are Donations legal?

[mvp]

i saw someone online and he makes DVDs and uploads them on torrent sites, and he made a Donation site, so people can Donation to him for his work with the DVDs he releases. is that legal? are Donations legal?

[Abond]

Let me understand. Somebody makes DVDs (the abreviation stay for Digital Video Disc - that means the person makes real DISCs of plastic!) - than it is not possible to load it (the disc itself!) on torrent site.
The person load the DVD VIDEO_TS folder as a essential structure element of a DVD.
The person load a video file ripped from a DVD, but it has nothing to do with the disc structure itself.
These are three posibilities.
May I ask you what are the sources (home video or commercial copyrighted video) of the releases he (she) upload?

[mvp]

Let me understand. Somebody makes DVDs (the abreviation stay for Digital Video Disc - that means the person makes real DISCs of plastic!) - than it is not possible to load it (the disc itself!) on torrent site.
The person load the DVD VIDEO_TS folder as a essential structure element of a DVD.
The person load a video file ripped from a DVD, but it has nothing to do with the disc structure itself.
These are three posibilities.
May I ask you what are the sources (home video or commercial copyrighted video) of the releases he (she) upload?

ive never dl any of his stuff, but the name of the torrents are movies "copyrighted" i was wounding since hes not asking for money for the dl, just if you would like to Donation to him. so i would guess thats not legal right?

[gadgetguy]

I'm not a lawyer but as I understand it, you can't legally gain from illegal activity. I don't think it makes any difference if s/he charges or receives donations.

[gll99]

You can't just go by the word "copyrighted" in a title. The content could be anything.

Maybe what he did is find the torrents for videos already posted by others and he is offering those links, pretending he put them there and is asking for donations for providing the links. If he says he made and seeded copyrighted movies and it turns out to be true then he should be easy to trace. If he does not have the distribution rights then he'll get caught pretty quickly since he's identifying himself through the donation account. Why anyone want to donate to someone like this is beyond me.

It may be harder to prosecute someone who just provides the links and not the actual videos but that may depend on his location.