I read a news story about the U.S. Copyright Group presenting a list of IP addresses to the courts in the hope of starting legal proceedings against people who downloaded The Hurt Locker over the internet.
In the comments section of this story someone suggested that if you were one of those being chased for money by the USCG you could challenge the decision by buying a copy of the film and taking it to court with you. There would be no proof of when you bought the film and you could argue that you were legally allowed to download the film as you had already paid for it.
Is there any mileage to this idea, let’s assume that you disabled your upload so you weren’t sending the file to others, you were simply leeching it. Is is still against the law to download a film that you have bought on DVD?
None. Owning a copy of a film does not give you the right to download copies (absent an agreement to that effect, which the film doesn’t have).
Copyright is the right to make copies. You do not have the right to copy anything without permission from the copyright holder. (Read the law before arguing this – only libraries are allowed to make archive copies). Copying it from DVD to your hard drive is a copyright violation (though it’s usually not enforced).
Well, the legality of format shifting is debatable - it’s not as clear cut as you make it out to be. But it does seem that in a similar case (downloading MP3s of a CD you own) the Seventh Circuit would reject it.
[QUOTE=In re Aimster]
Someone might own a popular-music CD that he was particularly fond of, but he had not downloaded it into his computer and now he finds himself out of town but with this laptop and he wants to listen to the CD, so he uses Aimster’s service to download a copy. This might be a fair use rather than a copyright infringement, by analogy to the time shifting approved as fair use in the Sony case. . . . The analogy was rejected in UMG Recordings v. MP3.com, Inc. . . . on the ground that the copy on the defendant’s server was an unauthorized derivative work; a solider ground, in light of Sony’s rejection of the parallel argument with respect to time shifting, would have been that the defendant’s method for requiring that its customers “prove” that they owned the CDs containing the music they wanted to download was too lax.
[/QUOTE]
ETA: although, copying a DVD to your hard drive is probably a violation of the DMCA, if you have to break the encryption to do so.