krazykemist

First the warning:

1. P2P are not the only services that are being scoured for DMCA violations.

2. Peer Guardian does not work. (For BitTorrent)

So I wake up this evening and check my mail. Not expecting to find anything other than work related stuff and the occasional Viagra spam, I just glanced over everthing then had to do a double take when I saw the title "Bit Torrent Sharing". It was a message from a guy at my Internet company (whom I work for) informing me they recieved a violation notice connecting my IP to the download of a movie via BitTorrent. Luckily there were no charges pressed or fines required. However if I recieve one more violation then the port on my DSL will have to be blocked.
I have been downloading television episodes and unliscenced anime using BT for a while only recently used it to download this movie. I started using Peer Guardian on the first of the year and it has been showing me that it has blocked connection attempts from everyone from Universal, Time Warner, Metro-Goldwyn-Meyer to the Taiwanese government. The violation report came from Universal and the time stamps were during times that PG was running and logging blocked connections.

So do not think BT is a 'safer' method to download and do NOT trust blocking programs, as there is no way for them to include all IP address ranges that a company may use.

Now for the request:

Does anyone know the laws and use policies regarding the downloading of television episodes. Links to sources that provide said legal restrictions would also be helpful.

*edited warning #2.

__________________
"Everyone thinks of changing the world, but no one thinks of changing himself." -- Tolstoy