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posted by Fnord666 on Saturday February 10 2018, @12:54PM   Printer-friendly
from the don't-even-think-about-it dept.

Over at TorrentFreak there is an article about aggressive prosecution for even talking about the streaming service Popcorn Time.

A man from Denmark has been handed a six-month conditional prison sentence for spreading information about Popcorn Time. In what is being described as a first for Europe, the man was convicted after telling people how to download, install and use the movie streaming service. He was also ordered to forfeit $83,300 in ad revenue and complete 120 hours community service.

[...] Importantly, PopcornTime.dk hosted no software, preferring to link to other sites where the application could be downloaded instead. That didn't prevent an aggressive prosecution though and now, two-and-half years later, the verdict's in and it's bound to raise more than a few eyebrows.

Neither this specific case nor questions about the service in general have played out yet. Control over playback and distribution and the grey area in between have been hotly contested for decades, and will continue to be for the forseeable future. The first big, international case being the one against Jon Lech Johansen in Norway. Recently, with the integration of digital restrictions into the very standards making up the web, things will become more difficult in the area of distribution and playback.

Source : Man Handed Conditional Prison Sentence for Spreading Popcorn Time Information


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  • (Score: 4, Informative) by Pino P on Saturday February 10 2018, @01:48PM (4 children)

    by Pino P (4721) on Saturday February 10 2018, @01:48PM (#636000) Journal

    constant attacks on free speech backed by diplomatic and economic pressure from the US, the empire of hypocrites.

    It doesn't look quite so hypocritical once you understand the two principles that United States federal courts have applied to resolve the conflict between copyright and the First Amendment.

    The United States recognizes free speech in ideas and assumes that everyone expressing a particular idea can come up with an original expression of said idea. This idea-expression divide [wikipedia.org] is codified as 17 USC 102(b) [cornell.edu].

    In some cases, the idea itself is a criticism of another author's expression. To enable speech that comments on expression, the law recognizes brief use of others' works for certain purposes as noninfringing. Fair use is codified as 17 USC 107 [cornell.edu].

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  • (Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Saturday February 10 2018, @05:20PM

    by JoeMerchant (3937) on Saturday February 10 2018, @05:20PM (#636062)

    $83,000 in ad revenue, sounds like he's doing more than just talking.

    --
    🌻🌻 [google.com]
  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 10 2018, @09:00PM (2 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 10 2018, @09:00PM (#636126)

    Still sounds utterly hypocritical to me. Especially since there is no such exception in the first amendment, meaning that rogue judges invented this standard

    • (Score: 2) by Pino P on Monday February 12 2018, @02:39AM

      by Pino P (4721) on Monday February 12 2018, @02:39AM (#636536) Journal

      Freedom of speech (Amendment I) and the Congress's power to secure exclusive rights to authors (Article I, section 8) are coequal parts of the Constitution, enacted within a couple years of each other. I doubt that it was the intent of the author of the Bill of Rights to repeal the copyright power of the Congress.

    • (Score: 2) by urza9814 on Monday February 12 2018, @06:35PM

      by urza9814 (3954) on Monday February 12 2018, @06:35PM (#636766) Journal

      Still sounds utterly hypocritical to me. Especially since there is no such exception in the first amendment, meaning that rogue judges invented this standard

      No, it's got nothing to do with rogue judges -- the Constitution, which defines copyright, came first. The First Amendment was an addition to that Constitution that declares that Congress cannot pass any laws restricting the freedom of speech. But the copyright restriction is not a new law, it is a power already granted to Congress by the Constitution. So copyright takes precedence over the right to free speech as that right has been established in the US, and that's *by design*, not something that was retrofitted later. For as long as free speech has existed in this country, copyright has had precedence.

      The problem is that the foothold given to copyright by the Constitution has now been used to expand the thing beyond any reasonable terms...you could perhaps claim that expansion as being unconstitutional/hypocritical, but copyright in general absolutely cannot be.