Quote:
Originally Posted by Elfwreck
That may be, for the purpose of casual discussion. However, for the purpose of legalities--to sort out what action can or should be taken against copyright infringement--the fact remains that people can download without uploading, and many do, and exactly how many is entirely unknown.
And (in the US at least) we have laws that say you can't convict or sue innocent people because they're doing something similar to lawbreakers. The copyright owner's inability to tell them apart is not the downloader's problem.
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Absolutely. That's why I started out by saying it was merely a point of interest and I have no intention of getting into a debate about the technical points of the legality of the issue.
My point is that the overwhelming majority of people who download by using a p2p program(by far and away the most common form of downloading today) also upload that material at the same time. To suggest otherwise in order to absolve all downloaders of any participation in the act of copyright infringement is simply ridiculous in my opinion.
Of course there are people who leech only, there are those who use rapidshare and other hosting sites, there are those who use Usenet, etc etc. They, as far as I know, are doing absolutely nothing illegal regardless of whether the material they are downloading is under copyright.
Cheeres,
PKFFW