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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

#341

Post by krunck »

lordloki wrote: post #154
thrance wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A bit off-topic, but I always thought it was "funny" how americans are so opposed to censorship but are perfectly OK with advertising and other forms of propaganda (from social media editorializing, bought newspapers...), that arguably do much more to "control men's minds" than censorship ever would. It just fuels my personal theory that americans only reason in positive liberty (freedom to...) and never in negative…

It's very simple, Americans believe that the individual is responsible for themselves while most of the rest of the world wants to be "protected" by a restrictive government. One leads to innovation and one stifles it. We would rather be responsible for discovering the truth on our own, than trust a central authority to decide what is and isn't true(or propaganda). I find it funny how Europeans think their government…

Those who turn discussions about degrees of something into fights about binary extremes are the true problem. Media and politicians included.

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

#342

Post by kqr »

singlow wrote: post #331
kqr wrote: post #281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> an exact brush-stroke-by-brush-stroke replica that is identical to the original in every way Yes, forgery is a crime in many jurisdictions, and in some it does not matter whether or not you are transparent about it being such -- specifically for copyright/trademark reasons.

Forgery would require trying to pass off the copy as an original. As long as it is not pretending to be something it isn't, it is just a replica, not a forgery.

Thsis was my impression at first too, but legal experts in my jurisdiction have taught me they're not always so cleanly separable.

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

#343

Post by flir »

pdonis wrote: post #336
flir wrote: post #299

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> prevent all possible bad things Well that seems like a bad faith interpretation of my argument. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1858_Bradford_sweets_poisoning

You included in your argument at least one bad thing that, as I pointed out, is not only not stopped by government regulation, it's explicitly permitted by it. The fact that there was a bad thing that happened before government regulation, which a government regulation was then passed to try to prevent, doesn't make your argument valid.

Which government are we talking about, please?

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

#344

Post by stale2002 »

amelius wrote: post #314
stale2002 wrote: post #306

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I think it is more reasonable for content owners to say what can and cannot be done with their data. They lose that right as soon as they sell it to other people. No, you can't sell a book to someone and then sue anyone who reads the book, upside down. That would be ridiculous. If you don't want someone reading your book upside down, or training on it, then don't sell books.

You assume that "training" and human learning are similar things. This is a bit like saying that taking a holiday picture of someone, and putting a surveillance camera on the street are the same thing. I think many books actually prohibit the storage into an information retrieval system and AI can be considered a form of that.

> You assume that "training" and human learning are similar things.

No I don't. Because a human is choosing to enact the training regardless.

Just like if a human held a book up to a rock. It would be ridiculous that an author could ban a human from "training" a rock from a book. Its their book, and they can show it to a rock if they want!

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

#346

Post by nwh5jg56df »

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…

Booooooo don't leech without seeding. Share a little at minimal risk

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

#347

Post by garaetjjte »

Alex_L_Wood wrote: post #123
trilbyglens wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Germany is wild. You will get a knock on your door within hours of firing up a torrent client

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.

Do these letters have teeth or just trying to scare you into a settlement for lawsuit that would never come?

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

#348

Post by gosub100 »

JKCalhoun wrote: post #255
otterley wrote: post #198

Both the headline and the theme of the story are incorrect and misleading. Meta isn’t claiming that everything they’re doing is lawful. They’re claiming that their activities don’t run afoul of a particular California state law, CDAFA, and section 1202(b)(1) of the DMCA. It’s very common in litigation for the plaintiff to accuse the defendant of every violation they might be guilty of or liable for (“throwing the boo…

Feels like their defense for some state incursion is an admission of a larger crime. I still don't get it. I'm not going to murder someone, steal their car, then put out a statement that I was unaware the car had expired tags and I shouldn't be prosecuted for it.

A YouTube video I saw talked about the charges faced by the accused killer of the United Healthcare CEO.

Aside from murder , he faced:

- criminal possession of a weapon

- illegal possession of a silencer

- illegal possession of an automatic weapon (it wasn't full auto, but somehow due to the large capacity magazine, NY state considers it an automatic weapon)

So had he used a hammer or a knife, he might be able to get out again because murderers in NYS can be out in as little as 20 years. But all the firearms charges can effectively double his sentence.

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

#349

Post by dijksterhuis »

saghm wrote: post #238
papercrane wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The US Constitution grants congress the power to give authors and inventors time-limited exclusive rights to their works/discoveries (Art1.S8.C8). This moots the 1st amendment argument. https://constitution.congress.gov/browse/article-1/section-8...

I don't think that authors having exclusive rights to their works necessarily implies that someone else _receiving_ them is legally culpable though. My admittedly naive thinking is that someone distributing something illegally doesn't necessarily imply that the receiver is also committing crime. If Robin Hood steals a fancy 4K TV from the mansion downtown and gives it to his neighbor as a birthday gift, would the nei…

your TV example is a bad example for discussions around copyright — how does one copy a TV?

a more pertinent example to the main topic at hand

i download a file onto my PC. in doing so i have made a copy of that file onto my PC.

if that file is a copyrighted work, e.g. a musical work, i have reproduced the work by downloading it. i have copied it. streaming music is covered by copyright for the same reason - a copy is transferred onto your device because you clicked on a button. the act of copying, or reproducing, the work is the bit that matters.

the distributor (spotify/apple) just gave me access to their original copy to make my own, new, copy. distribution is covered, but slightly different as it is facilitating others to infringe copyright (if i’m pirating music).

in your TV example, a closer idea would be if i 3D printed a new TV based on a patented design. probably not allowed to do it (i don’t know patent law) but who’s gonna enforce it? no one knows about it.

if i start selling my 3D printed TVs, well, i should probably get a lawyer sharpish.

—

also, isn’t knowingly receiving stolen goods a crime? so receiver of the TV in your example could be charged with a crime if it can be shown beyond reasonable doubt that they knew it was stolen?

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

#350

Post by ninalanyon »

apexalpha wrote: post #94
userbinator wrote: post #54

If this was 15-20 years ago, arguably at the peak of P2P filesharing, I suspect most people would side with Meta.

In the Netherlands this is still the law. Downloading is fine, uploading is not. We used to have a sort of national library of every single media on Usenet back in the day.

These days for books at least Anna's Archive is the place to go.

https://annas-archive.org/activity

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