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Originally Posted by anamardoll
But I do believe that it actually is legal to download pirated material in some areas and possibly in American because of the nuance of the way the law is written.
Now, they'd probably try to get you one way or another for possession of same. But if, say, Rowling's lawyers download Sorcerer's Stone and open it up and it's King's The Cell and they destroy the file, they've not -- I don't THINK -- broken a law in America.
IANAL, though, and I think too much of this thread is Fallacy By What Makes Sense To Me so there's that.
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It is not illegal to use torrents. If J.K. Rowling downloaded a copy of her own book from a torrent, she wouldn't be breaking the law, she has a right to copy it all she wants. If it turned out to be some other book instead, she still hasn't broken the law, she had a reasonable expectation that she was getting her book.
Now if she downloaded the book, and upon discovering it wasn't her book, decided to read it, would she be breaking the law? She hadn't broken the law in downloading it, and wouldn't be copying it, but would instead merely be reading it, and reading it isn't illegal, copying it is. If she were to copy it from her computer to an e-reader, then she would be breaking the law, because it would be an illegal act of copying. On the other hand, you could argue that she had a duty to delete the book once she discovered that it wasn't her book.