Copyrighted TV shows on a website

[Mongo]

Hi,

I saw a website for an mp3 player. On this website you could download tv shows to go onto the mp3 player. I know that's illegal so I went to try and download it and a default message came up from the websites owner saying that you could only download it if you owned that tv show. So it's like a backup.

I know there's this stuff about how you can legally create a backup of a game you own but I'm not sure about this stuff. Is it legal?

Many thanks.

[Mr. Knowitall]

You can create a backup, unless....

There's a complication from recent federal legislation, in that games and entertainment programming are increasingly shipping in an encrypted format. You may not even realize that they're encrypted - all DVD's, for example, are encrypted. You can legally make a backup copy of copyrighted material you own, but as the law currently stands you can't legally break the encryption to do so.