[rococode]

> If you downloaded a book from that website, you would be sued and found guilty of infringement.

How often does this actually happen? You might get handed an infringement notice, and your ISP might terminate your service if you're really egregious about it, but I haven't ever heard of someone actually being sued for downloading something.

[xmprt]

Whether or not it's enforced, it's illegal and copyright holders are within their rights to sue you. This is piratebay levels of piracy but because it's done by a large company and is sufficiently obfuscated behind tech, people don't see it the same way.

[comfypotato]

Well, cases like this one will determine if it’s obfuscated infringement or fair use.

[TillE]

In Germany if you torrent stuff (without a VPN), you're very likely to get a letter from a law firm on behalf of the copyright holders saying that they'll sue you unless you pay them a nice flat fee of around 1000 Euro.

It's no idle threat, and they will win if it goes to court.

[cowsup]

That's because, when torrenting, you're typically also seeding a copy of it, i.e. you're distributing your local copy to other devices, and thus you're directly aiding in piracy. Simply downloading content from a centralized server, as explained above, is different.

Although, one could argue what OpenAI & Meta are doing is closer to the torrent definition than the "simply downloading" definition, given that they're using that to redistribute information to others. It'll be an interesting case.

[thebears5454]

Honestly don't think our current laws are even good for this case.

This clearly needs some sort of regulation or policy.

It's clearly pretty bullshit if you ask chatgpt for a joke and it repeats a Sarah Silverman joke to you, while they charge you a subscription for it and she gets none of that sub money.

[red-iron-pine]

there is policy in most places, and the policy is fuck you pay me.

[pessimizer]

If books aren't under copyright protection and they're entirely legal to download, I agree that this lawsuit has no merit.

If that's not what you're saying, I don't understand your point. Is it the difference between the phrases "would be" and "could be," or even "should be"?

[iepathos]

Exactly, never happens. It's a threat parents and teachers tell school children to try to spook them from pirating but it isn't financially worth it for an author or publishing company to try to sue an individual over some books or music downloads. The only cases are business to business over mass downloads where it could make financial sense to pay for lawyers to sue.

[Shawnj2]

Actually no- downloading copyright infringing material is legal as far as I can tell but uploading it isn’t. The illegal part of torrenting copyrighted material is the uploading that the protocol requires you to do. Your ISP will send you an infringement notice because they want you to stop doing illegal things on their network

[harry8]

>How often does this actually happen?

Did you hear about Aaron Schwartz?

[edgyquant]

He hacked into a server to release a database of paywalled studies to the public. Not only is it not the same but it was the hacking that brought charges upon him.

[havnagiggle]

It's been quite a few years, but AFAIK he didn't hack JSTOR. He downloaded papers en mass using a guest MIT account that had legal access to JSTOR. Maybe he violated their terms, but that is not illegal. He did illegally trespass an unlocked MIT switch closet to do this. They blocked several IPs but his script would rotate to continue. The downloading was over a week or two, enough for security to set up a camera in the closet to catch him retrieving the laptop.

I believe JSTOR sued him to prevent him from releasing the downloaded materials, worried he had offloaded the papers separately from the laptop. The final blow was an outrageous set of charges by the federal government. I also recall several prominent leaders in the open source movement calling it out for what it was, a power trip to make an example of a "digital terrorist". Such a shame.

[kube-system]

This just all depends on what circle you're using the word "hacking" in. While technical circles are mostly concerned about the technical details on how someone might exploit a system, legal circles don't really care. They usually avoid using the word "hacking" anyway.

The relevant law here, the CFAA, is often referred to as the US law that criminalizes "hacking", but what it specifically does is criminalize anyone who "intentionally accesses a computer without authorization or exceeds authorized access" which is much more broad than how technical disciplines might use the word.

So yes, stealing a password off a friend's post-it note and Hasselhoffing their instagram might not be considered "hacking" if you're hanging out at Defcon, this would be considered "hacking" in legal or colloquial terms.

[tzs]

Here are details on what the charges were, and on whether or not any of them were justifiable.

http://www.volokh.com/2013/01/14/aaron-swartz-charges/

http://www.volokh.com/2013/01/16/the-criminal-charges-agains...

[TeMPOraL]

> AFAIK he didn't hack JSTOR. He downloaded papers en mass using a guest MIT account that had legal access to JSTOR.

Potato, potahto. Or, like kids these days say it, "corporate wants you to find differences between these two pictures...".

Fact is, from the POV of the legal system, "using a guest account that had legal access to" a system, but to which (the account) you didn't have legal access, would typically be seen as hacking. So is running curl in a loop, if it results in you getting sued for it. So is just guessing the URL (e.g. incrementing a user ID in a GET query param), if it lets you access things you shouldn't be able to.

Yes, it's not aligned with how technology works. But it is aligned with expectations of behavior, which is what the law is really about.

[brightlancer]

> Fact is, from the POV of the legal system, "using a guest account that had legal access to" a system, but to which (the account) you didn't have legal access

I don't think that is accurate.

He had legal access to the account. The account had legal access to the service.

The argument was that downloading articles en masse was an _abuse_ of the service, which was a violation of the Terms of Service and therefore a CRIMINAL ACT.