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File-Sharing For Personal Use Declared Legal In Portugal
New submitter M0j0_j0j0 writes "After receiving 2000 complaints regarding 'illegal file sharing' from ACAPOR regarding P2P networks, the Portuguese prosecutor refused to take the case into court on the premise that file sharing is not illegal in the territory if files are for personal and not commercial use. The court also stated that the complaints had, as sole evidence, the IP address of users, and that it is a wrong statement to assume an IP address is directly related to one individual. TorrentFreak has a piece in English with more details (original source in Portuguese)."
...among a lot of insanity...let's just see what German...err, the EU has to say about that.
Portuguese citizens need to be reminded that they're still under the jurisdiction of U.S. law, and WILL be extradited to the U.S. for breaking any IP laws!
What political party do you join when you don't like Bible-thumpers *or* hippies?
Someone better stop this sh*t before it spreads!... Common sense that is!
Where's the RIAA/MPAA/1% at with damage control?
Oh thats right, they are buttering up the EU and other large groups instead of small member or non-member nations...
If they suddenly went POOF, I wouldn't have a care in the world
I'm no legal expert, but doesn't that mean piracy is legal as long as you aren't charging for it? Awesome stuff.
Nice.
Portugal is also a very pretty country with lots of nature, and did I mention CHEAP housing with LOTS of land for pocket change? Plus low taxes, and even lower for the seniors.
Perfect retirement country, I may be heading there one day...who knows.
What this world is coming to - is for you and me to decide.
Anyone got a lead on good Portuguese proxy servers I can torrent through?
Want to help me set some up?
Silence is a state of mime.
And this is how it will remain until the bribe I mean the interest free financial bailout monies are forwarded. At which point the subject will be revisited.
Why Portugal May Be the Next Greece
Undetectable Steganography? Yep, there's an app fo
Enabling pirates since ~1577. Thanks!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simon_Fernandez
Silence is a state of mime.
there's no point judging the ones who use such material. find the source of the problem not the result!
âoeWe are doing anything we can to alert the government to the very serious situation in the entertainment industryâ
I can't quite put my finger on it exactly, but for some reason that sentence made me LOL bigtime. Luckily no coffee was in my mouth at that moment, or I'd have ejected it explosively through several facial orifices.
"The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
You just wait until various acronymous industry groups start blaming Portugal's "lax" IP laws on their financial problems. With entertainment revenue's bottom dropping out, as it does to an extent when people have little or no disposable income, we're bound to hear industry groups blaming it all on legalized file sharing. Sigh.
A successful API design takes a mixture of software design and pedagogy.
... terrorists!
The result has been a decrease in drug use and all associated problems
I don't think you really drove the point home. What this literally means is that decriminalization of drugs results in:
- LESS crime
- LESS violence
- LESS injustice
- LESS corruption in government
In other words, decriminalization has the exact opposite result of what the government propaganda teaches us. That should immediately raise a red flag and cause a citizen to lose trust in government. The fact that drug use itself also goes down, rather than up, is just the icing on the cake. The reason drugs need to be decriminalized is not simply to lower drug use; it is for the much more critical reasons stated above.
Since we're fucking up protocols like this... Ridiculous!
...there is a free seat, right next to switzerland...
...all this really means is that the right person(s) in Portuguese government haven't yet been bought. Rest assured they will be, and "order" will be restored.
This is a closely-guarded secret held under wraps by the US government, corporate-owned media, Big Pharma, and most especially the sickening for-profit prison corporations. You as a US citizen will NEVER hear about this on the news. Bill Maher should open every show talking about Portugal and compare it US prison statistics.
...but the Public Prosecutor's Office (where ACAPOR had originally filled a complaint) that refused to pursue the case, due to the reasons outlined in the linked articles.
(switch "the" and "NOT" on the subject line. sorry about that)
Portuguese with some legal background:
It has always been legal to own or acquire (download) unauthorized copies of most content. *
It's legal to make how many copies you want for your own use and to share with other people
within your "personal" sphere.
What is illegal is "making such content available to the public", emphasis on "public" as in
"general public".
What the A.G. clarified is that, in the particular case of BT and similar P2P protocols,
the act of seeding a file you are downloading, or did just download, enjoys the same treatment
as if you were downloading using a traditional protocol, i.e., benefits from the "personal use"
exception.
This does not mean you can happily run a public W4R3Z FTP server with impunity, but it does clarify
an important issue re: the law vs P2P downloads that had had no previous legal interpretation.
It has also brought about an interesting IP != person argument which will be interesting to follow up on,
in case of more serious offenses.
AC
* thanks to the lobbying efforts of the BSA-equivalent in the 90s, computer programs are dealt with differently
and enjoy no "personal use" rights.
Actually, there isn't any news here, only confusion, and file-sharing in Portugal is still illegal. This means you cannot share something that is copyrighted and of which you have no right to copy. But receiving the result of the copy is not illegal. This basically means that it's illegal to upload, but downloading is legal. Using BitTorrent for downloading copyrighted material of which you have no right to copy is also illegal because you're uploading when you're downloading.
