You didn't if you downloaded it without paying, which is why it is illegal.
Also you are undermining your own argument here if you support the OP's original "agreement" but not copyright to music / movies, when he explicitly states in the post:
"We never signed any contracts or work-for-hire agreements and I certainly never agreed to donating or selling any copyright of my work without a licensing fee."
So he should expect to be paid for his work or it be protected, but musicians shouldn't?
You didn't if you downloaded it without paying, which is why it is illegal.
So it's illegal to violate an agreement you didn't enter in? That makes no sense, sugar.
Let's test that: to read this post, you must agree to pay me 5BTC. Have you now committed an illegality? I guess not.
Also you are undermining your own argument here if you support the OP's original "agreement" but not copyright to music / movies, when he explicitly states in the post
He states that they had to written, explicit contact. Care to read my post again?
So he should expect to be paid for his work or it be protected, but musicians shouldn't?
Sure they should, by whoever has an (explicit or implicit) agreement to pay them. Thankfully I haven't, but I still like to reward them when I can for all the joy they brought me.
Yes. Downloading an album or movie without paying for it is illegal. This isn't in dispute.
I think it is in substantial dispute. Can you cite a case of someone in the US being successfully prosecuted for downloading? Note that this precludes bittorrent, gnutella, etc situations where downloading means simultaneously uploading.
Outside of the US there are plenty of countries where it has been made explicit in the law that downloading is OK. Some even going so far as to include the uploading portion of torrenting, etc as legal too.
> I think it is in substantial dispute. Can you cite a case of someone in the US being successfully prosecuted for downloading? Note that this precludes bittorrent, gnutella, etc situations where downloading means simultaneously uploading.
Note: Just because I don't have any cases offhand of my friends fined for jaywalking, doesn't mean it isn't against the law.
> Outside of the US there are plenty of countries where it has been made explicit in the law that downloading is OK. Some even going so far as to include the uploading portion of torrenting, etc as legal too.
I don't know much about the Dutch law, but it is supplemented by a 'piracy tax', ie, storage devices are more expensive to purchase among other things.
Note: Just because I don't have any cases offhand of my friends fined for jaywalking, doesn't mean it isn't against the law.
That's putting your arguments into the realm of faith. If those three citations are any indication, your faith is misplaced. All of those were for people doing distribution (e.g. uploading). None of them were for downloading.
I don't think it is much to ask for you to have just one definite case to back up your claim that the legality of downloading is not in dispute. Just one.
Somehow there's this weird gap where people completely freak out over the difference between stealing and copying, but the difference between uploading and downloading just slides right by.
I went through the first four hits on that. All of them included uploading. Please pick a case that you are confident supports your claims and then we can examine it.
As a point of order, the surest way to admit you are wrong is to tell the other person to "google it." It isn't anyone else's job to prove you are right.
Yes. Downloading an album or movie without paying for it is illegal. This isn't in dispute.
Actually, not where I live. But the point is that the situations are different, because I don't have an agreement with any artist. Whether that makes it illegal to use copyright works was not the issue in discussion. What was being discussed was the supposed hypocrisy of anti-copyright people.
there wasn't any contract.
There's was an implied agreement. Whether he has a legal foot to stand on is irrelevant to this discussion, because we weren't talking about the legality of the situation, but what it should be.
And so I ask again, when did I agree to that, in an explicit or implicit way? And you yourself answered, "you didn't if you downloaded it without paying". So no, there isn't.
In case you can't get past the paywall (try googling the title and going from there), the summary is that a woman got a protective court order and then she called police and told them her husband had violated the court order. They did not act, and he killed her three kids.
If a court order with explicit instructions to arrest should it be violated isn't enough to move the police into action, simply encountering you isn't worth a hill of beans.
Also you are undermining your own argument here if you support the OP's original "agreement" but not copyright to music / movies, when he explicitly states in the post:
"We never signed any contracts or work-for-hire agreements and I certainly never agreed to donating or selling any copyright of my work without a licensing fee."
So he should expect to be paid for his work or it be protected, but musicians shouldn't?