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[flagged] Supreme Court: There's No 'Time Limit' on Copyright Infringement Claims (torrentfreak.com)
54 points by Rant423 on May 11, 2024 | hide | past | favorite | 46 comments


Why is Copyright, of all things, exempt from the federal statute of limitations?

Are federal CSA cases exempted from the federal statute of limitations then?

For CSA cases, e.g. California has: two (2) years from when the victim remembers IIUC?


It isn't exempt from anything; the majority opinion says "The Act’s statute of limitations establishes a three year period for filing suit, which begins to run when a claim accrues."

The question is when the claim accrues. As in your example of CSA cases, they decided it's from when the victim discovers the crime and not when the crime occurred.


Are Conflict of Interest cases against the court exempted from the Statute of Limitations?

Can commuted and pardoned cases be reheard once the elected executive is out of office, if there no limit to the statute of limitations?

(Ludicrous that the court would consider total immunity for an executive of one branch, by the way.)


They didn’t even have an ethics code until last year. The new one isn’t great , either. https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/analysis-opinion/new-...

> The rules themselves are weak. Consider recusal, when justices step aside from considering a case. The justices took the rule that applies to lower court judges but then inserted a handful of new loopholes, including one that could be so big that it swallows the rule — basically allowing a justice to disregard a required recusal if they think their vote is needed in the case. And the financial disclosure rules haven’t tightened at all — a significant shortcoming, since the justices have proven themselves troublingly adept at sidestepping the current rules, whether for RVs, tuition, fishing trips, or real estate deals.


Can the executive terminate the employment contract of a nominated director of a DOJ employee, if there are to be three separate branches of government?


Who said anything about the executive?

You simply can’t file a “conflict of interest” case against SCOTUS. At all. The statute of limitations is a femtosecond.

That said, the DOJ is executive, not judicial. The courts are not part of it.


Ah, because the DOJ Department of Justice != the Judicial Branch.

Can SCOTUS censure Members of Congress or the Executive, then?

If there are insufficient checks and balances there should be Amendments to preserve separation of powers amongst the branches.


The DOJ is literally part of the executive branch


There is a nomination procedure which requires (?) Congressional confirmation, but Congress has no recourse for obstructive termination of a nominated director by the executive?

Isn't that the wolf guarding the hen house; i.e. what the founders expressly intended to prevent?


The recourse is impeachment.


With the war powers authorized in the 2000s, there's more than impeachment.

Are they American? Where is their birthy certy? (Is there Habeas Corpus for all persons. "You're not even American!")

If the executive is totally immune, they wouldn't need to assist a foreign country illegally in order to get Congress to grant them extra power.


Voluntary non-binding code of ethics.


> Can commuted and pardoned cases be reheard once the elected executive is out of office, if there no limit to the statute of limitations?

That would be a double-jeopardy issue.


Isn't the ruling because there is no overarching federal statute of limitations?


The title is not accurate.

The Court clarified that the time limit is 3 years from discovering the infringement, not 3 years from when the infringement took place.


I dont get why people elsewhere on this thread are so up in arms about it - it seems like a perfectly reasonable interpretation of federal law, consistent with other kinds of civil claims.

Tying the ability to recover damages not to the date of the action that caused the loss, but rather to when you discovered the loss seems more reasonable.


In general, tying statute of limitations to discovery rather than date of occurence is a bad idea because it extends liability infinitely and rewards incompetence on the victim side, which is egregious in general, but especially egregious in civil matters.


The problem I can see is the extension of the period of damages. There is an argument to be made that there should probably be a statutory cap on years for damages accrual rather than just 'as long as you infringed,' but that's for the legislature to do.


I agree generally that there needs to be a cap on damages.


Unfortunately, this is probably the correct decision. It's not the SCOTUS's job to determine what a "good" law versus a "bad" law is, unless it directly violates the constitution - which, when the constitution specifically says copyright is acceptable, and says nothing about a requirement for any statute of limitations, this clearly isn't.


People tend to mistake what the job of the Supreme Courts is. It is not as some form of vindictive righteousness body.

Supreme courts are there to uphold the definite letter of the law. If laws are bad/outdated or otherwise improper, it's up to the other branches of government to change them.


Copyright is going to be tested to its limits in the next few years

I wonder what the evolution of copyright will look like


[flagged]


Arguments about morality and preservation of culture aside, almost every who pirates does so because they want free shit, let's be realistic.


You are probably right in general.

However, copyright extends so long now though that it's not uncommon for things to be out of print or no longer distributed, so your only option is "pirating" if you want a copy at all. There's all sorts of weird related scenarios as well.

