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Meta claims torrenting pirated books isn't illegal without proof of seeding

arstechnica.com

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Re: Meta claims torrenting pirated books isn't illegal without proof of seeding

#271

Post by TheSpiceIsLife »

dspillett wrote: post #221
miki123211 wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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…

> 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 ill…

> 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.

Re: Meta claims torrenting pirated books isn't illegal without proof of seeding

#272

Post by JKCalhoun »

tiahura wrote: post #267
JKCalhoun wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Company emails, internal server logs.

Server logs of what? Transmission doesn't log which blocks it seeded. Does any client?

Router logs? I have no idea. I just suspect that, somewhere in the complicated cabling of Ethernet, there's a device that has been logging packets.

Re: Meta claims torrenting pirated books isn't illegal without proof of seeding

#273

Post by amanaplanacanal »

shakna wrote: post #129
yreg wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Information wants to be free.

Perhaps. However, information won't be produced, if the already tenuous financial positions of authors is removed. Things should be free, as in speech, not as in beer. Especially in this case. The giants of Silicon Valley could in fact purchase these rights. Few authors care about people personally enjoying a product through otherwise means. They do care about mass distribution without attribution, without royalty, a…

Information isn't copyrightable, at least in the US. Only creative works. But I get what you are saying.

Re: Meta claims torrenting pirated books isn't illegal without proof of seeding

#274

Post by [deleted] »

dspillett wrote: post #221
miki123211 wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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…

> 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 ill…

[deleted]

Re: Meta claims torrenting pirated books isn't illegal without proof of seeding

#276

Post by [deleted] »

dspillett wrote: post #221
miki123211 wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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…

> 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 ill…

[deleted]

Re: Meta claims torrenting pirated books isn't illegal without proof of seeding

#277

Post by hiccuphippo »

relistan wrote: post #204
Alex_L_Wood wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I lived in Germany. At least back then it was definitely a letter. They were not very good at it, though, and I received one for torrenting large open source software.

I wonder if people could form a nonprofit that starts torrenting public domain media or open source software as a honeypot to find these firms and bury them in legal procedures. I'd gladly donate to such a nonprofit.

Re: Meta claims torrenting pirated books isn't illegal without proof of seeding

#278

Post by dylan604 »

contravariant wrote: post #2

Well, I guess it would be nice if we could have some precedent for the claim that downloading copyright protected information is not in itself a breach of copyright. It makes sense from the point of view that distribution is the act protected by copyright, not the mere act of copying . If that sounds odd to you then that's probably on purpose, There's been plenty of opportunity to rename copyright to authorrights or…

>If that sounds odd to you then that's probably on purpose, There's been plenty of opportunity to rename copyright to authorrights or something similar

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.

Even in the "rules" of copyright, you're allowed to make copies. Back in the days of the olds being young and in school, we had to go to places called libraries to look things up. We could pay the librarians to make copies of things for us to take home to use in whatever task we were assigned. The fee wasn't for any kind of rights usage, but simply to cover the library's expense in providing that copy to you.

It's amazing how quickly information is lost from the lack of use

Re: Meta claims torrenting pirated books isn't illegal without proof of seeding

#279

Post by nonfamous »

sightbroke wrote: post #95
contravariant wrote: post #2

Well, I guess it would be nice if we could have some precedent for the claim that downloading copyright protected information is not in itself a breach of copyright. It makes sense from the point of view that distribution is the act protected by copyright, not the mere act of copying . If that sounds odd to you then that's probably on purpose, There's been plenty of opportunity to rename copyright to authorrights or…

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Amendment_to_the_United_... "Attached to the core rights of free speech and free press are several peripheral rights that make these core rights more secure. The peripheral rights encompass not only freedom of association, including privacy in one's associations, but also, in the words of Griswold v. Connecticut (1965), "the freedom of the entire university community", i.e., the ri…

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?

Re: Meta claims torrenting pirated books isn't illegal without proof of seeding

#280

Post by tombert »

mrweasel wrote: post #56
isaacfrond wrote: post #5

It's certainly nice to see someone accused of bittorrenting with the bankroll to come up with a decent legal defense team.

Isn't Meta going to be battling the full legal team of the entertainment industry with this argument? I think Meta did something stupid with this argument, because there is no way that Hollywood or the music industry is going be pleased with a precedence for legally downloading copyrighted material. They will now do everything in their power to get Meta found guilty.

The combined market cap of Disney and Comcast (who owns NBC and the like) is about 350 billion dollars [1][2]. Facebook alone is worth about 1.7 trillion [3]. I had trouble finding exact numbers on this, but it seems like the movie industry itself in the US is worth less than $100 billion.

Facebook could simply buy most of the companies involved if they give them too much shit. We've consolidated way too much power into a few large tech companies. I don't see it very likely that Hollywood could win this.

[1] https://companiesmarketcap.com/walt-disney/marketcap/ [2] https://companiesmarketcap.com/comcast/marketcap/ [3] https://stockanalysis.com/stocks/meta/market-cap/

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