Copyright violations, piracy, and helping out someone

Quite a bit of “enforcement” is societal. i.e. finding it wrong, saying so, like we have the opportunity to do here…

Moral judgement comes in.

And is correctly ignored or we may as well bring back stoning. The law is there and if the agrieved parties are concerned they should bring about prosecutions and test that in law. The problem is that if they lost it would be a major blow to the industry. So of course it is left to concerned citizens to do what they are unable or unwilling to do. At the end of the day one of our number has suffered misfortune and it is natural to offer assistance where possible.

Thanks Henry, so having having morals is like stoning, I get that.

I feel it’s “natural” to point out the illegality, call me old fashioned. Behind closed doors is one thing, but on a HiFi Forum?

So I lost some money on the stock market, fancy chipping in Henry?

Yes! How much would you like? :joy:
As a rule I try very hard to live by my morals, and equally as hard not to impose them on others. As I have tried to suggest, there is a legal system. That is what ultimately determines right from wrong with regards to copyright. Not you or me.

As I said, it can be a societal thing. To offer your files suggest societal acceptance (you), to protest suggests non acceptance (me). If files are offered, it may be thought “OK”. We are our own police.

The legal system decides what’s illegal, not what’s right and wrong. Parents, schools, churches, peers and public figures educate on rights and wrongs (or used to, currently there appears to be a bit of a vacuum).

So Henry, it is you or me at the end of the day. But also in this case Roon, who by their acquiescence seem to be suggesting it’s OK.

My objection is using a sponsored forum to break the law. If you find that acceptable, that’s up to you. Roon appear to agree with you.

Try as hard as you like, you won’t make it legal or acceptable.

This community site should not become a place for piracy.

We do not agree with him, nor do we disagree with him. It is not our place to do either. If you’d like to talk about the effects of doing heroin while listening to Led Zeppelin on your USB DAC connected to a Nucleus, we do not care as long you keep the subject relevant to the music, the gear, or the software.

Also, while copyright violation is a legal offense, the laws in the US (where Roon Labs exists) only extend to profiting from the copyright violation. The rest is usually a civil matter, not criminal. It irks me to no length when people confuse criminal legality with civil agreement violation. One is far more serious than the other, and mixing the two sets a dangerous precedent.

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Not sure how you got to “dangerous precedents”, were talking about copying files. From my reading, the area is pretty grey. I don’t think you, I or the file copier will be setting any precedents. Principles are there however, for all to see.

Breaking the law can lead to civil liberties being taken away (crime).

I do not think breaking a civil license agreement between two parties should ever result in the same. You may think it should, but I’m glad that in the US it does not.

Judging “pirating music for personal use” like a crime is that dangerous precedent. You said it yourself, about social discourse… I am also just trying to set the baseline in the other direction. While I do not promote piracy, I strongly believe it is not a crime. For now, the law in the US agrees with me.

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In the Uk it is no longer legal to rip your own cd’s for your own use (it was legal for a time). So all of us Roon users here in the UK are already breaking the law as it stands today.

Yet another reason why I’m happy to have moved to the Netherlands… https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ripping#Netherlands

Indeed, but we do pay for it:

wikipeda/google translate:
The home copy levy or private copying fee is a legally established levy on data carriers (such as CDs / DVDs, hard disks and electronics such as mobile phones) that benefits copyright owners to compensate for home copies.

That’s certainly a crime!

The crime was not piracy. The crime was that he was profiting from copyrighted works without proper licensing. See https://www.justice.gov/opa/file/763286/download for the case document.

He was selling premium access to RockDizMusic for $90/year and he was hosting advertising. See page 3 of the document above for details.

This profiteering on the back of copyrighted works is the crime, not the actual piracy. The license holders (the RIAA and those they represent) would love for you to all believe that this is criminal, but until you cross that line, it just isn’t.

In Australia s.109A of the Copyright Act still provides that copying for private and domestic use is not an infringement of copyright subject to the conditions set out.

An infringement of copyright in Australia is usually a civil wrong entitling the owner to remedies, not a criminal offence. Division 5 of Part V of the Act, however, sets out various offences including commercial scale infringement prejudicing an owner and commercial dealings with infringing copies.

Yes. But the consequences sharing music for no profit can be severe:

I remember this case very well, and the RIAA was heavily lobbying for this.

He ended up paying nothing, and the judge asked congress to change the laws to prevent this type of nonsense. Additionally, since this date, the random drive-by lawsuits against torrent IPs have dropped to nil because of law changes.

Anyway, I’m not promoting piracy, I am just clarifying that copyright violation for private use is a civil issue, and not a crime.

Those of you who feel otherwise, do you think the original poster should be locked up or fined to the point of bankruptcy?

@Ericj - thanks for posting this.
I believed you were allowed to make a backup copy and must have missed this particular ruling.

So basically everyone on here in the UK is the wrong side of the law on the assumption they have ripped a CD at some point in time.

… except me who has just deleted all my backups with a few megavolts :smile:

No. They have gone from a law that specifically says you can to the previous situation which remains untested in law. That places the financial hurdles back in the way of any sort of defence on the basis of principle and so is unlikely to be challenged.

In general a very good topic you extracted from the other topic. Congratulations! Good to see that Roon is very much aware of what legislation is and what is propganda from the content manager firms, labels, ‚owners‘ etc. In the desperate search of new business models they started to criminalize the consumers, even if they paid on storage for private copy use and private sharing. Private sharing is and has ben proven to be a great model to distribute awareness and one of the most important human behaviors: participation, inclusiveness and openess. No clue how money counters want to live democracy. Whenever I can privately share experience, knowledge and things I have at disposal I can enrich myself without the burdon of quantifying the economics behind it. This is part of freedom! Good that in most countries this is still legally possible.