German Court Says 'Accidental' File Sharing Isn't A Crime
from the accidentally-on-purpose dept
Michael Scott alerts us to the news that a court in Germany has found that accidental file sharing is not a crime. In this case, it involved a guy using file sharing software, where he didn't realize that anything he downloaded was automatically shared. For that reason, he was found not guilty of sharing the same content. Of course, as the article notes, this isn't likely to be meaningful in other lawsuits in Germany for a variety of reasons, including the lack of precedential power of court rulings, and the fact that most copyright cases in Germany are civil, rather than criminal cases (this one was criminal, because of the nature of the content). Still, in an era when "accidental infringement" has become pretty much the norm, it's nice seeing a court realize the problems of charging someone for infringing by accident.Thank you for reading this Techdirt post. With so many things competing for everyone’s attention these days, we really appreciate you giving us your time. We work hard every day to put quality content out there for our community.
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Filed Under: accidental file sharing, crime, germany
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Sorry....big fan of them. Had to correct you
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Question
Basically I'm asking if violent pornography is illegal in Germany (I could see some being illegal) or did some uptight asshole make it a criminal case because they were offended by legal porn.
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Well, in that case I think it falls under "Ignorance of the law is no excuse". So he didn't pay attention to the software, that's his own damn fault.
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I can hear him in court now,
"Ich weisse nicht, Ich weisse nicht"
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The point here is that there was absolutely no intent to perform the act that he was charged with. He was cleared of the charge of "Distribution" because he had no intent to distribute the material, and didn't even know that it was being distributed from his computer.
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Well, it couldn't be the software's fault, they would have safe harbor from that, wouldn't they?
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No - that's an ok analogy. If the charge was specifically "First Degree Murder" - then you would in fact be found innocent of that charge.
Of course; after that - it might end up being manslaughter, etc - but for the 'accused offense' of Murder in the First degree, it would not apply.
So yeah - a prosecutor could goof that up if the legal docs weren't in order somehow, I'm sure.
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It's nice to see the courts open up another flaming huge loophole that you could drive a truck through.
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It's another huge loophole.
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In Germany maybe ...
But I still do not get the relationship to the other story about the corrupted files.
I didn't know that was in the shared folder
... is equal to
I'm going to turn in a corrupted file because I didn't do the assignement
Both are total lies ? Ok, I guess.
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