Originally Posted by Harmon
Now that wasn't so hard, was it?
I totally agree that one should read the thread, which is what I do. But when it is not clear to me what the poster are trying to say, I don't have any obligation to guess what he or she might mean. The best thing to do is to ask.
Judging from your answer, it seems to me that you, like most people, think that downloading "pirated" material is, in and of itself, illegal in the US. That's one of the problems that results from the indiscriminate use of the term "pirate" to describe what's going on, and from assuming that all copying to which the copyright holder does not agree is necessarily illegal.
As a broad statement, merely copying digital material for personal use, even without permission of the copyright owner, is not illegal. On the other hand, distributing copied material without that permission is, in most instances, illegal, with the exception being distributing for "fair use."
In Ana's purely hypothetical situation, let us suppose that she was given a bootleg physical copy of a dvd of Wicked from someone who recorded a live performance without permission. Ana has not committed any criminal violation under the copyright law (although the person from whom she got it has committed at least one, and probably two). It is possible, however, for the copyright holder to persuade a court to make Ana hand over the bootleg copy for destruction even though Ana herself has done nothing illegal. (Interestingly, the copyright holder would not seem to have the right to retain the bootleg copy for himself.)
Moving now to a free download of the digital version of the dvd, the same situation probably exists. However, there is one caveat - if Ana uses a torrent program to do the downloading, she will - perhaps unknowingly - be engaged not merely in downloading, but in distributing the file to other users. The distribution would be an illegal act. Or if she paid for it, she might be sufficiently involved in a commercial transaction to be considered a participant in a scheme of distribution.
The bottom line is that whenever the situation involves someone copying a digital file for personal use, you have to be very careful to understand exactly what happened. Sometimes there's a criminal violation, sometimes there's a civil violation, and sometimes there's no violation at all.
(And just to cut off the objection that all this is just my opinion, that's true, but it's an opinion I have formed as a lawyer who has read the copyright act and not a few of the cases.)
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