Comment by contravariant

> something like setting a 1 byte per second cap on uploads

You generally can't set a client to 0B/s (as zero usually means “no limit”) but I'm not sure a good¹ lawyer on the other side would let you get away with claiming glacial distribution is not still distribution. At 1Kbyte/sec (I don't know a client off the top of my head that has control down to the single byte) a 50MByte file (not unusual for a book with illustrations/photos) can be transferred in less than 15 hours, a couple of Mbyte (a plain text book, compressed or just short) in less than one hour.

There are clients that can be set to not seed at all, or you could patch a common client that way. Some that don't even offer the capability at all (some command-line wget-style tools), that would be a legally safest option IMO².

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[1] good as in good at their job, no moral judgement implied!

[2] caveat: not a lawyer, never played one on TV, nor even in local am-dram.

> This is why you often see people getting fines for torrenting (Germany is extremely notorious for this for example), but fines for using Usenet, IPTV, streaming or book download services are a lot more rare (which doesn't mean they're nonexistent)!

It’s a lot easier to find out who is torrenting than to find out who is using Usenet for example though.

With torrents you can see the IP addresses of peers. And then I suppose they ask a court to tell the ISP to say which customer had that IP addresses at that time.

With Usenet you’d have to get a court to get each Usenet provider to give you a list of all customers that downloaded a file. That seems a little bit different to me.

And who knows, in the case of the torrents maybe they don’t always even need to get a court involved. With all of the data brokers out there, maybe there are lists you can buy of real people tied to different IP addresses and when you have a match you send a threatening letter telling them to pay up or they will take you to court?

Downloading used to be legal here. Now it is explicitly not anymore. Because why not if you can squeeze some extra money from end users who would have never bought your item for the insane prices asked.

> "distribution is the act protected by copyright" was the rule all along in many (non-US) jurisdictions, not an American so not sure about how the US does things.

I am pretty sure this is false. It is just that distribution carries heavier sentences and is easier to discover, not unlike with drug dealing.

It is not legal, anywhere, to (for example) borrow a DVD from someone, copy it, and give the original back. In some jurisdictions you have a right to backups, and a right to resale, but you emphatically do not have a right to privately copy.

Sorry, I may be missing something. Can you please clarify:

>you often see people getting fines for torrenting

>fines for using [...] are a lot more rare

Are you saying something kind of like, "When you torrent, you are also distributing that copyrighted information, which is often prosecuted, but simply procuring that information (without redistribution) is not." Or is it something different?

For example: in America, it is completely legal to buy, sell, and own a radar detector. Radar detectors are used to "detect" when the police use radar to catch speeding motorists. In spite of it being legal to own a radar detector, it is illegal to actively use a radar detector for its intended purpose. There are various reasons I have heard for this, but the most common was that the components of the device itself is not illegal, and picking up those signals are not illegal (because they are targeted at the public) but the reason and intent to use one is to commit a crime, and the use of a device in the assistance of committing an offense (speeding) is illegal. It's this kind of weird grey area, where you can possess the thing, but can't use it for the reason you (likely) bought it for.

Is it kind of like that? Like, you can possess copyrighted material that you have not paid for (for whatever justification), but actively sharing that copyrighted material without authorization, is criminal? If so, does that mean that lots of Germans simply don't seed illegal torrents?

Are there cases in Germany who went through until the end?

In France despite a hefty budget, the org in charge (HADOPI) was so bad they merged it with another one and I think it os over now.

The US Constitution grants congress the power to give authors and inventors time-limited exclusive rights to their works/discoveries (Art1.S8.C8). This moots the 1st amendment argument.

https://constitution.congress.gov/browse/article-1/section-8...

A bit off-topic, but I always thought it was "funny" how americans are so opposed to censorship but are perfectly OK with advertising and other forms of propaganda (from social media editorializing, bought newspapers...), that arguably do much more to "control men's minds" than censorship ever would.

