What Are Some Legal Implications of Watching Movies on Afdah?
The Afdah.tv site indexes movies from all over the Web, and many of these movies are being hosted illegally on other sites. Watching these movies falls into a legal gray area, according to FindLaw.
Afdah.tv prominently features a notice in the sidebar of all its pages explaining that it does not host any of the movies it indexes. As such, Afdah.tv bears no responsibility regarding the legality or illegality of the movies users can find and watch there. If illegally uploaded content is indexed there, the responsibility for that content lies on wherever the content is hosted.
Viewers of content on Afdah, legal or not, are mostly safe from legal recourse. According to FindLaw, streamed video content either is presented as a temporary full copy of the movie or is progressively deleted as it is watched. This makes the content “fleeting” and unable to be copied in the eyes of copyright law, leaving the viewer in the clear. However, some courts have ruled that such temporary copies are illegal as well.
FindLaw further explains that the MPAA and other copyright holders rarely seek legal action against viewers of streamed content, as they are difficult to track down and prosecute. Distributors of illegal content, especially large streaming websites, are much more likely targets in the eyes of the law.
