[mmrasheed]

I am not a lawyer. But, if a program is not distributed in your part of the world officially, it's not supposed to be illegal to download from different source. After all, the company is not losing any business. So, why not torrent it?

[rahimnathwani]

I'm not a lawyer either, but I'm pretty sure that copyright laws don't lose their effect just because something hasn't been released (yet) in your country.

If that were the case, then all pre-release bootleg copies would be legal.

[mmrasheed]

Bootleg copies are for advertisement only, that's why the put the warning signs everywhere on it. So, technically copying bootlegs wouldn't be legal.

Copyright is not an universal law and each country has its own definition of it. There are many countries where hollywood productions (movies or series) are not released, nor marketed at all. If not marketed, the product is not bound by the local copyright law. In that case why would the people of those countries be obliged to follow another foreign country's (US) law? Technically, people in those countries are not entitled to enjoy the hollywood productions at all?

[moron4hire]

There are copyright reciprocity agreements between specific sets of nations, but there is no universal copyright law.

[rahimnathwani]

Yes, that's why I referred to 'laws' (plural).

Have you come across any copyright law (in any country) where copyright does not apply just because the item has not been released in that country?

[moron4hire]

Well, there are 193 member nations in the UN, and 188 of them are members of the World Intellectual Property Organization, so I guess that means there are 5 countries that do not have any laws against violating intellectual property rights from other countries. Which ones? I don't know. I'm too lazy to compare the lists.

[c3o]

I am not aware of such a rule in any country's copyright law. If you don't own the rights, you may not make copies. Whether it's sold locally or not – unfortunately – doesn't factor into it. (However, in some countries purely downloading may generally be legal, but that rules out torrents.)

[pliny]

The default settings on most bittorrent clients will cause you to seed the file you're downloading, so you're distributing unlicensed copies to people in USA or other places where the content is licensed and where piracy is against the law.