I’ve got a friend I know from college. We where gonna do a movie night and I offered her access to my server that contains all my very legally attained media.
Said she’ll have to decline because of “security concerns with work and everything”. Apparently if she watches Shakma the dastardly Chinese spies will steal company secrets.
The absolute state of Americans.
I’m not a lawyer, but my understanding of US copyright law is that it’s a violation of copyright law to share (upload) copyrighted material that you don’t own, not a violation to receive (download) copyrighted material. The technicality that people have been sued for using peer-to-peer software where the user both uploads and downloads the copyrighted files.
Also copyright infringement in most circumstance is a civil infringement, not a criminal infringement. This means that you are only prosecuted by the copyright holder, the rights holder could try to sue you in court. The US government won’t prosecute you for copyright infringement unless you are making money from it or are operating a large scale distribution operation. However, it is very difficult for a rights holder to track you down and it’s costly for them to prove it in court, so they don’t bother.
Use a VPN when you use peer to peer software to share files.