this post was submitted on 01 May 2024
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Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ
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What do you mean by "the government doesn't care"? Do you mean that they are not enforcing copyright protection laws to your knowledge? Or that copyright protection laws don't actually exist in your country at all? If the laws exist but are not being enforced, there is always a possibility that they will be enforced in the future or that a change in government will lead to a change in approach. Your government could also potentially pass new laws in the future that make it easier for foreign entities to go after yourself and other pirates through your local courts.
You need to work out exactly what the law in your country says, what the government's attitude towards piracy is and whether there is a legal precedent in your country for the prosecution of pirates. For example, in Australia we have copyright laws and a government that is at least somewhat committed to upholding them, but we also had a significant court case a little over a decade ago in which it was ruled that the ISP being sued was not responsible for the piracy its users were allegedly engaging in. This essentially set a legal precedent within Australia that allows ISPs to turn a blind eye to piracy and makes it more difficult for foreign entities to prosecute Australian pirates. This is why most court-ordered anti-piracy action within Australia is limited to DNS blocks on websites. As a result, many Australians feel safe torrenting without a VPN because they believe it is very unlikely their ISP could be compelled in court to hand over their information or that there is even the will to attempt this following that high profile defeat in 2012.
In my country it is illegal to share, but not illegal to download, since when consuming you're not meant as a websurfer to know the source of that something. Should that law change, it cannot retroactively affect something that happened in the past. So I don't plan ever to share anything publicly, but only the very few things I'm very passionate about to the point I want to share them with communities of friends which you can access through invites only. Sharing a back up copy with your friends is not illegal either even if the EULA or whatever says it is, unlike for example in the UK.
I was specifically asking about cybersecurity in general.
But torrenting means you're also sharing.
Yes but you didn't create the torrent first
But who created it is irrelevant, the seeding is the legal issue.
I think that's not necessarily true. There's certainly some good reasons to have a distinction between the original uploader and all the rest of the additional seeders. It's going to come down to local law.
An analogy is if you buy some illicit substance and split it up with a few friends who pay you their share. Whether or not your local authorities considers you an illegal drug dealer could be highly dependent on scale, profitability, frequency, clientele, etc. Those details could be the difference between a slap on the wrist and some hard time.
I can't speak for every obscure jurisdiction that might exist, but I've never heard of that being a factor.
I don't know the laws that well, but there is a distinction in Canadian law between uploading and downloading. I'm not entirely sure how applicable to torrenting that is, but I think there's a reasonable argument that if you are the original uploader, you must have uploaded the content in it's entirety, whereas that's not necessarily true for anyone else downloading the torrent, and certainly not provably so.