Quote:
Originally Posted by darryl
The uncertain part is the no reasonable grounds for suspecting. I would suggest that when you download using a torrent from the Pirate Bay or probably most other torrent sites, this defence will be difficult if not impossible to make out. But archive.org? A non-profit with a laudable public purpose?
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I really don't think that the fact that it's "a non-profit with a laudable public purpose" makes a difference. There are numerous works that are perfectly legally held on "archive.org", being in the US public domain, which would infringe copyright if you or I were to download them. Australian and British copyright law are not the same as US law. As you know, anything published prior to 1923 is automatically in the US public domain, but that's not the case in Australia or the UK. Early works by long-lived authors can, therefore, be legally downloaded by people in the US, but not by you or me.
If you were talking about a site such as PG Australia, then you would have a reasonable claim that it was their responsibility to check that the works they were offering were legal for people in Australia to download, but that certainly doesn't hold true for a site in a country with entirely different copyright rules, such as the US.