I agree with this point, but disagree with your conclusion. My mother, for example, has limited PC skills - and has never heard of a 'torrent' much less tried to use one. The very fact that you are participating in a BitTorrent swarm demonstrates above-average PC skills. There must be a very limited quantity of people smart enough to use BitTorrent but dumb enough to not realise that downloading the latest Batman film is legally questionable at best - and they'd have needed to ignore all the mainstream press about 'piracy killing music/movies/kittens'. I'm afraid you've lost me there. The comparison is valid.
Then you'd go to prison. I hope you like porridge. We assume, yes. No, they can't - we've covered the impossibility of 'IP spoofing' elsewhere in the thread. If they were able to download part of a torrent from a given IP at a given time, then a machine attached to the IP at that time was making the file available. Additionally, they don't need to prove "beyond all doubt" - this is a civil case, not an episode of Law & Order. All they need to do is convince the judge that their evidence is good - if the judge is 51% certain you're guilty and 49% certain you're not, that's good enough. However, if the timestamps are wrong - for example, not correcting for differences in timezones - then the wrong person can be fingered, but that's something a cursory examination of the logfiles will easily disprove - plus any correctly configured system will record times as UTC in its logs anyway, specifically to prevent such mistakes.
Once they've established that the data on the torrent is what they think it is (and not just some random file named incorrectly) then I doubt they even have to attempt to download the file from a peer. If your IP shows up as being registered to a torrent on a tracker, then that is probably good enough. And come to think of it, in the same way that they request all of the peers/IPs associated with a torrent, they can also ask the tracker for data transferred (in both directions) for any given peer.
No, but it makes their evidence more convincing - and also helps to rule out a peer as being MediaDefender or one of that ilk seeding corrupt data. It'd be embarrassing if you sued the guys on your team... Aye - and can't they ask for how complete the copy held by each peer is? In other words, easily prove that a given peer is making a complete copy of the file available without having to download the whole thing.
You cannot compare stolen goods on the outside to pirated films on the internet etc. In the media, they say there is no difference between knicking a film off of a shelf, and downloading a film illegally, well there is, a huge difference. A) You download from once source, so 1 DVD, it's just being shared thousands of times, but it's one DVD. B) If a DVD got stolen tomorrow from a shop, and then I went and knicked one the next day, that's 2 DVDs stolen. Huge huge difference, comparing it to real terms would be "My mate bought a DVD from the shop and he copied it for me so I could watch it at home".
I'm not comparing the offences ('making available' isn't even an offence) but the excuses - "I didn't know it was stolen" won't help in the tenner-TV case, and "I didn't know I was making it available" won't help in the downloaded-game-for-free case.
You'd think they'd just exclude the likes of MediaDefender on an IP range basis Good point though. As far as I'm aware, in the normal* client-tracker communication when you're in a swarm, completeness isn't given explicitly but it's trivial to work out as you are, however, given the amount of bytes in/out for the peers you are connected to (and you also know the total size of the torrent). The only time you explicitly get completeness is if you send a scrape request, but then you are only shown 100% completed peers** * there are loads of unofficial tracker extensions on various different bits of tracker software ** which doesn't make it any harder or easier to find out their IPs, obviously The bittorrent protocol is frighteningly simple
Yes, you can. The theft is not (just) of a physical object, after all, but of information, or of a service. When you steal a DVD, you take something without paying for it. You enjoy the possession and use of it without reimbursing the shop and publisher for their efforts in making the DVD and making its possession and use available to you. When you download a film illegally, you deprive the distributor of income too. You can argue that they still have a copy of the film to sell, but you have deprived them of the ability to sell it to you --and to your mates who share your copy of the film. Now you can argue that you (or your mates) wouldn't have bought the film anyway, but that's not the point. The point is that you are enjoying the fruit of someone else's labours and efforts without reimburing them for it. Remember, it is not about the physical DVD. That's just a 50p plastic disk. It is about what is on the DVD and what time, money and resources went into creating that content. Same for when that content is not on a DVD but a server somewhere. Look at it this way: suppose you fix computers for a living. You fix someone's machine, dedicating your time and effort to it, but the customer refuses to pay. He argues that if he could not have got his PC fixed for free, he would have thrown it out anyway, and besides, it is not as if he has taken something from you: you still possess your skill to fix computers. You can still lease those skills to other people and make a buck. But you'd still feel cheesed off. You want to see a remuneration for your time and effort fixing the damn thing, not to mention the time and effort spent(!) learning and developing those skills in the first place (you don't just get paid for turning a screw, but for knowing which screw to turn...). You'd feel robbed.
