If you like watching movies on your computer, you now have another option for buying legal downloads: BitTorrent. The company, which was once notorious as an outlet for downloading illegal content, just launched BitTorrent Entertainment Network. The peer-to-peer network will offer legal downloads of movies and TV shows from the following major studios: Twentieth Century Fox, Warner, Lionsgate, Paramount/MTV and MGM. BitTorrent faces competition from Amazon, Apple through iTunes and the recently launched Wal-Mart download service. Amazon and Wal-Mart currently offer downloads from the same studios as BitTorrent, plus both have Sony/Universal and Wal-Mart has Disney; iTunes offers only Disney and Paramount entertainment.

BitTorrent Entertainment Network is offering limited-time downloads for movies ranging from $2.99 - $3.99, which is comparable to video-store rentals. You don't own the download permanently, though -- apparently the studios wanted to charge more money for buying downloads than BitTorrent felt was reasonable. And it's Windows only, with DRM protection and requiring Windows Media Player, so Mac and Linux users are left out in the cold. The company is betting that online viewers would rather pay for high-quality downloads than illegally obtain crummy bootlegs for free. I'm a little skeptical, myself -- I'd pay the $3.99 because I'm a big chicken about illegal downloading, but I suspect I'm not a typical BitTorrent user. What do you think?

A software-based company in San Francisco has released a new program that can censor DVDs on the fly. It uses an online movie database of existing "safe cuts," or you can upload your own. Their player then uses these cuts to generate a "cutlist," which plays the movie according to that list in real-time, effectively censoring it. This process does not create or leave behind a hard copy of the altered film, it edits everything in the background, splicing together a new version of the film as you watch it, leaving you with the original movie intact after viewing.

This differs from an earlier lawsuit against a company called CleanFlicks which was upheld in court because it was decided that they caused "irreparable injury to the creative artistic expression in the copyrighted movies," by actually taking your DVD, and creating a "clean" copy of it with all the sex and profanity edited out. Basically, they sent you a duplicate that they created, with none of the bad stuff in it, meaning they physically alter the original movie content on the actual media.

Another company, ClearPlay, provides a similar service through a standalone DVD player that has filters built in to screen out portions of the movie the viewer finds objectionable. Since they don't change the movie itself, they have been safe from lawsuits, so far.

You know that big announcement that Apple's Steve Jobs is scheduled to make this afternoon? Our friend C.K. Sample over at The Unofficial Apple Weblog is speculating that the new big roll out has nothing to do with the new Mac tablet or iPod Video, or any other new hardware gadget caught in the web of hopeful rumor. C.K. says, "The announcement is going to be all about movies coming to the iTMS."

He's got three bits of evidence. First, iTunes used New Music Tuesday to debut a batch of Oscar nominated short films in the Music Store; second, the people who usually get tipped off when Apple debuts new hardware (like Kevin Rose of Digg) seem to have no such edge this week; and lastly, there's this article from CNN Money, by Owen Thomas of Business 2.0. Thomas sites Jobs' buddy-buddy relationship with Disney, the sucess of the iTunes TV show business, and the relatively short-notice nature of these procedings, as reasons to believe that "Apple might go Hollywood".

What do you think about this? The TUAW readers, as usual, take C.K.'s provocation and run with it, and I think the very first two comments on the post are on to something. "Oscars are this week also, a perfect time to roll out some advertisements," writes Ryan Meyers. "I really hope this happens, been waiting for this forever. Instant-cinema." Not everyone is so excited: LD writes: "Would be a shame if it's just movies. I don't want to watch movies on an iPod and without a "media center" type of solution I can't really watch on my 50" plasma, not to mention the quality is crap from iTMS." As C.K. points out, Ryan Block from our big brother Engadget was one of the select members of the press invited down to the Cupertino event. It all leads me to believe that Jobs might not just be rolling out new content – he might also have a new kind of hardware for us to play it on.

The announcement goes down around 10 AM PST/1 PM EST. We'll be watching Engadget and TUAW's live coverage with bated breath.

Back in December, Karina reported on a vote by the French Parliament, sneaking in passing an amendment that would legalize downloads of music and movies for a flat fee. The amendment would have had users pay a flat tax to their ISP, which would then distribute the funds to an umbrella organization set up to disburse artists' royalties. Sounds -pretty cool, n'est-ce pas? Yeah, well, don't start packing that French-Engtish dictionary and other worldly possessions into your carry-on duffel bag just yet. Seems that  little vote back in December has really raised the ire of Gallic politicians and media industry folk. The media industry's take? Shockingly enough, they oppose the move to make downloads more freely accessible, claiming the flat tax wouldn't appropriately reimburse them for their "investment in the recording industry".

Even within political parties, folks can't seem to agree on what to do, though according to Variety, one deputy from President Jacques Chirac's party recently expressed support for the amendment, comparing the issue of pirated downloads to trying to stop people drinking alcohol during Prohibition. Interesting, given Chirac's stance on wanting tough laws to protect copyright - wonder if that deputy is now out of a job? At any rate, it's back in the hands of the politicians, and if French politics are anything like US politics, that means the likelihood  of consensus on the issue in the near future is pretty much nil. So might as well resume your regularly scheduled illegal downloading - hah! hah!  - just kidding! We at Cinematical would never encourage anyone to do anything illegal, even in France.

Cable network Starz! has just announced that they'll partner with Microsoft and Sony to form Vongo, a legal, pay-for-play movie download service. For a $9.99 service fee per month, Vongo users will obtain unlimited access to a rotating 1,000 film library, likely culled from Starz! current catalog. They'll be able to watch those downloads at any time on a PC or portable media device (presumably that means iPods, PSPs, etc), and will be able to download "new releases" (theatrical features will be available for download after a six month window) for $3.99 apiece. Though the service will obviously draw instant comparisons to the iTunes Music Store, which just started selling television shows for $1.99 an episode with a one day window, to VOD services like GreenCine and Movielink, and to traditional models of television-based pay-per-view, Vongo would seem to go beyond old methods of delivery in terms of its breadth of content alone. But that six month window seems terribly wide, doesn't it? Especially considering that, with the backing of Microsoft and Sony, Vongo will undoubtedly be marketed to PSP and Xbox-rocking gamers. Bill Gates is expected to expand on the deal and the concept in his CES keynote this week.