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Comment by res0nat0r

12 years ago

> I think it is in substantial dispute. Can you cite a case of someone in the US being successfully prosecuted for downloading? Note that this precludes bittorrent, gnutella, etc situations where downloading means simultaneously uploading.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Fastlink

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Site_Down

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Buccaneer

Note: Just because I don't have any cases offhand of my friends fined for jaywalking, doesn't mean it isn't against the law.

> Outside of the US there are plenty of countries where it has been made explicit in the law that downloading is OK. Some even going so far as to include the uploading portion of torrenting, etc as legal too.

I don't know much about the Dutch law, but it is supplemented by a 'piracy tax', ie, storage devices are more expensive to purchase among other things.

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res0nat0r

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Amadou  12 years ago

Note: Just because I don't have any cases offhand of my friends fined for jaywalking, doesn't mean it isn't against the law.

That's putting your arguments into the realm of faith. If those three citations are any indication, your faith is misplaced. All of those were for people doing distribution (e.g. uploading). None of them were for downloading.

I don't think it is much to ask for you to have just one definite case to back up your claim that the legality of downloading is not in dispute. Just one.

Here's one for jaywalking: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/radley-balko/raquel-nelson-jai...

  • tedunangst  12 years ago

    Somehow there's this weird gap where people completely freak out over the difference between stealing and copying, but the difference between uploading and downloading just slides right by.