[dmaul1114]

Originally Posted by Shaggy

How do you know? Do you personally research with every link you click on that the host has been granted permission from the copyright holder? If not, you better start as soon as they criminalize downloading. Any link you click on is potentially copyright infringed material. You've probably just been assuming that anything you download up to this point is legal, and you'd probably be right. However, if it becomes a criminal offense to be wrong, you'd better start doing your research. Of course, it's going to be nearly impossible to find that information out.

Fair points. If it goes criminal it would have to be limited to files downloaded and saved on your computer for future use. It couldn't be things people could just stumble across.

They'd have to find ways to catch and prove that people had downloaded and saved copyrighted material to their hard drive. Not just stumbled upon it and had it in their temp cache etc.

As far as people streaming copyrighted material etc.--yeah they can't go after downloaders their. Only the people uploading and hosting the files to stream, or read online etc.

What you probably meant to say was downloading with the specific intent of receiving copyright infringed material should be criminal, but intent is a very tricky thing in court. That's not going to be nearly as clear cut and easy to distinguish as you might think.

Yep, that's what I meant. It is tricky, but if you limit it to having copyrighted files stored on your hard drive (and not just in your temp files etc.) I think it gets a bit more cut and dry.

Harder to accidentally download something, save it in a specific folder, can even have it proven that they've opened the file multiple times (last accessed date on the file, vs. the download date from the info that got them caught etc. Now some people may download something, save it and use it etc. and not know it was copyrighted. But that's just too bad, so sad as ignorance of the law isn't an excuse. And it's not huge deal if it's just a tiny fine that's barely more than what the MSRP is for the file they downloaded illegally.

That's exactly why copyright law talks about distribution of content, not receiving it. Putting the responsibility on the person receiving the content is unworkable.

You're probably right. The stuff I outlined above is workable I think, but probably way more hassle than it's worth, and too little bang for the buck so to speak vs. going after the uploaders.