Quote:
Originally Posted by kacir
The question is: did you do something illegal by viewing this page?
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Good question -- my question, though, had to do with illegally uploaded material. In other words, your use of that picture may well not be illegal since the picture was posted in a publicly available medium. So you downloaded a legally uploaded image. You may or may not have had the right to use it as an avatar, but I think the courts will find that the mere existence of that picture in my browser cache and in volatile RAM isn't an infringement of copyright. The person who originally posted that picture should reasonably have known that such copies would be made (browsers all work that way, and it's impossible to show anything on a computer which isn't resident in RAM (video or system), so the posting of the picture originally would have implicitly granted such browser and RAM copies.
But my question deals with ILLEGALLY uploaded materials, downloaded into semi-permanent form for use later on. So a person publishes a book, complete with proper copyright registration. Another person scans it and uploads it without any permission from the copyright owner, so it is posted illegally.
Are you saying that it's legal in your country for you to download that file?
I know about the court precedents (in the US at least) which would make the downloading of legally uploaded copyrighted materials for personal use most likely legal (time shifting or space shifting). But nothing I've read or heard about says that the downloading of illegally uploaded copyrighted material is legal, and I'm surprised that any country which participated in the Uruguay rounf of GATT would have laws which make it legal.
I'm certainly not trying to say you're wrong -- I'm just surprised. I know China has massive piracy that way, but I had thought that European countries had worked to minimize such piracy.