Wrong. Telling people how to find people who will share copyrighted content isn't copyright infringement. Sharing copyrighted content is copyright infringement. It's a rather obvious difference. In either case, I side against the copyright owner.
"You run Erowid, which is a comprehensive reporting about all sorts of drugs, what they cause, their interactions, their prices, and all details. You don't sell drugs anywhere, and minimally comply with required statues."
In this hypothetical situation, you would personally be giving me the drugs, albiet indirectly. It's not much different from if you set them down on the table next to me. How about this: if you want to get some drugs in Philadelphia, I'll give you directions to Kensington. You hop on the Market-Frankford line, get off at the Kensington stop, and take a walk up Frankford Avenue. There are lots of dealers hanging around there who would be happy to get you your fix.
Did I just commit a crime? I don't think so. Call the cops if you disagree, I'll stand in court for it.
Hm, it would be a closer analogy to Popcorn Time if you made a autonomous vehicle which drives to Frankford Avenue, buys the drugs with a robotic arm, and then carries them back to the car's owner.
I'll admit, I'm not actually sure where the law would fall in that situation, but I think the police would have a lot of questions for the car manufacturer, and I'd be on their side.
So if you came into my shoestore, and you asked me for some good walking shoes, and where to find drugs - then you used those shoes to get there - have I committed a crime?
How easy do I have to make it to commit crimes before I've made it too easy? The answer is it doesn't matter. There is no scenario in which I am legally at fault if you commit a crime with tools you got from me.
I feel like you're being deliberately obtuse here. The law has more nuance than this. Intent matters.
The key phrase is "significant non-infringing use". Shoes are obviously not built specifically to enable people to commit crimes. And most people who use shoes are not using them to commit crimes.
PopcornTime was built specifically to enable copyright infringement. The vast majority of people using PopcornTime do so to gain unauthorized access to copyrighted material.
This bit doesn't even have anything to do with the DMCA. (Regardless, I agree that this particular case is an abuse of the DMCA takedown process.)
I despise our current copyright regime, though perhaps not with the vehemence that you have. But no matter what I wish the state of things would be, this is the law, and this is how judges have interpreted it ever since Napster showed up in their courtrooms (at least).
> There is no scenario in which I am legally at fault if you commit a crime with tools you got from me.
If I serve you alcohol and then you drive drunk...
"The majority of states consider bars and restaurants to be liable for injuries or fatalities caused by an intoxicated individual who's over-imbibed in their establishment." [1]
Drinking and driving gets people killed. Pirating a movie makes a studio executive cry into tissues made out of hundred dollar bills stolen from their artists' pockets. The bartender gets a lawsuit, the pirate goes to jail for 20 years.
I don't disagree at all, I was just trying to find some parallels in law where someone who enables someone else to commit a crime by doing something otherwise innocuous under specific conditions is then held liable. This is the closest thing I could come up with.
After Napster and Grokster, US courts say that enticing people to infringe copyrights can be a form of copyright infringement. The courts say it isn’t necessarily infringement, but that it can be, and it requires talented judges to figure out which side of the law particular projects fall.
> US courts say that enticing people to infringe copyrights can be a form of copyright infringement.
What the courts actually said is that enticing can get you secondary liability (contributory and/or vicarious). They maintain that there is a distinction between contributory infringement, vicarious infringement, and direct infringement. The DMCA takedown procedure is only defined for direct infringement.
My comment was to show that the argument “I’m not infringing copyright; I’m just giving directions and tools to do so, and telling them how much fun it is” doesn’t work in US law.
“One who distributes a device with the object of promoting its use to infringe copyright, as shown by clear expression or other affirmative steps taken to foster infringement, going beyond mere distribution with knowledge of third-party action, is liable for the resulting acts of infringement by third parties using the device, regardless of the device’s lawful uses.”
Unfortunately the law does not see it that way. Your or my insistence that this is ridiculous doesn’t change the fact that this probably isn’t abuse of the DMCA.
The law agrees with me in former case, and disagrees with me in the latter. In the case of PopcornTime, this is an abuse of the DMCA, plain and square. I'm also pointing out that in clear-cut cases of the DMCA, I think the law is wrong, and I side with the defendant, in spite of the law. The law is not the arbiter of my personal code of ethics.
The law agrees with me in former case, and disagrees with me in the latter. In the case of PopcornTime, this is an abuse of the DMCA, plain and square.
> The law agrees with me in former case, and disagrees with me in the latter.
and less about this:
> I'm also pointing out that in clear-cut cases of the DMCA, I think the law is wrong, and I side with the defendant, in spite of the law. The law is not the arbiter of my personal code of ethics.
I suspect we have similar opinions of the DMCA, but would very much prefer if we didn't conflate "I dislike the DMCA" with "I think this is an abuse of the DMCA (specifically: regardless of my opinion on the DMCA, I think this is an overreach)". It's like if we were discussing whether a person sentenced to death is guilty or not, and you came in and said, "I can't possibly see why we could side against the victim, I don't like them, the death penalty is stupid". All of which might even be an opinion shared by the people discussing it, but not only are you off topic but you're doing your argument a disservice as you're tying it to something that's not what you are arguing.
(I'm being a stickler on this, because like I said, I likely agree with your viewpoint and would very much rather you not allow people to come up with lazy responses to you.)
