That something is effectively public domain does not make it legal to use. This movie was in a thousand torrents, yet one gets still sued for uploading a kilobyte of it.
That it is hard or impossible to know if it is legal to use does not mean it is ok to do so. You need a source for the license that is able to compensate you for the damages you incur in case their license was invalid.
I'm not happy about either of these points, but that's how it is currently and just closing your eyes and hoping it will go away won't work.
So the world is just ignoring the legality of accessing the material in the way that they did?
Man, I wish as a human I could use the defense of "but it was publicly accessible in a torrent" as a valid reason that I acquired and consumed some content.
This sounds a lot like you're suggesting downloading copyrighted works is acceptable, and that only the uploaders have done anything wrong. Regardless how you and I feel about that sentiment, I assure you Hollywood feels and sues differently...
The MPAA has a clear opinion about uploading your ripped content, even to someone who doesn't give it to somebody else. The MPAA would still say both copies of The Dark Knight are illegal. (Note that this is not exactly what assistantpilot said; I tweaked it on purpose since I can be more definitive, and it's relevant to the original link. You are also free to disagree with their assessment. I do, but I wouldn't care to argue it in court.)
However, the poor choice of example doesn't negate the underlying point. Bits don't have color [1], and in general just because Alice shouldn't have a file in her cloud file store doesn't mean that there is nobody who does have the right to put the exact same file in the cloud store. There's no way to tell.
In some ways that's the worst part of SOPA from a philosophical point of view.... what the law essentially demands isn't even possible. It is not possible for Google to look at a file and tell if it is legal or not. They can make some guesses, but on Internet scale they can't know, yet the law requires them to know, then act, or face the consequences. This is not possible, neither in theory nor in practice. Laws that require the impossible are just obscured tyranny.
That's not necessarily true. Anyone can copy and distribute movies right now, but you need permission to do it. If you don't have that permission, you're taking the risk of being on the wrong end of legal action. Sure, it's not perfect, but it does have a restraining effect and, more importantly, it provides an avenue for recourse.
A similar thing could be done for scraping images and doing face recognition. It only takes the political will.
I can wrap my mind around idea of licensing just fine. That in no way means I agree with current one-sided state of affairs in copyright law.
I also don't see why did you bring torrenting into the debate - do you consider me sharing am movie to my friend from my iPad to his a crime? Is that the same as torrenting? Or why am I prevented from doing that due to DRM?
Correct, but perhaps after this ends, MegaUpload could return the legitimate files. I don't expect the government to do the same. And I very, very much do not expect the MPAA to do the same.
Sure, but you have to admit the arguments in this article are really flimsy right?
You don’t think it’s a bit ironic to mention “This is the same tired argument we’ve seen with things like BitTorrent”, when the media empires of the world have proved they can, and have, and will indubitably continue to make a) people to write offending software (eg. Winny) and b) people who use that software liable for using it to infringe on their intellectual property.
Wanting that not to be true because it would be nice if it wasn’t true is unbelievably trite and superficial as an argument, when in the examples given it’s been proved that people can and will make it so, legally, it is.
Whatever you believe regarding freedom and intellectual property, it’s irritating to see a parade of weak arguments about it.
You have a funny sense of logic then. Isn't it possible to be consensual in some cases and not in others?
If I said "In some cases it is legal to download a video and in some cases it is not", would you call that "never legal to download a video"? The fact that I can't legally download a movie currently in the theater shouldn't affect me from legally downloading a video licensed under a creative commons license.
"A person has no idea that they are violating the copyright of copyright holder X when they download the file."
And this is my whole point.
Everyone knows the correct way to get copyrighted content from the internet. You use iTunes, or Amazon's MP3 service, or NetFlix, or Hulu, or any number of services. Everyone also knows that when you get a legal copy of a copyrighted work there will be a 'payment' or a 'subscription' involved.
Naive people (I choose not to use the pejorative 'stupid' in this case) should know that any downloading of a copyrighted work which doesn't involve a subscription, or a fee, is nearly always illegal. This sort of action might train them with this fact.
Can you share information which is CC licensed or out of copyright or public domain? Absolutely. And I don't believe Titan Media or anyone else would be successful in pursuing someone by 'tricking' them with a filename that would otherwise be legitimate.
They could certainly try to sue you but any lawyer could move for a dismissal based on the clients beleif that the material was what it said it was, and deleted it immediately when they discovered it was not. There is no way to prove any sort of intent to violate copyright that way. Look of the case of Tracy Lords and her underage pornos where the buyer wasn't liable for child porn because she had represented to the production company and the production company had represented to the customer that everyone in the production was of legal age.
So if this educates a few thousand people that trying to get free copies of copyrighted stuff over the Internet is illegal and to stop trying (that would the educating the naive part) then its a good thing.
Well, large corporations using political influence to extend copyright terms effectively forever to prevent works from ever entering the public domain against the express intent of the Founders (at least in the U.S.) aren't exactly the white knights in this story either.
