This is what I heard and experienced. Is the guy above just making shit up?

It's absolutely illegal in the USA to download a movie (or game, or song, or book, etc) that you haven't bought [0].

It could be argued that if you bought a movie, say on DVD, downloading another copy of it from an online source could fall under fair use, but this is more debatable.

[0] https://legalclarity.org/is-pirating-movies-illegal-what-are...

I am not aware of a single example of someone getting successfully sued for downloading a movie. Every lawsuit that I’m aware of (even going back to the Napster days) people got sued for sharing content using p2p software. The current lawsuit robots download a torrent and then wait for individual IPs to upload some chunk of a copyrighted file to them, which they then use as proof of somebody sharing copyrighted material for their complaint.

Even the Protecting Lawful Streaming Act of 2020 explicitly does not punish consumers of copyrighted content, only its distributors.

>Tillis stated that the bill is tailored to specifically target the websites themselves, and not "those who may use the sites nor those individuals who access pirated streams or unwittingly stream unauthorized copies of copyrighted works"

There are so many paragraphs in response to my “You can’t get in trouble for downloading movies in the US” post and none of them have any examples of people getting in trouble for downloading movies in the US.