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Comment by CaptainZapp | Hacker News Reader

Well, yes. It always was.

Using services like allofmp3.com in Switzerland was and is perfectly legal (if you can find a way to pay for it).

There's a reason for that: Swiss legislators believe that it can not be up to the user of a download site to judge if this site is legit and is licensed to sell downloads to Swiss customers.

This doesn't mean that uploading is allowed. As soon you upload files or even fragments of files you crossed the line into illegality.

The whole "It is very terribly illegal what you're doing here, downloader!" hokum was basically pushed by IFPI and the content industry.

It's a lie (at least in Switzerland).

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Same in the Netherlands, although currently the government is trying to push through legislation that will change all that.

However, the majority of parliament is still against. Hopefully the minority government will think better of forcing the issue.

Unless I'm mistaken this is true in the USA as well. I hate that journalists and even websites like torrentfreak continue to perpetuate this myth. Headlines continue to says things like "Mom sued for downloading music" which isn't true at all.

Slovakia and Czech Republic too. It's not illegal to download copyrighted content, only sharing is. So using rapidshare and all that is perfectly fine. However, torrents and other kinds of p2p (or even hosting ftp) is not.

> This doesn't mean that uploading is allowed.

Wouldn't this effectively make swarm/torrent downloading illegal?

Of course; any kind of peer-to-peer service that actually uploads data you don't have a license to distribute is illegal. But fear not --- the Swiss have a solution for that, too: http://bitthief.ethz.ch/ "BitThief is a free riding BitTorrent client, that is, it downloads from BitTorrent swarms without contributing any resources itself."

This is I think a sensible balance. It recognizes that it is technically impossible to track down all downloaders and sue them, and placing the fault on the uploader is correct.

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