SuffolkOnline.net

You may have heard in the news recently that the owners of the torrent download site piratebay.org was recently convicted of copyright offences. Lets get one thing clear…piratebay.org didn’t actually host any legal material it provided the links for users to be able to get the illegal material. Torrent sites work by users of the site hosting files on their own systems and then the torrent sites providing links to those users files and parts of files for everybody to access from.

This was deemed enough for the owners of the site to be convicted. This, however hasn't stopped the site itself running as normal so is it still safe to use torrent sites?

Firstly, downloading material from torrent sites is not necessarily illegal but please be aware that any films, videos or software which is copyrighted that is downloaded may be illegal.

Generally speaking it has always been a risk downloading copyrighted material from torrent sites and we don't believe actually that this ruling will either increase or decrease the risk. Utimately it is our view that it is unlikely that you will be found and prosecuted should you download copyrighted material but it is still possible. What this ruling may do is to halt the increase of torrent sites by making the job of running a torrent site a highly dangerous past time.

As a summary we would stay that in the end it is the users prerogative whether to use these sites but you must understand and weigh up the risks as quite simply it is illegal to download copyrighted material from any site. It is very much the same discussion that was had amongst people in the days when you borrowed music cd's from friends and copyed them.