Comments on: Why Internet Piracy Research is Unclear

By: Kieran Rones

Kieran Rones — Thu, 14 Nov 2013 11:05:02 +0000

"Is there any clear guidelines as to what is Piracy and where is Piracy "legal"?" Both yes and no for the reasons you identified later. When looking at this you can have a content owner, pirate uploader, pirate site host, hosting company and pirate downloader (and potentially more). Each of the bolded individuals can be in a separate country with their own legal jurisdictions and laws regarding what constitutes infringement. This means that a lot of collaboration often needs to happen that means everything either takes quite a long time or never happens dependant on the relationships between the countries involved. Typically, each country will have its own legislation and some may be similar enough that they agree to work together to, for example, raid the servers of a web-host in France that a UK pirate is uploading to. This might give UK police the evidence they need to prosecute the pirate in the UK. But, there have also been arguments that the crime itself took place in the country where the servers are located so they should be the ones prosecute. Essentially, much of this is still being decided, legislated and looked at right now. Case law is being written and unless every part of the process took place only in one country it is often very difficult to establish what the legal outcome is likely to be. A good example of this is the US putting pressure for the Pirate Bay servers to be raided though they were (at one point in time) operating “somewhat legally” in Sweden.

By: Kieran Rones

Kieran Rones — Thu, 14 Nov 2013 10:56:37 +0000

Technically this is pretty much accurate (assuming of course said company/group is indeed the legal “owner” of the “product/process/dataset”). But we are also concerned with the fact that laws change, the world changes and societal norms change. If the pirates you wish to dissuade are not legally savvy (or disagree with the law for any number of reasons) then you need to be able to engage with them in a way that reflects where their views come from. We can argue that they should just respect the law but ultimately that may not be an argument that reaches them. But absolutely you would be quite correct.

Part of the problem also arises from the fact that we all engage in many actions daily online that would be considered “technically” piracy in a legal sense but that are in many cases, of no concern to almost anyone including content owners. This is due to the fact that “accessing” anything online technically means “downloading” it. So stumbling onto a page that has re-hosted content without permission from the original owner would leave you technically complicit in piracy but ultimately you couldn’t have known for sure what’s at the end of a link until you got there. In fact, if the page doesn’t acknowledge that the content has been taken from elsewhere you may be completely unaware that any “piracy” has taken place.

By: Renier

Renier — Mon, 11 Nov 2013 17:13:28 +0000

Is there any clear guidelines as to what is Piracy and where is Piracy ‘legal’

To give you a simple example – lshunter.net is one of many hundreds of websites that gives users free access to live streaming of any type of sport yet in the UK the owner of a similar site received a criminal record for this.
Does this mean that it’s Piracy in certain countries and ‘legal’ in others and who decides who should be prosecuted.

Or would it have been ‘legal’ if the UK ‘criminal’ hosted his website in another country and not in the UK?

By: David Wake

David Wake — Wed, 06 Nov 2013 23:58:32 +0000

Perhaps I’m somewhat simplistic – if an individual or corporate body has a product/process/ dataset that they believe warrants the sales and purchase process to apply (and experience supports that belief), obtaining it without going through those processes (in whatever medium is most appropriate) is piracy.