Quote:
Originally Posted by tompe
Well, it was a hypothetical example were I assumed that just to get a simpler example to analyse legally. In practice i think that youtube is an example where you download thing when you are viewing it and it is very unclear if the material you download is legal or not. Most people probably assume it is legal
|
And rightly so.
But that illustrates another problem. If you are someone like YouTube, you are hosting content other people create. Is all of the material people post on your sihe stuff they have the right to make available? You don't know, and you
can't know. There is simply too much being posted by too many people, and there's no way you can vet it all before allowing it on the site.
All you can really do is state that you don't willingly host illegal material, and ask folks to tell you if they encounter rights violations.
SF writer Harlan Ellison was having a long running dispute with AOL over pirated electronic copies of his work being available on AOL. I don't think he ever grasped the concept that it wasn't
possible for AOL to prevent it from happening, as way too many people had sites hosted by AOL and there was no way AOL could screen everything before it got posted.
Quote:
I was interested in what the law says because people in this forum claims things are illegal and I wanted to know if these claims were correct or not.
In Sweden for example I do not think it is illegal to distribute something if you though it was legal and there was no reason to think it was illegal. When it is pointed out to you that it was illegal you have to remove it if the claim that it is illegal is correct but everything that happened before that is legal. So I thought it was interesting to understand a legal system that worked different in this respect.
|
You may not be in violation of the law if you didn't know it was illegal when you did it. But what happens if you are told it is illegal, because you do not have the right to distribute it, and you continue to do so anyway. Are you then in violation of the law? I'd bet you are.
______
Dennis