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Morality of Torrenting....
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Post by
fenomas
I disagree - firstly, isn't most pirated content coming from cable TV channels?
Haven't the faintest - most video torrenting I'm aware of is regular broadcast TV being torrented out of the region it was broadcasted in, but then that's probably because I live abroad. But I mentioned broadcast TV as a litmus - it seems to me like if it's morally defensible to torrent anything it would be that, so might as well examine that.
Secondly, there are licensing terms associated with free-to-air broadcasts in legislation generally.
If you want to talk laws I think you're looking at copyright, not licensing terms. That is, if I tape a show off TV and then do something with the tape, the only laws I'd think were in play would be copyright laws, so the issue with serving up a torrent would be whether or not I was "publishing" content I didn't have the right to publish. (To which I think most courts would answer that I was, though morally it doesn't seem so obvious to me.) I could be wrong about this though.
You can't dig up the flower beds at the park despite them being available for public viewing, despite the lack of explicit rules to say as much - there are underlying laws that restrict such behaviour.
Again, bringing physical destroyable objects into things breaks all analogies.
Post by
Squishalot
If you want to talk laws I think you're looking at copyright, not licensing terms.
Not really. If you want to play a free-to-air radio station in a cafe or gym that you derive revenue from, that's a licensing issue. The fact that there are a lot of places which ignore said licensing issues is secondary to the fact. Free-to-air is generally for private consumption, not public. At least, that's how it works in Australia, as far as I'm aware.
But I mentioned broadcast TV as a litmus - it seems to me like if it's morally defensible to torrent anything it would be that, so might as well examine that.
The first response feeds back into this one. Free-to-air is licensed for private consumption. That's why we're allowed to tape things for playback in the future, generally speaking. The question is whether passing a recording to a friend is also private consumption, or has it now breached that? In the case of a CD or DVD you might buy, you're passing your rights to the licensed content to a friend when you lend them the CD / DVD, so they can view it privately. But if you view it privately and separately (i.e. a copy was made to enable that ability), that would probably be breaching, if not the technical definition, then at least the spirit of, the private consumption licensing requirement.
Post by
gamerunknown
Haven't the faintest - most video torrenting I'm aware of is regular broadcast TV being torrented out of the region it was broadcasted in, but then that's probably because I live abroad.
Oh yeah, in Britain we can't access the Daily Show via the Comedy Central website due to licensing laws, but we can use 4oD IIRC.
Free-to-air is licensed for private consumption.
and back before the internet, people used to make mixtapes and stuff to give their friends. Radios would sometimes broadcast encoded information which could then be decoded, too.
Post by
fenomas
The first response feeds back into this one. Free-to-air is licensed for private consumption. That's why we're allowed to tape things for playback in the future, generally speaking.
This is getting into hair-splitting but that's not quite correct. In general content isn't licensed at all (unless you've become a licensee), and the reason we can tape things and so forth is because they fall under fair use. Fair use is essentially what the law lets you do with other people's copyrighted content even if they haven't licensed it to you. So the core legal issue with taping a TV show and then seeding a torrent of it is whether that is a protected activity under fair use - and I believe any court would agree that it isn't. But as a moral issue, it just seems odd to me that something distributed freely and publicly should be thus restricted.
I mean, if you meet a guy handing out photocopied fliers to anyone and everyone who walks by, and you take one and make copies and start handing them out, you'd be violating copyright law as I understand it. But morally speaking it seems hard to get outraged over. (Of course if it was an HBO show it'd be a different matter.)
Post by
fenomas
Haven't the faintest - most video torrenting I'm aware of is regular broadcast TV being torrented out of the region it was broadcasted in, but then that's probably because I live abroad.
Oh yeah, in Britain we can't access the Daily Show via the Comedy Central website due to licensing laws, but we can use 4oD IIRC.
Have you tried on dailyshow.com? I thought they showed up there everywhere.
Post by
204878
This post was from a user who has deleted their account.
Post by
fenomas
Have you tried on dailyshow.com? I thought they showed up there everywhere.
Those are region locked too, you have to use a US proxy.
Oh, they show up fine in Japan so I figured the were open generally.
Post by
Liquoid
For, for I do not support MPAA and RIAA's policies at all. They're hurting the industry more than the pirates.
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