2022? Return to the central page.
Let the reader note, first of all, that I am not a lawyer. I am just an interested layperson who is interested in some legal questions. Everything below reflects my personal understanding of the legal situation in the United States, and you should not rely on it as legal advice.
In the realm of copyright, there are different sorts of illegality out there. For example, operating a pirate website, which simply and openly hosts copies of copyrighted books, is pretty much illegal in every relevant sense of the word. If you set up such a website, you'll get complaints. If you don't take down the website, odds are good you'll find yourself in court, facing massive fines. It is illegal, and the law is enforced.
Moving one level down, imaging you use some kind of torrenting software, without making efforts to disguise yourself, to download and share copyrighted books. A small fraction of people land in any serious jeopardy over this kind of thing, but trouble does find people from time to time.
Moving yet another level down is the simple downloading of a PDF from the internet. This is where things get interesting. Whenever you look at anything online, your computer does make a copy. A very strict hypothetical regime might then punish anyone who looks at copyrighted material that is illegally posted. To get really zealous about enforcing against this kind of 'violation', however, would involve making the average web-surfing Joe responsible for knowing the copyright status of what is behind every link he clicks before he clicks it. That's a non-starter, practically speaking.
And so we come to the simple downloading of PDFs of copyright-protected books. Suppose you were to go to LibGen, for instance, and download a PDF of a book you know is copyrighted. Could you be prosecuted? My understanding is that it is at least theoretically possible. It certainly seems to be a violation of copyright. But I don't know (as of 2022) of a single case where a single person was ever prosecuted for downloading a PDF in that manner.
That's interesting to me. Unless I am misunderstanding the situation, here is an act that is illegal, common, and has never once been successfully prosecuted. It appears to be illegal in the same sense that driving a car at five miles an hour over the speed limit is illegal.
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