Comment by miki123211
9 months ago
"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.
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)!
Operating / selling / promoting those services is a different matter, and most sensationalist articles about "people fined for IPTV piracy" are actually about people involved with that businesss, not the users.
I even remember reading about some (European) torrenting case that was successfully defended on the grounds of something like setting a 1 byte per second cap on uploads, but I can't find the source right now.
> 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.
> You generally can't set a client to 0B/s
It depends on client, it is possible in e.g. transmission
> I'm not sure a good¹ lawyer on the other side would let you get away with claiming
Fortunately that’s not how courts work.
I’m not familiar with the case, but it’s possible setting a 1 byte per second limit showed intent to not distribute.
It’s also possible that setting a 1 byte per second limit showed they were aware what they were doing was illegal.
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In the context of a book, that could still be seeding a book every few hours..
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It isn't worth my time or risk to test it myself, but if you disable seeding will Warner Media still send a notice to your ISP? If you set your client to 0B/s I assume it's still broadcasting hashes. I suppose if you disable that function entirely in your client there would be nothing to see.
I guess some people may be worried about actual fines, but I would assume the biggest risk to most people is getting blocked by your ISP, which in many cases requires less than the legal standard for proof of copyright infringement.
The contractors whose job is collecting lists of people downloading films generally make sure to download at least a viewable clip of the film direct from your client so it could be shown in court. "Yes, your honor, here is the evidence we retrieved direct from the defendant".
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It's an interesting case.
Most commonly used clients won't let you turn off seeding, but you can indeed limit the upstream to a really low value. You can also, at the same time, seed a ton of different things, preferably quite large, to saturate your upload and make it statistically improbable to fully send a copy of any single file.
Now, based on my feeling and cases I've seen in my country I'd say that the judge would make a claim that the sheer fact of making these files available is enough.
Moreover, there were rulings stating that even if you don't have the whole torrent on your disk, but only few fragments you are already in violation.
For me, it make sense, as when a company gets caught red handed they are judged based on the inventory of stolen programs they have, not an actual usage of them.
Lastly, here in an european country, consuming pirated media (books, movies, music, etc.) is not a crime. However there are plenty of caveats:
- you can't share it, so torrenting, as mentioned, might be illegal; getting a copy of a movie on a hard drive from a friend only puts him in jepardy
- it has to be personal use, so watching it alone or with your wife is ok, but playing stolen music in a club is not; commercial use is strictly forbiden ("commercial" as in "commercial licence", so usage in context of a company, so facebook case here is strictly in violation)
- it has to be a media that's already been published somewhere (cinema, television, streaming service); pirating leaks and prereleases is strictly forbiden
- pirating software is whole different animal, since now it's not a copyright, but a breach of licence agreement
You can think about it as owning a tiny portion of "soft drugs" (like marijuana), which is legal in some countries. Selling is not.
> pirating software is whole different animal, since now it's not a copyright, but a breach of licence agreement
How can that be true? There is no way for me a breach a license agreement without being party to the agreement.
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I haven't really seen this point made elsewhere, but as I understand one of the more salient features of bittorrent is that peers are actively sharing the portions of a file they have downloaded. "Seeding" only refers to those who have the entire file and continue to share it, but all peers who are downloading the file are generally sharing the pieces of it they have while the rest downloads.
They could throttle their upload bandwidth, but if they were doing that to the extent that they could plausibly argue they hadn't distributed any of the content, I think they would have said so, and I think it would be a stronger argument than using lingo to merely suggest it (especially when the lingo doesn't imply what they say it does).
transmission-cli -u 0 <url>
This. It can be easily done in the GUIs as well (Don't ask how I know).
I don't know where GP got the idea that you can't set a client to 0B/s. All the clients I am aware of support setting the seeding rate.
Booooooo don't leech without seeding. Share a little at minimal risk
> 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?
This process of checking seeding peers to reporting an IP to an ISP to them send a user a nastygram is pretty automated. Torrent a Nintendo game (not even that new of one) and you will get an ISP nastygram within minutes.
I've heard.
Germany is wild. You will get a knock on your door within hours of firing up a torrent client
Not sure if this is just misinformed, or anti-Germany/EU propaganda? Either way, not true.
In Germany, if you torrent something without protection of a VPN, you may receive a letter from a blood-sucking legal firm within a week or two, with a fine that can be argued down somewhat.
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Huh, what in the world are you talking about.
If you’re torrenting and you happen to get caught, you will receive a letter from some copyright lawyer with a fine of X amount as well as a cease and desist.
The only knock on your door is the mail delivery man
What? No, you will not. You could get fined for seeding some popular stuff, but even then no one is knocking on your door, it'll probably come in the form of a letter, and even then it's not a guarantee.
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BS
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.
With "here", you mean Germany? Are you sure? Last time I looked into these things (granted, in 2022 or so), seemed to me that for example using Stremio with a torrent add-on would risk a fine in Germany, but using a Debrid service (that torrents in your name and you just do a direct download like e.g. is done in Youtube) would be free of risks or legal threats. I'm not in Germany though, so I didn't research it much further. Just out of curiosity.
When and where? This does not sound true for any jurisdiction I know about.
> "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.
> 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.
If the DVD doesn't have strong DRM (which is pretty rare, CSS counts as strong DRM) you are allowed to make a private copy in Finland. There is a levy on various storage mediums to compensate private copying. I believe there are similar laws in other countries based on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_copying_levy
I'm not 100% sure if strictly downloading from illegal source makes downloader liable for damages, as far as I know in all court cases there was seeding involved (in Finland).
Of course the levy is somewhat questionable these days since pretty much everything has strong DRM (as bar is very low) and thus you are not allowed to make copies. The authors who protect their work with strong DRM still get part of the levies though.
Canada has (had?) something similar. Once the movie and music industry got a significant tax levied on recordable media (flash cards, optical media, etc.) pirating became defacto legal.
At least this is what some Canadians explained to me once.
Huh, you are absolutely right. I think I knew about the private copying levy but didn't consider it when writing my original comment.
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.