It just fuels my personal theory that americans only reason in positive liberty (freedom to...) and never in negative liberty (freedom from...).

I would expect it to be argued by defendants that since no man (or indeed woman) at Meta actually read the books that were torrented, the First Amendment does not apply here. The question is: does the First Amendment apply to an algorithm?

In some jurisdictions (e.g. Germany) "copyright" belongs exclusively to the author/creator and is non-transferrable, the German word for "copyright" (Urheberrecht) also literally translates to "author's right"). So instead of transferring copyright to an entity (e.g. the employer) you only grant an "exclusive, transferrable and unrestricted" license to that entity, essentially prohibiting you from using it without their permission while technically still retaining that right. This is also why CC0 exists as a substitute for a public domain declaration because in these jurisdictions it is literally impossible to transfer your copyright to the public domain.

In Germany copyright law there is actually one provision for the real transfer of copyright: death. So as far as copyright is concerned, the transfer of copyright requires literally death of the author - which might get a chuckle out of people into media studies.

They are called "authorship rights" in Polish. While the right to distribute or make copies doesn't aleways belong to the author they always originate from author. And some are even non transferable or revocable, like the right to say "I, <my chosen name>, made this thing"

Works fine in Dutch law really, you just have to allow for the option that a company can be an author. A work could also have multiple authors.

I prefer it to a name that's more accurate because it signals what the purpose of the law is, which I consider more important than its implementation.

Now that I think of it that also works quite well when naming things in software. Don't name things after their implementation, when you can help it.

I think the equivalent is called author's right in civil law countries

With Musk in the White House (who has similar interests) that might actually happen.

The word “copy” in the early 1700s when copyright was codified in law meant both a written text and a reproduction of a written text. The meaning you’re using, of text at an intermediate stage of a publishing process, is much later, 19th century. [0] So, the original meaning was a noun (the right to make “a copy” of a book) but meant the book itself, not the abstract text of the book. It would be interesting to research whether there were any rulings in that period about hand-copying a book, which was the only alternative to printing it.

Nowadays of course copyright covers much more than text, and includes such “copies” as the public performance of a theatrical work or reproduction of a sculpture, so the modern copyright clearly doesn’t have the meaning you’re using.

[0] https://www.grammarphobia.com/blog/2013/08/copy.html

Any proof that the word copyright was intentionally referring to the noun instead of the verb? The British Statute of Anne in 1710, the first copyright statute, definitely referred to the act of copying a book, not some abstract concept of writing samples.

This sounds completely false to me. Do you have a reference for it?

In particular, the original Statute of Anne (the first law establishing a copyright) is officially titled:

> An Act for the Encouragement of Learning, by Vesting the Copies of Printed Books in the Authors or Purchasers of Copies, during the Times therein mentioned

No doubt people used the word "copy" in the sense you mean, but "copy" in "copyright" is absolutely about copying as in copying some data.

I always thought that ad copy also came from copy as in copy some data. Like it's the words that get copied when the media is replicated for distribution, as opposed to words that are for some internal communication purpose.

that's not true. the term for works for hire is 95 years from creation https://www.copyright.gov/help/faq/faq-duration.html

Sweden is always an edge case - education especially. It’s got a population of 10 million people. My metroplex area in DFW has half that with 75% more diversity. Sweden is cool but a terrible reference point for anything other than homogeneous social studies.

That’s my understanding as well. Duplicating the bytes of a file when you don’t have the rights to the content is technically infringement and grounds for an infringement claim, and then you have to explain in court why it’s “fair use.”

> Man, that's such an ignorant type of thing to say. Copy does not only mean the act of making a duplicate. Copy also means the words/text directly. Terms like copy editor refer to those that make edits to the copy=>words/text, not those that make edits to the duplicates. Maybe you are unfamiliar with the use of the word in that manner, but that's not the rest of the world's problem. That's a limited knowledge problem on your end.

Do you think freedom of the press involves the right to make any kind of juice you want?