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Comment by not_your_vase | Hacker News Reader

Depends on the jurisdiction where you live.

In many European countries it is legal what you describe. In other European countries you don't even have to own the DVD-Blu-ray, as long as you store the "backup" on a storage medium that you bought in that country (there are pirate-taxes added to storage medium prices that are distributed to copyright holders, kind of legalizing movie and music piracy). One thing though: uploading is considered criminal even in these countries (e.g. the downloading part of torrent is OK, seeding even a byte is a big no-no)

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Not thinking about upload to make it available, just as a cheaper way of backup and access to what you already own.

As a private person, you can totally do that in many places (but not everywhere, of course). Building a business around it sounds sketchy - even a non-profit. In the moment any money is exchanged, no lawyer will be happy to take the case.

But as long as you do it as a private person for your own private use, you can get away with it at many places. (Maybe you noticed that these news about "billy torrented a spongebob episode, and has to pay now a quadrillion moneyz" always come from the same country. In Europe the distribution chain is being chased - torrent site admins, cinema-camera teams, content hosts... but usually not the end-users.)

Of course IANAL. Do your research too - especially because this is really dependent on the country where you are.

Seeding 11000111 is a no no?

It's even crazier than that: Some numbers are illegal to redistribute, because they represent a way to break some copyright, e.g. https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~dst/DeCSS/Gallery/Stego/birkmier-pri... (from https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~dst/DeCSS/Gallery/Stego/index.html)

Also see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DeCSS and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illegal_number

Did not know that, interesting

On one hand it makes no sense because "it's just a number, like 12345, how can you copyright that". But because of digital encodings, any content can be represented as a string of numbers. If we really go down that reductionist route, if numbers can't be copyrighted, then nothing could be copyrighted...

I'm ok with that, personally, but the rightsholders aren't, lol.

It also (interestingly enough, I guess) means that an online random number generator will occasionally produce illegal output because some of those numbers will translate into DMCA circumvention devices. Crazy world we live in where the law can't even catch up to the issues of 3 decades ago, much less today's.

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