
Watching Pirate Streams Isn’t Illegal, EU Commission Argues - Sami_Lehtinen
https://torrentfreak.com/watching-pirate-streams-isnt-illegal-eu-commission-argues-161001/
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Tehnix
Interesting case, with a lot of grey areas. I'd say there definitely are some
differences between p2p (i.e. torrenting) downloading and streaming, where in
p2p you are also actively distributing the illegal content, in contrast to
streaming where you are only a consumer.

There's also the fact that the user has no real way of knowing if the content
they're are watching is legal or not (most display ads before, like youtube),
heck netflix could stream pirated content and no regular user would really
know (not saying they do ofc).

Furthermore, in the case of streaming a clear target is the site that provides
the stream, which is a lot easier to target than whatever user ends up
watching it.

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joshvm
On the not knowing front, many people used Netflix for 'piracy' either
intentionally or unintentionally by watching shows in regions where Netflix
didn't have the rights to stream them. I imagine a lot of people simply
thought that it was cool that they could get US Netflix in Europe or vice
versa.

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andrewaylett
Interesting the apparent legal (and social) distinction between streaming and
downloading, where technically the distinction is mostly in whether the data
continues to be stored after it's been watched -- the decision about whether
the data transfer is a 'stream' or a 'download' is pretty much entirely down
to the client.

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user5994461
And we'll note that browsers usually write the stream to the disk and it stays
there for an unbounded amount of time, so streaming is equivalent to
downloading [most of the time].

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detaro
This is similar to the argument made in German law, which explicitly excludes
(rough description) "transient copies that only exist as a detail of the
technical transfer method" from protection.

AFAIK mostly intended to stop people nitpicking technical details (e.g.
claiming that you infringed on copyright on an image that you are allowed to
view, but did not have explicit permission to create a copy of it in your
browser cache, or javascript in a website, ...), it also is used to defend
streaming.

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bobajeff
I thought copyright was about distribution of content not acquiring content.