Look, I'm a filmmaker. I believe in copyright (for limited terms), and I believe in using the law as a mechanism to enforce the interests of copyright holders. But making it a crime to link to a page that contains unlicensed material is going way too far IMHO.
(BTW, the sleaze and malware make pretty effective deterrents for the general public to use the PB. You may have noticed that Hollywood is still in business despite the fact that the PB is still operating.)
There are certainly legitimate uses for tools like y-dl. Those using online services for marketing purposes -which include copyrighted material- must be required to reach an agreement with those services to flag the status of those materials in a way that's transparent to software.
If I stream a file for an hour, I tie up a bunch of network resources for an hour. If I can legitimately DL that in 2 minutes, I'm using less net resources for a shorter time. Why in the hell should that be denied because some material is not in the public domain? Completely illogical result.
I watch a lot of long-playing material (I think is non-copyright but WTF do I know?) that I DL to timeshift and watch offline in chunks as time allows. Is that music concert from Poland that's up on Youtube copyrighted? That amateur history/science/education channel that asks for Patreon help? Screw RIAA (again)
You are correct about naming of laws, but it doesn't necessarily make my point invalid.
I would believe that inviting a friend over to watch a movie is legal is because the copyright holders allow it under the license you agreed to as part of the transaction. They would most likely be within their current rights to restrict such a thing but I seriously doubt a court would agree with it.
In most cases ripping a DVD is most likely illegal in the United States as it is illegal in most cases to bypass any security measure to prevent copying. This has been covered under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, but I am not familiar with any recent adjustments they have made to that law.
Downloading a copy of a movie under a torrent is illegal not because of the download, but the uploads of you seeding the file. I believe this has been established in the courts.
With all your examples, regardless of the material involved, can be perceived as theft under copyright protections if the copyright holder wishes to pursue it as such. Just because they allow some behaviors that may be seen as a detriment to them in some way, most likely it is not, doesn't mean that suddenly all behaviors are moral and legal.
The defenses I see of the idea that copyright infringement is ok and not really a crime is dependent over complicating the matter. It also requires stretching the definitions of commonly used words which has clear meanings throughout various cultures. I admittedly take a simplistic view of the matter and many may not agree, which I'm fine with.
I create a song. You wish to listen to the song. I want a dollar from you for this transaction to happen. You give me a dollar and you get a copy of the song. I have gained a dollar and you have gained the right to listen to the song. The opposite of that is you do not pay the dollar and copy the song illegally. I have been deprived of the dollar I am due and you have gained the ability to listen to the song. It could also be argued you have also gained the dollar that you were supposed to give to me in the transaction. That is the simple matter of why I consider it theft.
If the copyright holder was giving out the material without financial gain but with specific restrictions and one violated the restrictions, then I would say that is copyright violation that is not theft. But if the copyright holder expects monetary compensation as part of the agreement to let you consume the material and does not get it? That is theft.
Surely the MPAA are on the hook for this. It doesn't matter if they bought it legitimately as they'd still be infringing - in the same way the MPAA can claim that your download of a torrent of a movie [made by employees of one of the companies it represents] is infringing despite the torrent site not having informed you that it's not a legally acquired work.
If the argument "we didn't know" works for them then surely that sets precedent for everyone else. If it doesn't work then damages of 10¢ for every instance of infringement of the work would seem reasonable. That's for every DVD they make with it on, for every showing in a movie theater, for every use in advertising ...
though it looks like the MPAA have already set a damage level of $30k per instances [TorrentSpy case as reported at arstechnica]. Now last week the top ten selling movies [which may not be all MPAA ones of course, nor carry the infringed work, but this is just for scale] had sold collectively about 15 million units in the US. From that I'd expect damages of the order of 30k * 10 * 15M = 4.5 trillion, or 25 years of the MPAA's total revenue [as reported on their website] to be reasonable. /tongueincheek
This isn't a hypothetical abuse of the law. This actually happens. Sites are shut down for linking to things. Sites are considered 'commercially' violating copyright because they have a banner ad that gives then a thousandth of a penny. Look at the current incarnation of the pirate bay. It doesn't even link to infringing content. It just gives you the ID code of a file that helps you find infringing files. There's no tracker, there aren't even .torrent files. Now look at how many places it's banned.
I'm not aware of any court case where downloading and watching movies without the rights owner's permission was considered OK. Instead, the downloader always had to pay a fine.
> Copyright holders know, but don't seem to want to do anything about the legality of this issue.
Except, of course, the minor detail of influencing legislators to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars to change to law so they can shut down anything "torrent", "rapid" or, indeed, "share".
I don't see the major new issue here. Everybody gets their tv of a torrent or rapidshare or some other place that is willing to give it to them. Copyright holders know, but don't seem to want to do anything about the legality of this issue.
That something is effectively public domain does not make it legal to use. This movie was in a thousand torrents, yet one gets still sued for uploading a kilobyte of it.
That it is hard or impossible to know if it is legal to use does not mean it is ok to do so. You need a source for the license that is able to compensate you for the damages you incur in case their license was invalid.
I'm not happy about either of these points, but that's how it is currently and just closing your eyes and hoping it will go away won't work.
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