[julian_sark]

I learned that lawyers are allowed to lie like there's no tomorrow, especially in civil cases pre-trial, in my jurisdiction.

This was especially emotionally scarring when I hired a lawyer to rebuke civil claims of several thousand Euros for (supposed) downloading of some TV show episode, a practice which is either considered a national sport, or a major contributor to GNP in Germany (the copyright claims, not the downloading).

The lawyer sent his usual spiel, his €300 template letter to the opposing council, which claimed that I'm a bumbling idiot who has no clue how to power up a PC, let alone plug in a network cable the right way 'round, and thus, can't possibly be guilty of any such shenanigans.

I asked her whether a Linked In-profile that identifies me as a Sys Admin and IT Systems Architect might become a problem with this tale, but various lawyers assured me that this is a highly scripted industry (both the copyright claims and the defenses) and nobody cares. And the scripts are actually legal students sitting at home with access to a fax gateway.

[alex_suzuki]

Fascinating. I live in Switzerland where downloading is legal but uploading is not.

So basically if you downloaded a hypothetical torrent, and set upload bandwidth to zero, you‘re safe.

I guess the lawyer could argue that I’m a bumbling idiot who forgot to turn off the upload facility…?

[julian_sark]

It used to be the same in Germany. There is still the right to "Privatkopie", meaning that one is technically allowed to make both backup copies, and things like a mix tape for a friend. After all, if they denied this, there would be no justification for upholding the leech farm that is GEMA, i.e. the body collecting fees for blank media. These fees are then given to the musicians, fairly (at least if one believes in fairy tales ...).

However, they then decreed that circumventing any copy protection makes this illegal. Also, if the source of the material is "evidently illegal" (i.e. unlicensed), it's not applicable either. So eventually, downloading off of Bit Torrent without ever uploading MIGHT still be legal in Germany, unless courts declare that this constitutes an evidently illegal source.

And that's the other fascinating thing: there are, to my knowledge, no truly binding judge rulings in Germany most of the time. Unlike English-born case law, a judge might rule for a pirate bay downloader one day, and the next judge rule against another downloader the next day, every other aspect of the cases being equal.

Last I heard, some court had opined that even consuming streaming content, like sports, was illegal now, even with no uploading happening, if the source isn't an established, evidently licensed one.

It's a friggin' mine field really.

(edit): Oh yeah right, there's more. I learned during my defense against their claims years back that it's all as horrible as you'd expect from judges mostly clueless about technology, and then some.

Apparently there was precedence for the following: Let's say someone torrents a Miley Cyrus song. I have no idea why one would do that, but for the sake of example, let's assume. Then the music industry would say: "But there is a torrent, or a zip file or whatever, with that song, and 50 others. Because you downloaded that one song, we legally assume that you downloaded the 50 others, too!" There was at least one court decision where this stood. The state has tried to reign in the rampart threats against citizens by copyright lawyers (it's ** publicity when a grandma gets sued for outrageous amounts). The one thing they did was limit damages to a set amount. Then the copyright holders circumvented that with "legal" "theories" such as the one above. That was also why they stopped going after movie shares for some time, and concentrated on those sharing TV series. Many more individual claims of 10k each to be made, when people download a whole series of TV episodes.

I'm also personally convinced after doing some research that copyright holders give material to specialized companies who in at least some cases are then doing the seeding themselves, in order to catch offenders. There is at least one company in Germany where I have strong suspicion of this happening ca. 2012.