We live in a crazy world

Posted Nov 27, 2024 13:53 UTC (Wed) by anselm (subscriber, #2796)
In reply to: We live in a crazy world by Wol
Parent article: Arch Linux finally starts licensing PKGBUILDs

Witness the Italian copyright enforcement people being taken to court for lying, when they paid for adverts saying "Copying CDs is illegal".

Many of the adverts the copyright-holder lobby puts out are based more on wishful thinking than actual law. For example, they will claim with great confidence and authority that downloading movies from the Internet is illegal, but the fact is that people don't generally get sued for downloading movies. If they're getting sued at all they get sued for uploading movies whose copyright they don't own, which is something that takes much more intent (unless you're using BitTorrent without knowing how that works) and is usually way easier to make stick.

What is technically not allowed according to the law, certainly here in Germany, is downloading movies “from obviously illegal sources”, but it is difficult for a layperson to figure out whether a site is “obviously illegal” if it looks very convincing and has a slick and professional UI that is, if anything, nicer than the official offerings. It's not as if such sites have a big banner at the top saying OBVIOUSLY ILLEGAL MOVIE SOURCE.

We live in a crazy world

Posted Nov 27, 2024 14:00 UTC (Wed) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link]

> Many of the adverts the copyright-holder lobby puts out are based more on wishful thinking than actual law. For example, they will claim with great confidence and authority that downloading movies from the Internet is illegal,

So basically they're saying the whole streaming industry is a fraud?

In the UK, if they didn't plaster their claims with disclaimers left right and centre, they'd be in big trouble with the advert regulator. Who has the power (and they've used it) to ban them from ANY advertising without running it past the regulator first. They've only used it once or twice ...

> If they're getting sued at all they get sued for uploading movies whose copyright they don't own

Unless they're MGM, or Columbia, or Fox 2000, or Sony ... remember when they were regularly getting DMCA takedowns from themselves? <rofl> ...

Cheers,
Wol