Pirating Songs in Germany

kiwi_bird

After a new ruling you DO NOT have to pay anything if you download less then 2000 songs and don't "reproduce" them.

...

Sounds awesome, but how is 'reproducing' defined here? I mean, playing an mp3 reproduces the sound.

kiwi_bird

It's defined as burning it on a CD and selling it.

Omnutia

Can we get some links to news about this?

kiwi_bird

After searching quite a bit I found this article. Since it's in German I'll quickly explain:

The title says that the prosecutors will only go after you if you download 200 songs. If you read further down it says that the states regulate this issue differently. In some you can only get prosecuted if you cause more than 3000€ in damages, and in others only if you have download 3000 music files or 200 films.

...

[O]nly if you have download 3000 music files

And now they have to proof you downloaded all those songs and did not rip them from CDs.

kiwi_bird

I read an article a few months ago, where they showed how they catch the "Pirates". They seriously have 20 people sitting in front of windows boxes running Bear Share and writing down the IP address of people with a lot of uploads..

So in theory if you use Bittorrent you can not get sued, since how are they going to prove you downloaded more than just the one album/ song? It's also been made much harder to get a warrant to search someones computer.

Omnutia

Wait a second, since when has an EU country wanted to stand up for the rights of it's citizens? I say something fishy is going on.

kiwi_bird

They've only done this new ruling because it took too much time to go through all the filed suits.