Comment by tempfile
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.
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.