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At least where I live, Hungary, torrenting was decriminalized some years ago as long as someone isn't doing it for profit. It's still illegal but they stopped g

• thinkling 9y ago
  When I briefly was a subscriber to FREE internet in France, I was amused to see that their cable box came with a Bittorrent client enabled by default, despite some strong anti-piracy laws on the books in France.
  • kuschku 9y ago
    Free (aka Online.net, aka Scaleway) also offers a uTorrent with web ui in their distro installer for their servers, out of the box.
• mattmanser 9y ago
  Until the EU want to do a new trade deal with the US, and the US decides it wants to co-opt your legal framework to enforce its commercial appropriation of European culture, history and stories through Disney and Hollywood. And then you'll be getting lots of enforcement. The whole copyright thing is just a US export thing, as soon as it becomes a problem for them, they'll force the EU to make it a problem for you too.
  • mtgx 9y ago
    Obama has already tried doing that with ACTA (remember that one?) and also with the newer TTIP. He failed.
  • SauciestGNU 9y ago
    With the EU in accession and the US in decline on the global stage, I suspect the US will have less ability to force these issues in future negotiations with the EU.
    • blibble 9y ago
      > With the EU in accession and the US in decline on the global stage you're kidding right? after brexit the EU has lost 70 million citizens, its second biggest economy, its largest city (which also happens to be the world's financial capital), and its main military/cultural power whereas Trump will be gone in a few years
      • r00fus 9y ago
        Great Britain wasn't ever really with the EU on most things. The joke was that UK were the US's mole in the EU/world stage everyone knew it (e.g. lapdog jab in "Love Actually"). Brexit took that rent and tore it open, but if/when Scotland secedes from the UK and rejoins the EU, that might affect things. Trump being gone doesn't necessarily mean the US is going to suddenly regain it's former prominence. This discussion, of course, is ignoring the Elephant/Tiger in the room (China).
        • ForRealsies 9y ago
          You're delirious if you think: Scotland will actually secede from the UK, and that the EU would accept another member with such a small economic base.
  • make3 9y ago
    this might be an unpopular opinion, but I think copyright is a good thing, as it allows for artists to actually get paid for their work
    • goblins 9y ago
      Unfortunately that is rarely the case especially in the US.
    • jstarfish 9y ago
      I agree, but the current landscape is such that it feels like seeing a street performer only accepting tips in Bitcoin. Do you want my money or not? It's made clear to me every time I want to go watch something and am willing to pay money for it but it's not available on any of the platforms (read: middlemen) I pay to subscribe to; I have to subscribe to yet another one just to see that show. Or it was there until yesterday, then it was removed without warning. I found myself in a position recently where the only way I could watch a particular show would be if I went down to the store and bought the box set on DVD. But I don't own a DVD player, haven't needed one in years, and wasn't about to buy one..
      • yellow_postit 9y ago
        So just don’t watch it. I don’t get why that’s so hard.
        • jstarfish 9y ago
          Nobody here got anywhere in life by making a habit of giving up at the first sign of resistance.
          • make3 9y ago
            people survive when if they don't get to watch their favorite show
          • sosborn 9y ago
            You know you are talking about tv shows and movies right?
  • rando444 9y ago
    Since the EU has stated they won't be doing any trade deals with anyone not in the Paris climate agreement, it looks that this won't be a problem with the current US administration. http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/eu-trade-deal-paris-climate-change-accord-agreement-cecilia-malmstr-m-a8206806.html http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/eu-trade-deal...
    • wang_li 9y ago
      Where are they going to get microprocessors and hard drives?
      • onli 9y ago
        You don't need a trade deal to import stuff.
        • wang_li 9y ago
          That's true. Until there are viable desktop and server CPU competitors, it'll just mean increased costs for European consumers.
      • zanny 9y ago
        Considering most microprocessors are manufactured in Taiwan and Korea and a lot of hard drives come from Singapore and Thailand, the EU doesn't even have anything to worry about on that front.
        • onli 9y ago
          I first wanted to write something in that direction, but realized that is not true. Since the common cpus are all produced by US-american firms, they'd indeed be affected by something like this. Though you are of course correct afaik, the real production happens in Asia.
          • lmm 9y ago
  • andrestan 9y ago
    "enforce its commercial appropriation of European culture, history and stories" How do you actually mean by this? It seems to me that the vast majority of big Hollywood movies are of US origin and not European. For example see here, http://www.businessinsider.com/highest-grossing-movies-of-2017-list-2017-12/#10-justice-league-6359-million-1 http://www.businessinsider.com/highest-grossing-movies-of-20... where only Beauty and the Beast could argued is "appropriation of European culture". If anything, it seems like the EU not enforcing copyrights is an attempt by the EU to itself commercially appropriate US culture. The US populace generally isn't spending its money on imported films from the EU. The reverse on the other hand happens quite a bit.
