You are missing the point I was replying to, specifically that parent suggested people were only hunted for creating/uploading pirated content, not merely participating in the torrent.
That’s a really interesting distinction. Clearly there’s an “original crime”, the first person to rip the CD and put it online (or whatever kids do to pirate music nowadays).
But then if I download a file, create a copy, and share it with you, have I done anything wrong?
To all intents and purposes, seeding is an act of reproduction. You, while keeping your copy, create copies of (parts) of the file and share it to someone else to allow them to assemble a new, second copy.
Whether this is, or should be, a crime is a different question altogether. The main point I was making is that it’s the copying/sharing to other people which seems to be a crucial element in these prosecutions.
That’s likely intentional: the last thing the *AA folks want is a decision that creating a copy of a copyrighted work for your own personal use is not a crime. But it does seem the courts have decided: making a copy for someone else is indeed illegal.
But both are illegal? I suspect if it came out that some torrent seeder was actually part of some sort of piracy ring responsible for ripping the movies, they'd get far stiffer penalties than the few thousand $ fine that typical torrenters get. Moreover isn't AI companies also "keeping content available"?
The whole point of the thread is that AI companies are getting away with piracy but individuals aren't. But the reality is that AI companies aren't getting away with it (a judge ruled that Anthropic must face trial over their use of pirated books).
More specific to this thread is that claim that "ONLY downloading" hasn't resulted in fines for anyone. So far as I can tell, this is true. People are just quibbling over how someone who's torrenting somehow counts as "only downloading", even though their client is uploading.
