- cross-posted to:
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- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
In one of the AI lawsuits faced by Meta, the company stands accused of distributing pirated books. The authors who filed the class-action lawsuit allege that Meta shared books from the shadow library LibGen with third parties via BitTorrent. Meta, however, says that it took precautions to prevent ‘seeding’ content. In addition, the company clarifies that there is nothing ‘independently illegal’ about torrenting.
It is NOT ILLEGAL TO ASK FOR A COPY. Copyright law does not prohibit you from asking me for a copy of a work. You are perfectly free to ask me for that copy.
I am not free to give you that copy. If I give you that copy, I am infringing on copyright, not you.
There isn’t anything infringement for me to offer to giver you a copy.
If I stand in front of MPAA headquarters with a big red button that says “I will make and give you an illegal copy of a movie if you press this button”, I have not violated copyright.
If you press the button, you have not violated copyright. You have merely indicated that you would like to receive an illegal copy; you have not created that copy, nor have you distributed a copy.
If you take the thumb drive I give you, and put it in your pocket, you still have not violated copyright. You still have not created a copy, nor have you distributed a copy. You are now in possession of that copy, but “possession” is not infringement. You would have to do something further with that copy before you would actually infringe on copyright: You would have to create an additional copy, or distribute the copy I gave you to someone else.
I violated copyright when I put the work on the thumb drive, and I violated it again when you received it, but you have done nothing illegal. You did not initiate the transfer; I did, either when I put the big red button out there, or when I handed you the thumb drive.
If you stick a knife in my face and tell me “your thumb drive or your life”, in addition to the numerous actual criminal penalties you face, the rights holder could, arguably, claim that you have infringed on copyright by distributing a copy.
Sorry, this just isn’t correct. Yes, you can ask for almost anything and it’ll be alright and merely asking a question is completely legal.
The issue is, you then proceed to do a second step. And that is transferring the data. And that is a separate thing. You then initiate the actual transfer. Your computer actively does that. It keeps the transfer going and recieves the network packets. It literally copies them into RAM and then copies them again onto your harddrive. To make your local copy. The uploader merely reads it from their harddisk and hands it out, they do one copy operation less. Though they’re still the distributor.
I think any expert witness would testify in court, that your computer as the downloader does two copy operations, at least in the technical sense of the term. And that you’ve ultimately also initiated the transfer as the downloader due to how TCP/IP works.
The thumbdrive example is a bit construed. I think you might get away with that, though. Unless you plug it into your computer. Because then all the copying to RAM and harddrive etc starts again. But I think just pocketing it is posession (which doesn’t seem to be wrong), and not necessarily copying.
But like: how do other laws work where you live? Can you instruct someone to do something illegal and you’re fine? I can’t come up with anything normal, let’s say I hire someone to kidnap my child/wife to teach them a lesson. Or I hire a hitman to kill my arch enemy. Am I fine dong that? It’s a bit over the top. But where I live I can certainly get into trouble if I make people do something on my behalf. Which I’d argue doesn’t exactly happen here. It’s a bit more complicated… But your concept of law doesn’t seem to make much sense to me.
I don’t even have the data. I can’t do anything involving the actual data. I can’t copy it. I can’t transfer it. The UPLOADER is the only one with the capability of transferring the data.
No, it does not. It requests the data. The server is perfectly capable of answering that request with “Fuck off, I don’t want to.”
It keeps telling the server “I received that part, thanks, can I have some more?” The server is free to never start the transfer, or to stop it at any time.
Receiving those packets is neither “copying” nor “distributing”.
And then back again, into and out of ram every time you watch it… That’s not copying. If that was copying, you wouldn’t be able to use a DVD, as that act “copies” the disk every time you watch it. That theory has been raised a few times; to my knowledge, it has never been successful.
Generally speaking, yes. The examples you gave certainly don’t fit the general case, though. Suppose you’re my Uber driver. I break no law when I ask you to drive faster than the speed limit, or blow through a stop light. You’re free to refuse such requests.
You don’t seem to understand that there are 2 machines required to make a transfer. One uploads. One downloads. The two together make a copy. A machine cannot upload into the ether.
Two are needed to complete a transfer, but only the first can originate one.
Only the first knows what the transfer actually is. I could request a nice video on pirates, and you could send me https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQw4w9WgXcQ
only one needs to read the data. Only one needs to write it (the receiver)
if you’re found later with a bunch of pirated material, you’re the one who gets prosecuted, not whoever you dowloaded it from
Then you should be able to cite a case where this has happened.
What actually happens when you are found with a bunch of pirated material is… Nothing. Because it is not illegal to merely receive an unauthorized copy.