Is this advisable?

Mrs_pbradley936

If you had a child (well teenager) that wanted to download and burn DVDs and CDs would you let him? I mean is it legal. If it is all above board what sort of equipment do you need and how much is it likely to cost?

My nephew wants to do this and while nobody objects if it is allowed, my sister does not want to be in Court defending something which all teenagers seem to be doing.

jamalfatty

Depends first of all where the content comes from, there are loads of both legal and illegal methods of obtaining media. Quite a lot of the legal ones will have restrictions that prevent you from moving the files about too much or burning them so that would be something to check.
As to the cost, a CD/DVD burner can be picked up for about £15, and then blank CD's are dirt cheap.
Before anyone starts downloading loads of stuff, check with your ISP if you have a download limit, and if you do, what happens/how much does it cost if you exceed it.

If you did decide to go down the dodgy route, although its illegal, chances of you ending up in court for downloading a few films or CD's are slim to nil.

Mrs_pbradley936

Just check with AOL and they said no limit BUT a regular use in excess of 20 Gigabites (not sure if that is the right spelling) would be regarded as commercial use and the service would be restricted. So the next question is how do you find out how much you have downloaded?

nickj_2

yes it is illegal , but the chances of being caught are slim , however , every now and then music / film co's have a crack down and the few that are caught have received large fines .

Millionaire

Chances of getting caught?, some info:

http://www.pcworld.com/article/id,131763-page,2-c,consumeradvice/article.html

By the way nowadays you dont have to download to watch stuff, there are sites popping up all the time which let you stream and watch things so you can do away with P2P software.

jamalfatty

pbradley936 wrote: »

Just check with AOL and they said no limit BUT a regular use in excess of 20 Gigabites (not sure if that is the right spelling) would be regarded as commercial use and the service would be restricted. So the next question is how do you find out how much you have downloaded?

There are programs you can download that monitor bandwidth usage, just do a google search for 'bandwidth monitor'.

As a general rule of thumb, a movie is about 750Mb and a CD about 100Mb, so you've got about 20 Movies and 50 CD's there a month, BUT depending on how you download this stuff, you have to take into account uploading bandwidth as well which if you share as much as you download can double these file sizes.