Portugal will benefit now from increased immigration of file sharers, maybe their economy will be saved as a result...
Piracy = making money off of other people's works = bad
File sharing != Piracy
Thank goodness the portugese legal system understands that as most of the rest of the world (Including Slashdot) seems to think those things are one and the same.
I'd say the next Pirate Bay VPN located there will sure meet your description of a globally distributing film/music/software company based in Portugal. :)
..don't panic
From Wikipedia:
Just because Americans don't hear about foreign films doesn't mean they don't exist, or even thrive (like all other film industries, including the American one).
There was a /. article on the proposed CleanIT program which is as cold anc clean as fascist naziism can get - awful. Eurocrats is not a synonym for Beaurocrats but for cold-blooded inbred Aristocrats, plain and simple.
It's clear to me that we need to end the European Union. Let the countries make their own laws. Under proposed EU fascist changes, Portuguese file sharers could be arrested with or without file sharing, so this is a nice way to flip the bird as it were - people are not blamed with or without file sharing.
Portugal has a small population. That has NOTHING to do with it. Go back to sl/heep..
Hey, everyone that's not American. Lets all get behind China and f#$k these yank Equilibrium-style fascists once and for all
Looks like Portugal will be the next country that is "harboring terrorists".
> file sharing is not illegal on the territory, if, files are for personal and not commercial use.
The whole posit is absurd. Copyrighted material (namely music and movies) are created exclusively for personal use, because each person using, watching and/or hearing them, either enjoys or does not enjoy them individually, because it decides inside one's brain. This fact does not change between the movie theatre and the home LCD TV. If persons personally do not pay in exchange for the audio-visual experience, there is no meaning in creating stage-quality movies and music, considering they cost a fortune to make. Yet, a world without public-display worthy music and movies would be much like taliban meets vahhabi islam and no SLD reader wants to live in such a land.
There is something more here, with regards to mentioning islam. They just hate jewry. File sharing P2P pirates also have a big problem with jewry, that is why they refuse to pay for enjoying music and video. Jewish investors founded and still own and run ALL of Hollywood studios, the jewish producers and directors make movies and popular music and mostly jewish actors star in movies and TV shows. That is something most gentile (goyim) cannot accept, even though they lack the creative minds and innovativeness to replace them, to become anything more than consumers of jewish-made entertainment and technology.
The majority of goyim, who are not righteous among the nations, want to deny money flow to the jewry, hoping their world-governing influence will collapse (even though the modern civilization would be nowhere without the jewish brains of journalism, science and finance). That is why net-borne MP3 pirating first started in Russia, the most anti-semitic land of all and that is why the Pirate Bay site is funded by the scandinavian far-right wing party.
Each SLD reader must make up his (her) mind now on this very important moral question. How is taking for free from jewish-run music and movies businesses different from the taking of jewish commercial property that was going on in 1933-1945's Germany? That uncompensated taking led to a terrible outcome of shoah, but where will the rampant online piracy lead? The answer concerns the very existance of the Chosen Nation, just as much as iranian atom does.
Jewish people can only work with their minds and thus create intellectual property, because the gentile kings have for many centuries banned them from the fields of agriculture and industry, not even allowing them to continue the ancient tradition where rabbis were carpenters in the weekdays. If habitual P2P purges jewish livelyhood from the media and entertainment activity, how will modern jewry survive, without commercial money flow, no lands, no industry? Maybe that is the utmost sinister aim of P2P movement to erase the only people whom the Almighty allied himself. Therefore P2P is evil and downloaders are servants of pure evil. If you want to eventually end up in Abraham's bosom, rather than crumble back to the dust of the soil in body and soul, do not file share jewish-made movies music and books! Which means do not file share any such media, because 95%+ of it is jewish-made and you have no right to take for free from the Chosen Nation!.
However, most of the netizen generation is brazen vile and afro-ishly cheeky in its stubbornness, so we may as well phophetize to the donkeys. Therefore, one can only hope the jewry, born ingenious, outsmarts, as usual, its detractors and has already re-purposed the rampant P2P phenomenon to fully block the commercial entry of far eastern (JP/KR) popular media into the free world markets, while Hollywood barely survives on its brick and mortar basis. Yet, the mortars will soon sound and the global net will be dismantled due to war security concerns, after which P2P will be ceased for good and jewish owned media regains its previous high revenue-earning levels. This way the brutally immoral and sexually perverted asian media junk can be barred from the free world, making the mankind more righteous, which is the jewry's utmost declared aim.
It will be interesting to check back a year from now and see if virtually no-one produces Portuguese language content at that time since you won't be able to sell enough to recoup the costs of making and marketing it. Maybe look at how many NY Times bestsellers are translated Portuguese today and how many are avaible a year or two from now. I know I wouldn't spend my time translating, only to sell one copy and have everyone else pirate it. Maybe it'll work out well, maybe not. Let's check back next year and see, shall we.