    • mattmanser 9y ago
      You've got it ass about tit, Europeans can't create works based on US culture and sell it to them, but the US did just that to them 100 years ago but then forced crazy copyright on the rest of the world. No-one can sell derivatives back to the US. The US can use elves, orcs, dwarves, vampires, werewolves, Repunzels, Thors, Lokis, fairy godmothers, Romeos, Juliets, etc. commercially all they want. But we can't use Supermen, Wolverines, Mikey Mouses, etc. commercially. I'm not saying it's a bad move from the US pov, but let's not claim it's done for the sake of artists, it's done for $$$ tax revenues and keeping US entertainment as a dominant export. It's basically an extremely effective one way, heavily US favourable trade embargo that they've codified into international trade law.
      • hn_throw_1234 9y ago
        While there's little question that the US has extended copyright protections for too long (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_Term_Extension_Act https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_Term_Extension_Act), it truly baffles me that anyone could assert that copyright isn't, in the first instance, done for the sake of the creators. It costs incredible amounts of money/talent to create stories, characters, entire worlds for film or the written word. That some believe creators shouldn't have rights over original stories in order to recoup those costs still makes no sense to me. Let's reward innovation and creators for their contributions to society. It seems to me that you may be more opposed to a seeming US monopoly on entertainment than you are to the effects of copyright law. You don't argue against the merits or lack thereof of copyrights but rather make distinctions about the US vs Europe. Don't fall victim to mood affiliation.
  • digi_owl 9y ago
    Copyright has a hilariously convoluted story. The term is from England, but many of the rules are from France. Because in France they came up with "rights of the creator" that included things like the estate being able to deny someone the use of a play or song after the creators death. Then these two got merged via the Berne convention on copyright. But USA didn't sing that one until the 1980s(!). So for a long long time, USA used a variant of the English copyright law, that only concerned itself with the printing of books (then as the tech came online, they expanded it to cover the likes of recorded music and computer software). One thing to keep in mind is that the Berne convention requires that the signatory nations respect copyright duration of the nation of first release. And thanks to France we have this whole thing about death plus X years. And like i said, USA didn't sign any of that until very recently. And thus we had situations like Tolkien becoming popular with hippies because an American publisher picked up a copy while visiting the UK, and went on to print a pile of cheap copies back in the US. Anyways, thanks to global media corporations, lobbyists, and the whole Berne thing, we now have a constant ratcheting of the whole death+X duration thanks to the lobbyists playing on national fears of being out-competed by others with "better" terms for the corporations. IANAL and all that.
• dest 9y ago
  The blank media tax is probably a compensation (i.e. not a tax) for the right to do private copies of legally acquired media. At least, this is what it is in France.
  • efdee 9y ago
    At least in Belgium, that right has existed for ages without the compensation on blank media (cassettes, VHS tapes, ...). When they introduced the tax it was quite explicitly stated that it was a compensation for illegal copying. Why I, who never use my CD/DVDs for copying anything but homemade content, have to pay for someone else's illegal copying is not clear to me. Especially since the tax doesn't change anything for the person who is making the copy - it's still illegal.
    • dest 9y ago
      I agree on the hypocrisy of that system.
• xyzzyz 9y ago
  In Poland, downloading movies, music and books (but not software) as a regular person is completely legal. What is not legal is distributing them, so you have to make sure to disable uploading in your torrent client.
  • coldacid 9y ago
    Of course, that'll slow down your torrents a lot, as leech detection does exist and most clients will punish pure leechers.
  • eikenberry 9y ago
    Kind of ironic that they are using the law to enforce bad behavior.
• chx 9y ago
  You are probably right that individual users won't be pursued but that's more of a political issue than a legal one -- torrenting via such a big site is certainly not legal. Even though the new 2013 criminal law indeed allows for downloading and uploading (this part is new) if no income is generated -- but you are missing some very important words which are there ("indirectly" and "income" -- not profit!) and some which are not. Be very careful with legal texts, the wording carefully and deliberately omits mentioning whose income it is -- the tracker site you are using generates income via ads and donations. How do I know it's deliberate? Because some twenty years ago it was me who informed the Hungarian public about downloading being legal if no income was generated -- even if upload was not --- in a series of articles in Chip Magazin after a very long interview with Artisjus (the Hungarian collective rights management agency) and they have had at least a significant role in wording the copyright law then (if you would want to be a less careful journalist you would even accuse them writing it) and I'd bet anything they have had ... some ... input into the current law as well. Do note the tracker sites themselves are illegal, this has been established last summer by the highest court in the EU. http://curia.europa.eu/juris/document/document.jsf?text=&docid=191707&pageIndex=0&doclang=EN&mode=req&dir=&occ=first&part=1&cid=258631 http://curia.europa.eu/juris/document/document.jsf?text=&doc... (change the doclang argument to HU to read it in Hungarian).
• jcranmer 9y ago
  There's one caveat that's often missed: downloading pirated content is illegal nowhere (at least, nowhere that I'm aware of). The violation of copyright comes in distribution, which is to say uploading. The industry stopped its lawsuit programs against individuals in part because they found it very difficult to actually prove copyright infringement.