Was talking to two of my neighbors before and both said that in Switzerland downloading movies from any site is legal for personal use?

Can this be right?

Is piracy allowed here?

Yes it is legal.

Yes, isn't legal in Germany, France, Spain, etc?

Thank you, could hug you right now

Means I can get homeland season 2 and good wife and blue blood without have to wait till the next season each year.

You a made my week

France, no way first time is a warning,then a registered letter, strike three is internet cut off three month.
Germany you pay a fine when they track you down
A friend of mine had to pay 1400 Euros for two songs her 15 yr old son Down loaded and put on his Facebook page.

This is a great place to live,love it

Well yes it is, but you need to be careful how you do it! To be strictly legal, you need to ensure that when you connect you are only downloading - most torrent applications do a few other things at the same time, so you might be in a grey area, if that is how you do the downloads.

Isn't it enough if you stop sharing when your download is complete?

I think you'll find you'd have a problem here for that
I believe you might have to be the initial seeder rather than a leecher - I'd say in the absence of legal cases, seeding as little as you can looks to be a good approach....

Yes, this is legal

No, piracy is not allowed and is illegal

But downloading movies for personal use is not defined as piracy in Switzerland

Not really, as with bittorrent you upload any small parts of the movie data you have on your hard drive. So technically as soon as you have downloaded even a second of the movie, you can upload it.

And there we have the grey area. Everybody agrees (even if rights holders don't like it and would like to change it) that pure downloading is legal, but the question is when uploading starts being illegal.

Obviously rights holders want it to be illegal as soon as you upload a byte. Others argue that (unless you are the inital uploader), you never upload a complete movie (or song) but just unrelated parts of it.

Think of it as a symphony. Copying individual notes from different times of the piece and distributing them won't be an offense, as only the complete symphony is an independent work of art which can be protected.

In short, technologies
- running down- and uploads in parallel are a grey area (BitTorrent, eDonkey, Direct Connect)
- where uploads are independent from downloads are fine (Usenet Newsgroups, HTTP or FTP file sharing) for downloaders

I've heard VUZE is one of the best sites to use...

Usenet.nl and usenetserver

Thanks, very well explained.

Downloading movies, series, docus for personal use. LEGAL
Downloading music for personal use. LEGAL
Sharing movies, series, docus or music. ILLEGAL

Downloading and sharing programs (office, windows, etc). LEGAL or ILLEGAL?

Am I right?

Unless you have access to private trackers.. I max out my connection speed within about 5 seconds

Downloading and sharing any material/programs would be illegal here I would think. Also uploading material is illegal in Switzerland.

OK, that would be by downloading, but if I donwload photoshop to use it at home but not to earn money (not professionally). I think with software is always ILLEGAL downloading and sharing. Isn't it?

the software question has been asked a few times but never properly answered ... it only has" i think, it might be, maybe" type replies

I would think downloading any programs without paying for them is illegal, certainly sharing them around would be. Things like music, video, etc, to download for personal use seems to be okay here in Switzerland.

Not true, many software program authors distribute their software for free and actively encourage people to redistribute the software, all at no cost.

Exactly. We should distinguish between open source, freeware, shareware and on the oder side the "payware". The first group is clearly legal, but the second group should be theorically legal too, because you are not earning money with it, but I am not sure.

Examples: office, windows, photoshop, ... ¿LEGAL OR ILLEGAL?