illegal, but breaches are generally ignored considering personal and fair usage.

Distribution of TV shows - interesting. The networks play large amounts of money to guarantee sole distribution rights, so they're definitely not in the public domain. It links back to advertising as well, networks make their money back by charging advertisers to be associated with popular shows.

So, /end{ramble}, specifically, no. Downloading tv shows is illegal. You're bypassing the network's intellectual property and participating in someone else's attempt to bypass the legal distribution channels.

Whether this is still the best way to distribute content is another matter. And we're seeing advances with legally downloadable tv shows, online distribution of music, whatever, so maybe progress is being made. But the laws still lag behind.

Anyhow, that's my 2¥'s worth of opinion.

[Fozzie]

Unless you can download it from the official distributor with their waiver then it's copyright theft. Why on earth would they invest huge sums in the production of the material and then give it away?

Anyone who uses torrents for music, films, TV programmes etc. are fully aware they are committing a crime. No need to try and gloss over it.

[jasong]

What really pisses me off is that they can sue you for downloading the show, but if you follow the law you might have to wait years to see the episode you missed. I'm not trying to cheat the tv people, I'm trying to make television as enjoyable as possible for me.

They want people to not steal their stuff, but if you can't record it off tv, a lot of times the only way to obtain it is illegally. Admittedly, it's not considered a God-given right to be able to watch tv when you want, but it seems that a lot of executives have their heads up their butts when it comes to what they could do to remedy some of the pirating.

[paleseptember]

Well, we've moved away from the legality of it all, and I agree with you in part Jasong -- the programming decisions sometimes are just ... bizarre :looney:

[wirthi]

What paleseptember says is not true for (continental) european law systems. I know for sure that the German, Austrian and Swiss Law System don't know the concept of "fair use", I'm quite sure the French, Belgian, Spanish etc. don't know either. There is no "fair use" here.

The only thing legally provided for, is the right of *private persons* to store material 'legally provided to them' for further use. This includes recording legally seen TV-Shows for further, private (!) use (i.e. recording them from the analog or now digital TV stream that was broadcast by the TV channel). This does not mean you may download something copyrighted from the internet just because you *could* have seen on TV already.

This has nothing to do with the fact that copyright laws are outdated and cannot keep up with current technology. Copyright law prohibits you from violating the rights given to the copyright owners. I does not matter how you try to violate them, be it with a 30-years-old analogous Camera or an up-to-date Downloader/YouTube/Peer2Peer-Programm.

If you want to reform copyright law you first have to think about how to compensate the monetary drawback of the copyright owners. Not that I like the music industry but still they invest huge money in producing good (?) music. If they have no chance of earning their money back by selling the music since everyone is free to copy everything, they will not produce music any longer.

The current problem of the music industry is not the copyright law but their misunderstanding of what custumers expect.

[PCZ]

It used to be easy for the media companies to control distribution.
Launch a TV show in one country then sell the show to other countries networks.

Not anymore though, folks through the power of the internet watch the shows worldwide as soon as they have aired anywhere.

These 'caps' don't have any advert breaks either so they are far more enjoyable to watch.
This is of course not sustainable and the TV companies will have to adapt.

Jasong to answer your question yes it's illegal.