Comment by ferdek | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ferdek | Hacker News Reader

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I believe the way you put it describes this part in the DMCA takedown notice the best way possible. Bringing up European laws on intellectual property and mixing it with US "copyright" is comical to me, especially after reading this [0] article on French law recently:

> France doesn’t have copyright. Sorry for US readers, your “copyright” is nonsense that doesn’t apply here, though the word “copyright” can be seen misused verbatim once in a while.

I believe this interpretation of "copyright" is all similar around Europe. US copyright law is all about "right to make copies", be it software or music/video and it just doesn't make any sense on the other side of the globe.

In the country where I live I can purchase a music or video file and legally make unlimited copies for my personal use. It is also legal to download it from any other source as long as I can prove that I paid for it some time ago in the past. Torrents are illegal as the protocol forces me to share the file, and sharing part is illegal. Downloading is fine xD.

[0] https://thehftguy.com/2020/09/15/french-judge-rules-gpl-lice...

There may be significant differences between US and EU copyright laws, but the anti-circumvention laws in question here are pretty consistent, as they implement the WIPO Copyright Treaty ratified by both the US and the EU: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-circumvention

Then I wonder if level of security a given anti-circumvention technology implements matters in the EU.

See, I strongly believe (and heard of such cases in the past) that where I live, if I "hacked" into a computer system which had administrator password set as "admin123" and the owner sued me, he would be laughed at at the court and I was let free. And I believe in the US I would be convicted for computer crime.

Isn't it the same here? If Youtube's anti-circumvention tech whatever it is that DMCA compliant refers to is so weak that source code how to circumvent it is in the wild for years and Youtube does nothing to address it, isn't it theirs fault? :shrug:

We're both IANALs, but it is interesting to put it into perspective that the same sentences that makes laws mean something totally different in practice on two sides of the globe due to cultural differences and/or origins of given laws.

> Torrents are illegal

I assume this only applies to "copyrighted" content? Is it illegal to torrent a Linux distro or some such thing?

Either way, this seems much more reasonable than the US's current system.

Sorry for not being clear enough. It's not that torrents as protocol are illegal. So yes, it is totally legal to distribute any content you have rights to distribute, such as Linux distros, creative commons material, you name it.

It would also be legal for you to share a music file to, for instance, your friend who lost it's original copy but already paid for the song. You simply can't redistribute the song on massive scale to people who didn't buy it, so that's torrenting weakness here. Also, the personal connections between you and the downloading party matters in determining if this was fair/"personal use".

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