Malcom \"Mal\" Reynolds wrote:
When it comes to the receiving party, copyright laws are silent.
but there are laws about receiving stolen property
A copy of a movie that's sitting on my hard drive is not "property".
Look up fair use or personal use.
See also:
http://wiki.answers.com/Q/Is_downloa...n_this_i ssue
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Downloading or uploading is neither legal or illegal, it all depends on
what it was downloaded for. There are limitation to liability in the
DMCA that is if it was intended for a promotional use instead of
non-commercial, personal use, then that person is violating the DMCA.
This was addressed as The Supreme Court stated in MGM vs. Grokster in
2005 that one who distribute the device to promote it's use to infringe
copyright is liable. However, the DMCA does not completely outlaw
redistribution of materials in anyway whether in person, or through
Torrent or p2p clients or elsewhere online. And once a distribution is
made, the Artists has no control of them. You owns what you possess and
it's your right to do whatever you want to with it.
As long as the materials were distributed or released under agreement of
the authors or inventors, you do not need the authorization to
redistribute them to another person or make many copies as you want.
This is exempted from the DMCA notice.
File sharing does not by itself infringe copyright and so therefore it's
not illegal to download or upload anything as long as they are intended
for personal use.
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Note also this wording:
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Plaintiffs are informed and believe that Defendant, without the
permission or consent of Plaintiffs, has used, and continues to use, an
online media distribution system to download the Copyrighted Recordings,
to distribute the Copyrighted Recordings to the public, and/or to make
the Copyrighted Recordings available for distribution to others. In
doing so, Defendant has violated Plaintiffs' exclusive rights of
reproduction and distribution.
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No mention at all of "stolen property". As in - "The defendant is in
possession of stolen property".