On April 18, I had just bought a new laptop that had a DVD player. I remember Netflix or something as a company that you pay a membership and they send you DVD's. Well I didn't want to have to wait in the mail for a DVD, so I went web searching for companies that might have it set up so you could pay and download the DVD movies. I had read that under copyright laws, if you paid a membership fee, then that company would pay the royalties on the product with your membership fee, and that this process was not illegal.
So I happened upon MoviesDirectPro.com Please email me and I will be glad to forward the webpages of their explanation of their product, etc. To validate my report. I may set up a webpage later with these documents, but I haven't decided yet.
I searched all over the site, looking for evidence that it was a peer to peer sharing network vs. A legal site, and it appeared to be a legal site. I gave my credit card and they charged me $17.88 for membership to this website, which supposedly would give me access to all of these DVD's to download.
Upon receiving my verification email a few minutes later (man, that was QUICK!) and not long after, a receipt from Clickbank.com that they had taken the money out of my bank account, I was direct by email to this second webpage. It was a "getting started page", which gave instructons on where to go to download Azureus, or Shareaza, two programs that are made available on the internet at their respective websites for FREE, and their terms and condition agreements specifically state that if ANYONE CHARGES MONEY FOR THIS SOFTWARE THAT A REFUND SHOULD BE ASKED FOR IMMEDIATELY, that NO ONE SHOULD CHARGE MONEY FOR THIS SOFTWARE, BUT THAT IT WOULD BE DISTRIBUTED FREELY. So this kind of irked me - that, and downloading copyrighted material in this manner is called peer to peer file sharing and is illegal in the United States.
I just paid a little under twenty bucks for instructions on how to break the law and land in criminal court! Oh wonderful.
So I immediately wrote the company at the two email address they provided, and of course, received no response other than their autoresponder that said basically "We received your email, we will get back to you as soon as possible."
It's April 25 now. I have emailed this company 3 times. I have filed a report with Clickbank today requesting my money back. If Clickbank does not find a way to get my money back to me, I'll be filing a report here on them too, and insinuated as much to them in my complaint.
I really don't expect to get my money back, but I want to make sure that other people know about it. Whether you download files from peers or not, is your choice, but for a company to present themselves as a legal outlet and then present the illegal option as legal... AND charge money for it.in my book, that's a scam.
I feel sorry for all of the people that may not know that peer to peer filesharing is illegal and may get caught in the sweep that the music industry is doing to individual users, maybe as a result of this website or others like it. I read of one parent settling out of court with the music industry and paid something like $15,000 for the downloading activities of her 13 year old kid. This is truly pathetic.
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