Let’s say I buy something digital online - for example some fonts. I then take those fonts and share them on a P2P site like Piratebay. Have I committed a crime or is it only the person that downloads those fonts?
Depend who, where. In general, the person offering the songs rather than the person downloading them is the one hit with the lawsuits. This is because when you offer them to others, it is easy to track you down - everyone can see your offer. When Joe Schmoe downloads the file, it is only traffic between you and him; nobody else can easily tell.
In general, the “making available” offer was seen as the same as actually selling (or giving away). You are distributing in violation of copyright. In the USAI believe this has become a criminal offense as well as a civil tort.
Pirate Bay / bit torrent is a special case. With bit torrent, you download chunks from sources all over until you get the whole file; as someone downloads a file, they become part of the community simultaneously offering parts they have so far downloaded. AFAIK most clients, in the spirit of cooperative sharing, don’t offer the option to leech without contributing to the crowd. So, if you download you also offer to upload. Ergo, you are a target for a lawsuit.
In the United States, fonts are not copyrightable, except for scalable fonts. This may not be true in other countries.
In terms of the general concepts, intent plays a big part in determining guilt. Uploading to a file sharing site would, I believe, constitute a deliberate intention to illegally distribute a copyrighted work. This would be self-evident to any reasonable person. To use a more extreme example:
If you deliberately remove a stop sign you’re guilty of more than just theft of property, you’ve committed reckless endangerment even if your act is discovered and fixed *before *anyone gets hurt.
I don’t want to sound like an RIAA PSA, I don’t think uploading files is on a par with that. But the violation is committed once you upload the file, whether it ever gets actually downloaded or not. Of course downloading it is illegal too.
And is all but irrelevant even in the US – almost all fonts are scalable fonts now. Bitmap fonts, except for a few specialty uses like game engines, are all but extinct.
In my jurisdiction, copyright infringement is a strict liability tort - no mens rea necessary. There is a defense of innocent infringement, but in the scenario above, I honestly don’t think it’ll fly.
The “innocent infringer” concept is supposed to be a very narrow one. It is meant to protect middlemen, like retailers, who acquire inventory believing that it’s legit, but later it turns out to be counterfeit.
I have actually run across the ditsy types who did not know that Limewire, for example, was not just a music player but also sharing all their music with the whole world. The other amazing thing was that nobody at thier employer had a clue either, so this organization quite likely sharing hundreds of songs on their public IP was oblivious to the fact.
But basically, offering a sng for download is the same as distributing. You are in violation.
It’s also a violation of your End-User Licensing Agreement, to which you agreed in order to download the fonts.
Which may or may not be enforcable.
It’s uncommon for them not to be enforceable.
I thought there was a huge issue that because of the boilerplate, when you had to accepts, terms and conditions, etc. that some were not enforcible
About 10 years ago, it used to come up often in cases, but generally speaking courts routinely found that these were enforceable contracts.
(And traditionally speaking, there’s not much wrong with boilerplate, so long as the law is concerned. It’s pretty much a buyer beware situation.)
In fact, it’s pretty much accepted these days that the default mode for commercial software is that it is licensed, not sold.
It would be worthy of remark for a court today to find any such contract unenforceable. It just doesn’t happen.
How do you know? Plenty of end-user license agreements, including those for fonts, permit redistribution under certain conditions.
You’ve got some problems with your premises. For one, digital things aren’t normally bought and sold the way that physical objects are. Normally what you are doing is buying a licence to use the work in certain ways and under certain conditions. That use may or may not include redistribution. Second, it’s not possible to share files on the Pirate Bay; they don’t host any original media. All they do is run a website and a torrent tracker which helps connect people who want to download certain files with the people who have a copy of these files. Any copying of data would take place directly between you and a third party the Pirate Bay may have put you in touch with.
So to determine whether or not your scenario involves illegal activity, you need to establish two things:
[ol][li]Does the licence you purchased permit you to redistribute the work through a P2P network? If yes, what you are doing is almost certainly not illegal.[/li][li]Does any relevant jurisdiction criminalize the unauthorized distribution of copyrighted works in the manner you propose? Depending on the way the law is worded, the action may be a crime only if the distribution was done for commercial gain, or in a certain volume.[/li][/ol]
Even if the answer to the second question is no, you may still be liable for civil penalties. Indeed, most actioned copyright infringement results in a civil suit, not a criminal one.