Quote:
Originally Posted by DiapDealer
It's already an illegal copy of a copyrighted work. How could downloading an already illegal copy (and creating another copy) be legal?
|
Laws are weird like that.
I've always understood downloading to be, if not legal then essentially un-prosecutable because there's no way to tell whether or not the download is "fair use".
See Elfwreck's point about companies who download their own stuff -- or rather, things LABELED as their own stuff, which is not the same -- in order to track piracy habits of their stuff.
If one downloads what one THINKS is one's own stuff to track but accidentally gets something else, that would be very tricky. Fair use? Well... maybe. Hard to say, actually.
Imagine the Harry Potter people pulling down copies of the books to look at the watermarks and finding the books were ACTUALLY Stephen King books, deliberately mis-labeled.
Similarly, no one has (to my knowledge) tested the legal repercussions of downloading a book one already owns and then pulping it. (Format shifting.)