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Comment by panarky | Hacker News Reader

> for purposes of commercial advantage or private financial gain, offer or provide to the public a digital transmission service that

If it's a peer-to-peer streaming service where media consumers also serve media to other users, then the argument could be made that users themselves are providing the "digital transmission service".

There may not even be an identifiable, centralized "platform".

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> has no commercially significant purpose or use other than to publicly perform works protected

This seems tailored to kill PopcornTime.

You could use PopcornTime for showing copyright-free videos, they exist

The fact that one has to point out that they exist at all, is indicative of how popular or significant they are on that platform.

Or how popular they are NOT depending on your viewpoint

That's why it says commercially significant.

Isn't PopcornTime free software, which means it has no commercially significant anything? Or is it meant to be read has no (commercially significant purpose) or (use)?

PopcornTime definitely has a commercially significant purpose, even if it’s free: it provides unrestricted access to large amounts of copyrighted material that has undisputed commercial value.

But is that "digital transmission service" run "for purposes of commercial advantage or private financial gain"? I agree with your theory, but not sure why you removed the qualifier from your theory. This seems more targeted to PopcornTime than bittorrent

Getting media for free is "private financial gain".

how so? you don't gain financially by receiving free media in any form, at best you avoid a monetary cost.

You're getting something that you'd otherwise have to pay for. That is legally considered a financial gain, even if it doesn't hold up to pedantic linguistic scrutiny. Legal definitions are often different to everyday language.

In Germany that is already the case. Streaming is "ok" here for the consumer whereas torrenting is illegal and practically dead by now. The legal argument is that you are distributor when using peer to peer. Under German law it doesn't matter if that is done for profit or not.

Could this be used to make torrenting a felony then? In the case that you're sharing a commercial work, obviously. You sharing a torrent is essentially you providing a service (being in the swarm, sending chunks), which exists entirely and only to infringe one or several copyrighted works (the files in the torrent).

The prosecution might need to demonstrate that you knew you were serving copyrighted works to others.

Your defense might be that you thought you were only a user, not a dealer with intent to distribute.

And then the prosecution will enter this HN comment into evidence, proving that you knew exactly what you were doing.

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