A quick guide to file sharing for Bollywood Movie Downloads

The internet is basically a huge network of web servers linked together and you use a web browser on your machine to access the information on these servers.

Sharing Movie, Video, MP3, Games and Software files takes places using peer to peer networking (P2P for short). This basically means that each computer instead of just accessing data on the internet becomes a mini-server in its own right! Clever huh?

This works by just allowing others to have access to one shared area of your computer. They can then download the files that you have put in that area. Note that this is not compulsory - you can just download without sharing - but the network depends on people being willing to share!

Likewise you can access all the files on all the other machines' shared folders. That's a lot of data! In fact it is so much that it would be impossible for it all to sit on these traditional web servers and the bandwidth required to service them would be massive!

Peer to peer sites provide a piece of software to allow you to access these huge networks of files. That is why there is a one-off fee and the downloads are then free!

Consequently there are many millions of people connected to these networks enjoying access to huge amounts of data, songs and movies - you can become one of them too! It is estimated that there are more than 300 million internet users with P2P software!

Legal issues for peer to peer file sharing

Sharing files which are in the public domain with other people is not illegal.

The difficulty of course comes when people share copyrighted material. The basic position is that if this is without the permission of the copyright owner then it is a breach of the law.

So was Napster breaking the law? Well yes it was, basically because it listed all the files on the peer to peer network on a central database and therefore it was decided that it was distributing copyrighted material. As it was a central databse it was easy to target and close down. Now however peer to peer file sharing is happening without a central databse and this distributed network is basically impossible to shut down.

So is no-one sharing copyrighted material any more? Errrmmm...probably they are. It is just that the sites providing the membership are no longer illegal because they do not have a central database of files - instead each computer in the network requests files from another computer, which in turn asks another computer and so on until they find what they are looking for and can then download it. So it is the individual that needs to be careful about what they are sharing with the outside world.

So what is there that is legal to share? Plenty! Public domain files could be put there by companies trying to promote the latest album (which they hope you will then buy), by artists seeking more exposure or a straightforward transaction where you pay to download it.

Most sites provide tutorials on how to use their peer to peer software and outline the legal issues. If you are concerned or have any doubts, you should of course do some research for yourself.