Are your children downloading illegal material from the Internet?

Software and movie piracy is a problem that grows larger every day due to the ever-increasing bandwidth available to home users. Many parents are not aware that it is so easy to find and download illegal so-called dvd rips of popular movies online, sometimes before they are available in your local store! Many parents are not sure what their family members are doing on the computer. If the children know more about using the computer than the adults in the house, it can become an even more uncomfortable situation.

So, what can be done to avoid this situation? As always, we recommend having an open dialogue with your children in order to impress upon them the importance of staying on the right side of the law. Copyright infringement might seem insignificant, but can if you are unlucky lead to a fine or the termination of your Internet connection. The Motion Picture Association of America are bringing normal families to court for downloading pirated material, sometimes even individual movies. No matter what you think of this practice, it can be an uncomfortable situation to find yourself in.

In addition to establishing house rules with your children regarding their computer use, you can use a hard drive scanner such as SmutScanner to list all movie files on the computer which you can then manually inspect for downloaded movies. If you do not feel comfortable looking through the computer yourself, a specialised piece of software such as SmutScanner can save a lot of time and effort in uncovering files hidden deep within the directory structure of your computer. It will even find files deliberately hidden in difficult-to-find locations.

If you do find evidence of software or movie piracy on the computer, we recommend that you delete the offending material immediately and have a discussion with your child to explain why piracy is wrong.