Digital media is protected by copyright law, yeah. I’m not arguing it isn’t protected at all, I’m just saying the “piracy is theft” argument often used to claim that piracy is a crime is complete garbage that doesn’t hold up to scrutiny.
The “it’s a copyright violation” argument is actually applicable, though. When creating a digital copy without the rightsholder’s permission, an individual is creating an unauthorized copy and violating the creator’s copyrights.
How that’s applied legally and who bears the responsibility is where it gets interesting. It depends a lot on each country’s own copyright laws, but generally, making something available for others to download is unambiguously illegal as unauthorized distribution of a copyrighted work.
Downloading that copy is more of a gray area. Is the downloader making a copy by downloading it? What if they don’t save it, and instead just consume it like with streaming. Or is it a copy just by the mere act of saving data capable of creating a like-for-like representation of the original? What if that copy isn’t a perfect copy, but degraded through multiple lossy re-compressions and only resembles the original?
In my original comment, I added the “(downloading)” as a bit of a nod to this whole argument. Uploading is unambiguously a violation in some form, but piracy in the form of streaming is a gray area that isn’t actually illegal in a lot of places.
Haha helps not viewing it dead tired. Totally see where you were coming from there. It is an interesting point to make, especially given most view the need for IP protection for an individual or firm to extend only within reach of that party. Some are often enforced where common overlap occurs, like I could build surfboards under the name Tide and the soap people can’t do jack.
Yet, books long out of circulation and print are still given full protection. If copyright technically allows home movie showing to extend to streaming, why isn’t allowing home vcr recordings of tv movie broadcasts extended to downloading online streams given the actual method of data transfer is indistinguishablen from just watching it.
Shame that general priorities in law and policy are uh, what they are, I honestly would’ve loved seeing this stuff explored in the courts more, over just giving priority interest to corporations lol.
Digital media is protected by copyright law, yeah. I’m not arguing it isn’t protected at all, I’m just saying the “piracy is theft” argument often used to claim that piracy is a crime is complete garbage that doesn’t hold up to scrutiny.
The “it’s a copyright violation” argument is actually applicable, though. When creating a digital copy without the rightsholder’s permission, an individual is creating an unauthorized copy and violating the creator’s copyrights.
How that’s applied legally and who bears the responsibility is where it gets interesting. It depends a lot on each country’s own copyright laws, but generally, making something available for others to download is unambiguously illegal as unauthorized distribution of a copyrighted work.
Downloading that copy is more of a gray area. Is the downloader making a copy by downloading it? What if they don’t save it, and instead just consume it like with streaming. Or is it a copy just by the mere act of saving data capable of creating a like-for-like representation of the original? What if that copy isn’t a perfect copy, but degraded through multiple lossy re-compressions and only resembles the original?
In my original comment, I added the “(downloading)” as a bit of a nod to this whole argument. Uploading is unambiguously a violation in some form, but piracy in the form of streaming is a gray area that isn’t actually illegal in a lot of places.
Haha helps not viewing it dead tired. Totally see where you were coming from there. It is an interesting point to make, especially given most view the need for IP protection for an individual or firm to extend only within reach of that party. Some are often enforced where common overlap occurs, like I could build surfboards under the name Tide and the soap people can’t do jack.
Yet, books long out of circulation and print are still given full protection. If copyright technically allows home movie showing to extend to streaming, why isn’t allowing home vcr recordings of tv movie broadcasts extended to downloading online streams given the actual method of data transfer is indistinguishablen from just watching it.
Shame that general priorities in law and policy are uh, what they are, I honestly would’ve loved seeing this stuff explored in the courts more, over just giving priority interest to corporations lol.