Quote me a single passage in any copyright law that says watching illegal videos is a crime and I'll salute you.
I think law makers tend to work with the assumption that illegal activities
are crimes. Until quite recently, Australian law considered illegal the act of copying a legally bought CD and converting the tracks to mp3 for use on a device such as an iPod. As you can see, it is not simply a matter of paying for access one way and acquiring it through another. The law must proscribe such rights and each country has different laws. Radio broadcasts of cricket are often not streamed over the internet because the rights are far different.
ya cuz its not right and its not legal. i think planetcricket can get in trouble by posting those videos even tho we didnt make them someone did but we are showing them i think
I don't think PC would actually be legally implicated in anything without actually hosting content, but they can be harassed and intimidated. This site isn't anyone's livelihood (at least as far as I know), this is just here for fun. That makes any level of harassment from corporations or authorities not worth anyone's while. If a large, well funded body threatened legal action, it would not matter much if the case is weak. Who is going to pay to defend PC?
This connects with certain issues surrounding the Recording Industry Association of America. One thing I will tell you about the RIAA is that they're not looking to get just you. If they go after someone, it has to be worth the effort. Most people are not worth it, whether it is because their ISP doesn't give out their details or because they are internet savvy and don't get sucked in by obvious RIAA plants. A quick google search can tell you the sorts of people they managed to get to. There are plenty of ridiculous suits against old ladies, like a grandmother who lets her grandchildren use her computer, where they download a few mp3s.
They're also good targets because they have no money, don't understand their rights on the issue and don't want to fight. Going to court is expensive even for the plaintiff, but settling out of court isn't as much, even though a judge might award more money. While a hardened netizen might scoff at someone being 'caught with as many as 1000 songs', the average newspaper reader gets a fright. It also comes across in the papers as if they could have used the law, but showed mercy on poor granny.
The RIAA managed to launch hundreds of lawsuits, but the practice has ground to a halt on the back of some stumbling blocks. One prominent issue is that the method by which they used to determine if a transaction could turn up a very false positive. One person was accused of using the p2p program Kazaa, when they owned a Mac that was not capable of connecting to Kazaa. One more notable case involved a deceased target. The publicity was quite bad and they discovered that there were indeed people who were willing to fight back. A single court case could be worth 20 successful settlements and take five years to finish.
More recently, the music sharing community oink.me.uk was brought down by a police raid. The community was based on BitTorrent, a p2p program where users host the content that is transferred and no server is required to host the shared files. At this point, none of the 180,000 users have reported legal problems. This is to some degree because operators of such sites have a choice of countries to host their site from and thus choose one that protects their interests the best. Because that country is never the USA, American companies have a hard time getting the data from the shutdown of a major piracy ring.
