The hunt for more titles

[kacir]

Originally Posted by RCR

Could someone tell me if this is illegal to do?

It very much depends on where you live.
In my country downloading a text or a picture, or other copyrighted work from internet is not illegal. Unless it is a child pornography or something like that.
On the other hand, distributing the work, that you do not have the right to distribute is a copyright infringement. It still is not crime, but you can be sued by a copyright holder. You will be made to stop distributing and you might end up paying damages to the copyright holder.
Please note that most of the popular P2P programs (like KaZaA, Gnutella, bittorrent ... ) also distribute the parts of the file you have already downloaded, even if the download is not finished yet. So when you use bittorrent to "just download" a file, you *are* distributing.

Imagine a situation.
I build a successful website. The site is visited by ten thousand people a day. One day I publish a copyrighted text, or a picture, for which I do not have the right to distribute. BAM! In a single day I have made 10000 people to do something illegal.
This does not sound right, does it?
Or, I own a radio station and I play a song I have no right to play. Have I just made seveal thousand people to commit copyright infringement?

Originally Posted by RCR

Does the act of converting the file, and putting it on my Sony make it illegal?

Again, it depends on where you live.
If you happen to belong to those 5% of world population that live in a country where 90% of all lawyers of the world make their hard-earned honest living , you have just, thanks to DMCA, become a CRIMINAL.

In reality I can not imagine a situation where somebody takes your reader, examines its contents and checks if the file you are reading can be obtained legally.
Unless , that is,
the situation is that you are a mega copyright infringer (**), hosting 100 000 copyrighted works on your computer and serving 10000 books per day using several p2p programs and an OmenServe bot on an IRC channel and "Publishing Industry Association of America" is collecting evidence against you.

(**) please note that I have not used word Pirate.


DISCLAIMER:

I Am Not A Lawyer so all the above is only my personal opinion.

I do not think that you should download books illegally instead of purchasing them or borrowing them from your local library.
Even better, I think you should primarily download and promote works that are available for download legally and for free.

[dhbailey]

What country do you live in that downloading illegal content isn't illegal?

[SurgE]

Originally Posted by dhbailey

What country do you live in that downloading illegal content isn't illegal?

I think you mean copyrighted content?

[dhbailey]

Originally Posted by SurgE

I think you mean copyrighted content?

you're right -- I typed before thinking clearly.

So what country is it legal to download illegally uploaded copyrighted material?

[Valloric]

Originally Posted by dhbailey

you're right -- I typed before thinking clearly.

So what country is it legal to download illegally uploaded copyrighted material?

It is not so much that some countries have a law stating "it is legal to download copyrighted content" (which Russia actually does have, for all non-russian copyrighted works), it's that a lot of countries do not have a law against downloading copyrighted content, merely because they do not have a lobby pushing to get them enacted. My country (Croatia) is one country that fits that description.

In other words, in Croatia, if I took a paper book and printed copies of it, that would be against the law. But downloading a book of the net... well, they haven't gotten around to those scenarios yet. And until they do, people here are free to download to their heart's content.

Naturally, that doesn't give you moral justification. You still know it's the wrong thing to do. Laws != The Right Thing, and the same goes for the lack of laws.

[HarryT]

Originally Posted by dhbailey

you're right -- I typed before thinking clearly.

So what country is it legal to download illegally uploaded copyrighted material?

Switzerland, for one. It's legal to download copyrighted material for personal use there.

[kacir]

Originally Posted by dhbailey

So what country is it legal to download illegally uploaded copyrighted material?

I live in Central Europe. I do not want to be more specific.

There are quite a few countries that allow an individual to copy copyrighted material for *his own PERSONAL use*
The notable exception is for example Australia where it is illegal to copy a portion of a printed book for your own use.

Even in USA it is legal to make recording of a TV program for your own personal use - this is called "time shifting". See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betamax_case

Let us have an example.
While browsing the net I find a really cool looking picture. I like it so much that I download it and I decide to use it as my avatar. Avatar is that little picture that would then appear under my name, next to in this forum. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avatar_%28computing%29
It turns out that the picture is copyrighted and I had no right to publish it here.
So you have made a copy of that picture from the internet while reading this thread. The copy is made automatically. The file is copied into the RAM and most probably also to your browser cache. The question is: did you do something illegal by viewing this page?

[dhbailey]

Originally Posted by kacir

The question is: did you do something illegal by viewing this page?

Good question -- my question, though, had to do with illegally uploaded material. In other words, your use of that picture may well not be illegal since the picture was posted in a publicly available medium. So you downloaded a legally uploaded image. You may or may not have had the right to use it as an avatar, but I think the courts will find that the mere existence of that picture in my browser cache and in volatile RAM isn't an infringement of copyright. The person who originally posted that picture should reasonably have known that such copies would be made (browsers all work that way, and it's impossible to show anything on a computer which isn't resident in RAM (video or system), so the posting of the picture originally would have implicitly granted such browser and RAM copies.

But my question deals with ILLEGALLY uploaded materials, downloaded into semi-permanent form for use later on. So a person publishes a book, complete with proper copyright registration. Another person scans it and uploads it without any permission from the copyright owner, so it is posted illegally.

Are you saying that it's legal in your country for you to download that file?

I know about the court precedents (in the US at least) which would make the downloading of legally uploaded copyrighted materials for personal use most likely legal (time shifting or space shifting). But nothing I've read or heard about says that the downloading of illegally uploaded copyrighted material is legal, and I'm surprised that any country which participated in the Uruguay rounf of GATT would have laws which make it legal.

I'm certainly not trying to say you're wrong -- I'm just surprised. I know China has massive piracy that way, but I had thought that European countries had worked to minimize such piracy.

[HarryT]

Originally Posted by dhbailey

But nothing I've read or heard about says that the downloading of illegally uploaded copyrighted material is legal, and I'm surprised that any country which participated in the Uruguay rounf of GATT would have laws which make it legal.

I'm certainly not trying to say you're wrong -- I'm just surprised. I know China has massive piracy that way, but I had thought that European countries had worked to minimize such piracy.

It's not a case of having laws that make it legal, as much as a current absence of laws which makes it illegal - in many countries, copyright law hasn't "caught up" with the idea of electronic distribution. Many EU countries (especially those Eastern European countries which have only recently joined the EU) haven't yet implemented the EU Copyright Directive in national law.

[Valloric]

Originally Posted by dhbailey

Are you saying that it's legal in your country for you to download that file?

Since it still has not been proclaimed illegal, it is by definition legal.

Originally Posted by HarryT

It's not a case of having laws that make it legal, as much as a current absence of laws which makes it illegal - in many countries, copyright law hasn't "caught up" with the idea of electronic distribution. Many EU countries (especially those Eastern European countries which have only recently joined the EU) haven't yet implemented the EU Copyright Directive in national law.

Exactly!

[dhbailey]

Thanks for the further clarification -- it will indeed be interesting to see how the copyright laws change over the next few years for those countries who have joined the EU or become signatories to GATT but whose laws haven't caught up yet.