If it is legal in the country you are in then there isn’t a problem.


First, if you were stopped upon reentering the States and they checked your digital material they would have no idea where it came from and if it was legally obtained or not, so there would be nothing they could do to you.

Second it is almost impossible to find out who is actually doing the downloading. It requires your ISP to provide your name to the authority requesting it, most simply don’t because it violates civil rights. Even in the States most ISP do not give out customer info to these investigations. In order for them to say it was you, the suing company requested your name by getting you IP address and asking your ISP for the customer info associated to that address.

They get your IP from the torrent. When you download a file on a torrent your IP is displayed. However, even if they do get your info from your ISP the issue comes from actually proving it was you. For all they know you could have had your internet connection hacked and someone else is downloading it. In other words they don’t have the hard evidence required to make any sort of conviction. Even if you have said material it doesn’t mean you downloaded it illegally, you could have gotten it from another legal source.

Third, Torrent files have no special features about them, meaning you can download them in any format and you can’t tell it came from a torrent.

Fourth, what is illegal in the states is the sharing copyrighted material without a license. If you have the material there is no way they know where it came from. That being the case, you may paid for the material and thus have a license. Even if you didn't though, the burden of proof is on them to show that you obtained the material illegally and as I said there is almost no way to prove it was you. Again, this basically means there is no hard evidence against you.


I have never had an issue about viruses or other material. When you download a torrent you get to see all the files in the torrent before you actually download it. Also if you use a site like www.piratebay.org you can check info about the uploader and read comments about the file/torrent. If there are any issues, 99.9% of the time someone has already complained about the torrent in the comments. I also read the comments and check to see if the person is a trusted uploader or not.

Hope this helps.


Edit: I should mention that there is nothing explicitly illegal about torrents. Torrents are used to share info, its the info that is in question. So if you have a torrent program on your computer it is not illegal.