Quote:
Originally Posted by gideongallery
as to the arguement for US citizens i will cede that point, however it is irrelevant because there is no way the pirate bay can tell the difference between the US customers who are using it like a VCR (90% based on your quoted stat) and the 10% who are not. Like the VCR which can be used for both legitimate uses (timeshifting/home viewing) and illegal (bootlegging videos) the VCR seller (walmart) is not legally responsible for the true infringers activities.
It is the responsiblity of the copyright holder to find and go after those that are actually commiting the crime.
As to the arguement about foreign countries where the program is not sold at all (use dr who confidential which only airs in britian), no sale is possible to those people, which means no sale is lost. And the 1 download != 1 lost sale ruling means that it meets 4th condition of fair use.
Which was the "Access shifting" fair use that the Grokster people were trying to establish when the supreme court ruled that since each transaction had one infringing (sharing)"in and of itself" they did not need to consider the fair use right at all However since seeding breaks the file into a 1000 pieces the "in and of itself" infringement arguement can not be logically applied which means the courts should and MUST consider the validity of the fair use of "access shifting.
I am of the belief that the arguement that "we licience for a specific place only" is just as invalid as the "we licience it on a limited bases to be viewed at a specific time" (arguement struck down by the Betamax case).
Since the law was only designed to protect the income generating ability for the copyright holder, and courts have explictly ruled such (see highlighted portions).
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My quote of 1 in 10 was not that 1 in 10 are use torrents as a VCR, my quote was that I read that 1 in 10 houses in the US doesn't have cable. So if those people are downloading shows that they don't normally have access to because they don't have cable they are not timeshifting. Timeshifting, it seems, is when you choose to watch content you paid for at another time or on another device. If you don't have access to cable you can't timeshift cable shows because you never paid for them. The same could be said with what type of cable you have. For example a friend of mine has Dish Network and I have regular cable. I get channels that he doesn't like VS and he gets channels that I don't like HDNet. If I download an HDNet show that is not timeshifting because I didn't have access to it in the first place. The same would be said if he downloaded a show that was on VS.
As for the argument that it is not a lost sales and the technicalities of how torrents work and why they are legal, I'm not going to get into that. I have stated in the past that I think people who create content should be allowed to determine where and how it is distributed and if that means denying access to some people so be it.
My point was that you are saying that most people use torrents (when it comes to TV shows) like people used to use their VCRs. I don't know that this is accurate. I think there are a lot of people downloading shows they never had access to in the first place which means they are not using it as a VCR.