im gonna get deja vu arguing about theft with nexxo again, but the definition of theft in the uk has the requirement that there must be an intention to "permenantly deprive" the other of what is being stolen. Obviously this makes a whole lot more sense with physical objects... Morally downloading and stealing are pretty much the same thing, legally they aren't. indeedy, may as well add an 'are' in there while they are at it...
i dunno what services we are talking about here... assuming you mean future sales? but the simple fact is by making a copy of something you dont permenantly deprive the owner of it. you could make an argument if by copying it you took a serisouly significant portion of the "goodness" away from it (eg if you could say prove beyond all doubt that that persons sharing of the file had deprived the owner of 75% of all possible profits on it)... Aside from anything else whether it actually does permenantly deprive the owner of it or not, it is the intention to permenantly deprive that is the key thing that is lacking. Lets face it if it were possible to prosecute someone under the theft act for copying intellectual property for personal use then people in the 80's would have handed over all their c90s and people would all be more worried about 6 months in prison than taking stuff without paying for it.
No, "services" is: they make a film for your entertainment. That costs time, money, effort, resources, talent (well, mostly, Uwe Boll will not enter this argument for the sake of clarity and sanity), skill. They expect to be reimbursed for that service. Else why bother making the film?
sure they expect and should be paid for their work excepting uwe boll and michael bay. it doesnt change the fact that torrenting a file isnt actually stealing within the legal sense of the world
just because you dont end up with something physical in your hand doesnt mean its not theft. you are essentially stealing data, its not yours it belongs to the publisher/film company. a dvd is just an easy medium in which to give you the data, essentially what you are paying for is the data (plus cost of dvd and retail markup). so maybe legally torrenting isnt theft but in my eyes it is.
No, but it copyright infringement It's illegal any way you look at it, arguing it's not theft in the eyes of the law is like arguing [insert convincing analogy here]
Yeah, doesn't seem to be covered by the legal definition of theft as there's no 'intention of permanently depriving' involved. To say you deprived them of money for that instance of the film would IMO need them to prove that you would have bought it otherwise since that instance was a perfect copy that you created for yourself of an existing instance. There's no 'intention to deprive' on that specific instance since it was just created and nobody else was about to pay for the instance you created. I think IP law covers this instead of the traditional theft laws.
I think you are getting a bit confused about a few things: 1. What is stolen is information/data, or services rendered. Not the physical plastic disk on which it may be stored. Forget about the disk. It is not about the phsyical disk. 2. If you illegally download a film, you intend to permanently deprive the publisher of the money that they are entitled in return for you for using (i.e. playing) their film. Whether or not you would have bought it is immaterial. I could argue that I never intended to buy the DVD I lifted from the shop anyway, so no real loss suffered, right? But stealing it is. You can now argue: "yes, but when you steal a DVD the shop has not got it anymore to sell to someone else, so they are permanently deprived. While if you download a copy of the film the publisher can still sell a copy of the same film to someone else --they are not permanently deprived of that possibility". They aren't, but what they are permanently deprived of is a remuneration of a service (of entertainment or information) rendered to you. That's the deal. That's the contract. You play, you pay. No pay, no play.
I dont know who the you is but i'll bite basically for something to be theft, among other things, the thing stolen and the intention to permenantly deprive must relate to the same thing. you cant seperate a single instance of copied IP in the way you seem to want to, the way theft is defined wont let you That and the fact cant really steal a particular potential sale, as it doesnt exist yet for you to steal(unless youre in minority report ofc), sure to the layman it seems like theft, morally it is just as bad, but it isnt theft.
Just because you aren't prosecuted for theft doesn't mean it isn't theft. The whole point of my post was to say that arguing whether or not it is technically theft is completely pointless. The whole point of IP laws are to protect people from others stealing their IP. What is another word for stealing? Theft. Downloading a DVD sounds like theft to me. So you're not actually stealing a physical disk, it's still their property, you have no right to take that data from the internet. So it's not theft by definition of the Theft Act, what does it matter? Arguing that it's not theft is just stupid because theft has different definitions.
