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Comment by Anunayj | Hacker News Reader

So this technically makes piracy legal, as losing as I'm not distributing the material, (or seeding it's torrent).

Not necessarily. The reason why torrent seeding is so perilous is because P2P is a privacy nightmare, not because they forgot to say the word "download" in the law. If you want to sue people who are copying your work, BitTorrent makes it very easy to get enough information to demand dox from an ISP. For a "mere downloading" case to even occur, you first need to compromise (legally, of course) the host of some direct-download site, subpoena their logs, subpoena a bunch of ISPs, get dox from that, and then sue that class of users. Usually at that point the copying has stopped anyway, which is enough to get a copyright owner to back off.

If such a suit were to happen, the argument would probably boil down to where the infringement actually occurred. Does the server infringe when it sends copyrighted material (because that's where the copy is made), or does the client infringe when it requests said material (because they asked for an infringing copy)? Courts might accept both arguments and just decide everyone is liable.

Also all of that is for copyright, which (usually) covers published works. Trade secrets, which cover things not ever intended to be published, would just call both sides guilty of "misappropriating" the trade secret.

IANAL. If you pirate without distribution (so torrents are out of the question) and don't circumvent any DRM mechanisms (cracks, keygens) then I don't think there's a legal basis for a lawsuit.

However, most games and software come with some form of DRM which you need to bypass to pirate them, and that's often banned explicitly in copyright legislation. It is under the American DMCA laws and, as far as I know, under European copyright laws, but your mileage may vary.

But yes, as far as I can tell, if someone shares their Good Old Games setup files with you and you download them, you're not breaking the law (though the person sharing the content obviously is).

Regardless of actual legality, you can still expect a lawsuit if your company pirates software and defending against that usually costs more than actually buying the software.

Downloading a file which contains copyrighted data is creating a copy (you now have that sequence of bits in memory or on disk on a device you control) without the right having been granted, no?

According to the laws I know of, distribution is prohibited but receiving an illegal copy isn't. The server is offering an illegal copy and that is the main problem in most piracy cases. Usually the person who offers the copy has more resources and acts like a central part in the redistribution, so they're the easiest and most profitable targets of lawsuits. I'm sure that was considered when the laws were written.

But again, I don't know the specifics of copyright law where you live. Perhaps your jurisdiction considers the person accepting the offer of an illegal copy to be a criminal as well.

The person running the server is the one who is creating the copy and doing the distribution, not you the user.

Even if you argue that the initial copy of the work in RAM in your network stack was created by the server operator, you're likely to make copies from there: copies in RAM if your network stack is not zero copy; copies to disk if these pages swap; and copies to disk if you save the files.

See e.g. https://scholarship.law.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1602...

Dubious, when the user is the one initiating the copy (by requesting the download) and the one benefiting from the copy.

The right to make copies (reproduce a work) and distribute copies (sharing) are both separately protected by copyright law [1].

[1] https://www.bitlaw.com/copyright/scope.html

thanks! people go after uploaders, who both created a copy and distributed the copy, the downloader is receiving yet another copy and by nature of the technology is "reproducing" simply by how filesystems work but it seems like the uploader is the center of attention

thoughts on that? It seems that enforcing this against a downloader would require every single piece of media have an explicit limited license for downloading, which isn't practical right now

IANAL, but no. You can still get sued.

You can be sued for anything. I could sue you for farting in an elevator.

You have to actually show damages, and nobody is going to care about personal research into obsolete software.

except oracle.

This is the case in Canada, at least.

Switzerland, too.

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