Hacker News Reader

Comment by dave4420 | Hacker News Reader

You have to follow the provenance.

If I own Queen’s Greatest Hits on CD, I can rip that, encode it to MP3/AAC/FLAC/whatever, copy it between my laptop/desktop/phone. That’s fine.

If you also own Queen’s Greatest Hits on CD, then… I cannot give you any of those files, because they have ultimately come from my CD, not from your CD. Even though the bits are identical. The provenance matters. You have the right to use the copies from your CD. You do not have the right to use the copies from my CD, even though the bits are the same.

View on HN

Even that may not be legal, at least in the US, if there's any copy protection at all. Audio CDs probably aren't copy protected, but any commercial DVD would be. So the mere act of breaking the CSS protection is illegal, even for personal home use. The RIAA spent a lot of time and money enforcing that.

Outside of the US, saner jurisdictions may prevail.

I'm sure this isn't a valid legal interpretation, but when I see:

> No person shall circumvent a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work protected under this title.

Then I say to myself, if I can bypass the technological measure, it doesn't effectively control access to the work, so it's fine. Especially when they later say

> Nothing in this section shall affect rights, remedies, limitations, or defenses to copyright infringement, including fair use, under this title.

Time shifting, format shifting, and space shifting are all established as fair use in case law; so I don't feel bad about circumventing ineffective controls to a protected work to enable my fair use of the work.

IMHO, electronic distribution without authorization is a clear no, and obtaining a copy through unauthorized distribution is also a clear no. But I'm flexible if the original media is defective. And I'll pretend I didn't see it for things like the Despecialized Editions of Star Wars.

Ok, so as long as the user itself, or someone else on their behalf, makes 100% copy and store it locally at the user its ok as I read it?

Then next step is that the user can put all those GB on their own Dropbox (not shared). But what Dropbox can do is to do hash-check of the files and only keep one file of all those hundres of compies. Synced to cloud.

Still only the users copy and they can access it at home, just at a fraction of the cost for storing the copy.

I don't know where the parent is located, but in the US at least none of this matters. It doesn't matter if it's a bit perfect copy. It matters that you don't have the copyright in the first place.

At some point you need to stop asking people on the internet and start asking a good copyright lawyer in your jurisdiction.

But then they need to prove that the mp3 are from your cd and not mine, right?

The same for the dvd, he could have created the copy from his own?

I’d say if you’re caught torrenting it, you’ve essentially demonstrated that it’s not a derivative of your physical copy. At least by the standard of a civil case.

Is it illegal to torrent files to /dev/null?

Because you guys found a different copy, not the one I torrented.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com