Maybe it's just what I'm personally familiar with but I no longer feel like the typical pirating case is what it was in the 90s, the "free stuff" case. More often now, it's things that someone can't legitimately get otherwise.


Or because they live in a country where the legal option doesn't even exist. Or because the legal option sucks so bad that you can't use it (hello Amazon prime)


I never claimed that wanting free shit was the only reason people pirate, but the most common reason. Obviously other reasons exist.

But I still suspect that given a free illegal option and a paid illegal option most of your examples would still opt for free.


That's probably not true. You may want to consider for example that pirates are the group that spend the most on content.


> Or because the legal option sucks so bad that you can't use it (hello Amazon prime)

You can literally buy a Fire tablet for $49; or on eBay $20, and be able to use it and the DRM without touching your Linux stack. Complaining about the lack of legal methods is just a lack of exertion.


Even with cheap hardware not all content is available in all regions.

Which results in VPN and breaching the services terms or illegal download.


>Even with cheap hardware not all content is available in all regions. *in a cheap digital format for streaming or download.

You can find most content for purchase in hard media


The problem is that the legal methods for Internet streaming are a bad experience. I don't pirate both because I have the money and because it's illegal. But it would probably be a better experience than digital rentals if I did.


Why would I buy some extra hardware with less screen quality than I already have?


The majority of people want free shit, regardless of whether it’s a giveaway or a download. That’s just not an argument for or against piracy.

The legal stage is not “can people get free shit in the future” but “can people take it upon themselves to gain/give reasonable and rightful access”.

If we simply “give up the fight” and let companies decide what we can and cannot have, they will put locks on every piece of content. Then locks on every piece of hardware. Then locks on every interaction. Then silos around everything. And after that they will subjectively decide what we get exposed to since they own the distribution channel. Maybe no independent artists. Maybe no content that “has an agenda”. Maybe lists that would make banned book lists look tame.

And that doesn’t even count the ability retroactively remove access to what you grew up on, what you love, and what you hold as important. Regardless of whether you “purchased” it or not (because in this scenario you would have “purchased” everything).

If we hand them absolute power over our experiences we hand over everything.


>Arguments about morality and preservation of culture aside...

Let's just put aside the actually pertinent arguments and deal with the preferred strawman...


I didn't set up a strawman, nor did I attempt to invalidate any otherwise pertient arguments.


This is also a documented statistical fact - more than 90% of Yuzu users (or emulation users) do not dump their own keys. That, kind with TOTK famously getting pirated over a million times before release; shows that most arguments about morality and preservation of culture (although they have merit) are mainly given by people interested in justifying their own actions.


Of course they don't, this isn't some big gotcha. Why even bother when a Google search saves you the work? I play some old Pokémon games that came out on the DS and ya know what, I just downloaded the game and shoved it in an emulator rather then figuring out how to get it out of my own cart.

Some nice person already did the work and I don't feel the need to conduct legal ritual with candles and blood rites to get a blessed copy of the same damn bits that are just sitting right there. If I could just get an Nintendo SD card adapter and plug it in to my laptop and dd to get the image it would be a different story.


"Arguments about the reasons people don't just pirate to get free shit aside, almost everyone just wants free shit"


Yes, because even when you account for people who pirate for those other reasons, the majority of people who pirate do so for free shit.


No time limit for copyright claims but very strict limits for anything to do with labour rights - and they still keep telling us it's a country of laws.


It would be nice to have some mechanism to force the various branches of government to pass laws that oppose their own collective self-interests but advance the interests of the populace.


Sure. Get a majority of people and a majority of states to vote for it. That's the mechanism.


There...is... It's even in the bill of rights, it's just not very pleasant.


I mean, it is a country of laws. Just...some of those laws are pretty bad. For what it's worth, the Court in this case is narrowly focused on correcting a lower court's interpretation of the Copyright Act, not something in the Constitution or something fundamental, and on a first glance, I at least feel that their conclusion is highly justifiable. That doesn't mean the Copyright Act isn't fundamentally broken (it is, on my opinion), but that's trivially fixable by Congress if we get appropriately minded representatives.


The doctrine of adverse possession is well-established, at some point there has to be certainty about who owns what. Look at East Germany after reunification if you don't believe, the fights over real estate seriously delayed rebuilding.

But for copyright adverse possession doesn't apply - it's understandable why the music industry would have the Court say so.


Minority rule by design (or originalists), a perspective: https://www.npr.org/2024/04/22/1246297603/ari-berman-minorit...




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