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Comment by pbhjpbhj | Hacker News Reader

AFAIAA there are lawful reasons for development of such an app both in the UK and USA under accessibility laws.

That of course doesn't mean companies won't sue, or pay off a developer, or make threats, etc..

I'm quite interested about where it sits wrt 'time shifting' which is allowed in the UK. I'm allowed to record "tv" to watch later, AFAIK; so I can watch on the train, or when I'm away from the "tv" receiving equipment (eg aerial) as long as I only watch it once and don't show other people (!). So, can I still download a YouTube video to watch in the car where I _personally_ don't have the ability to watch? YouTube is TV. Or would it only count for a live broadcast show on YouTube?

This is my personal opinion and is not legal advice.

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Stop looking for lawful reasons to do things, do things assuming they are lawful until shown otherwise.

Trawling the legal system for loopholes to Pull One Over on mega-corporations is kind of like throwing a bunch of marbles in front of someone with a rocket launcher pointed at you. Quite fun to see it work in movies, not so much a strategy for solving the issues at hand in reality

>I'm allowed to record "tv" to [...] only watch it once

This is gold. What if you mirror it on two TV screens, but one has a slight latency, because HDMI->SCART something something connector?

The law isn’t written by machines. Obviously that would be okay.

From the same people that tell me I have to come to a complete stop at a stop sign. The complete fools, don't they know my car will still have temperature!

The Heisenberg uncertainty principle may make enforcement a little tough.

What about the earth spin? Whether you slow down or not if you break to a "complete" stop isn't even clear... it depend on the direction you drive compared to the earth rotation you may actually accelerate.

Yossarian shot up in bed; "I see everything twice!" he cried. The TV licensing auditors hurried into the room. "How many TV shows are playing?" one asked, holding up one screen. "Two" said Yossarian. "Now how many?", pointing at two mirrored screens with a delay between them. "Two" said Yossarian. "And now?" switching both screens off. "Two" said Yossarian.

The TV licensing auditors conferred amongst themselves. "If he sees everything twice, he needs two licenses" one argued. "Hold on" said another, "he reported seeing six shows, he needs six licenses". "We showed him three, he saw six, he needs nine licenses" said another. The second one's eyes narrowed. "The law doesn't allow him to see more than one, he needs a fine". "If he's creating new feeds without permissions, that's distribution and copyright infringement, he could be facing a custodial sentence for this". They turned to Yossarian who decided it had gone far enough. "I see everything once!" he cried. "Destruction of evidence now, is it?".

It's Content-22: if you don't want to watch it, there's no money to be made from you so you can - better that you watch and talk about it than not. But if you do want to watch it, then you can't, not without paying. The content is made for people who want it, but those are the very people who have to be kept from it. The people who want to come in, can't, and the people who want to share it, mustn't.

Yossarian thought about Content-22. He picked up a book. "Put me through to cancellations, I have been meaning to do more reading lately". The TV licensing auditors hesitated and glanced at each other. "One license per person, covers all screens, after all you can only watch one at a time" said one. "We can give you a discount if you extend your license for another year?" said another. "And send you an upgraded set-top box for being a loyal customer".

Loved this.

Brilliant, great username too.

The legal community isn't interested in petty 'gotchas' like this. A judge would just apply a test of what a reasonable person (so not a HN user) would think and say that obviously this is fine why are you wasting their time with such a question.

aka the Cooperative Principle or Grice's Maxims.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cooperative_principle

How do you feel about the 'gotcha' that you're technically making a temporary copy of a program in RAM in order to run it?

My understanding is that this is the critical 'gotcha' that necessitates a license for using software in EU. Copyright was supposed to govern copying, not use. Of course the scope of copyright has been only expanded since then.

Not sure I follow how RAM would extend any application of copyright. EU law already protects copyright of object code which means even the initial copy (RAM or non-RAM) storage can already require a license.

Could but by and large didn't, at least not for consumer software.

You walk into a store, you buy a disc, it's yours. Legally obtained copy. No terms.

After that you'd be free to use it without having any terms be imposed on you by the copyright holder, because using isn't copying, and if you're not doing something that is the copyright holder's exclusive right, you don't need their permission to do it.

If we wanted to follow this line of thinking, maybe you should also need a license to listen to music because today's digital media players tend to make temporary copies of the audio in RAM and buffers..

I think this technicality makes a big difference.

Of course I'm sure they could figure out other ways to give copyright holders the power to impose their terms on users, but the way it's currently done in EU feels like a technical 'gotcha' to me.

"Article 4 of Directive 91/250 lays down the exclusive rights of the copyright holder, rights of a preventative nature, in its computer program. The first of those rights is the right of reproduction, which is defined in particularly broad terms because it covers not only any form of reproduction, whether permanent or temporary, but also acts of reproduction necessary to use a program. Unlike other categories of works, in any case those which are distributed on their own medium, a computer program always requires a reproduction, if only a temporary one, in the computer’s memory in order for that program to be used. The rightholder’s exclusive rights therefore constitute, as far as computer programs are concerned, greater intrusion into the private sphere of the user than in the case of other categories of protected subject matter, because those rights require de facto the authorisation of the rightholder even simply to use the program.

Thus, the copyright holder’s exclusive rights in a computer program cover not only traditional acts of exploitation of the work under copyright, but also the enjoyment of that work in the user’s private sphere."

https://curia.europa.eu/juris/document/document_print.jsf;js...

The law that case is referring to is also the one I was referring to about protecting object code of any form: https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/PDF/?uri=CELE...

"Subject to the provisions of Articles 5 and 6, the exclusive rights of the rightholder within the meaning of Article 2, shall include the right to do or to authorize: (a) the permanent or temporary reproduction of a computer program by any means and in any form, in part or in whole. Insofar as loading, displaying, running, transmision or storage of the computer program necessitate such reproduction, such acts shall be subject to authorization by the rightholder;"

To be clear the "gotcha"s as referred to in the comments above aren't "bits of the written law one might find surprising or overreaching" they are attempts at circumventing the meaning of the law by taking it absurdly literally (as in my stop sign example in my sibling comment) and hoping to use that narrow interpretation as legal reasoning instead of paying attention to the actual intent of said law.

As I said the law as written doesn't singularly hinge on the process of loading a program into RAM to allow the requiring license to use software anyways, the software can require those additional terms as part of the installation onto the computer's storage which is clearly a copying process. This is also why the "walk to the store, buy a disc, it's yours. Legally obtained copy. No terms." example is silly - even if we accepted that was legally yours with no usage terms what you have is no terms usage (but not modification or redistribution) of the installer which is going to require you to agree to terms to perform the copy (and probably enter a license key in any semi-modern time). Similarly with the point on music, what makes you think it isn't licensed to a copyright holder? Because it doesn't prompt you when you hit play? CDs give unlimited private playback and backup rights, no public distribution, and no public performance. Modification has certain allowances (known as fair use) just like software but generally is up to the rightsholder. Streaming gives a temporary license for much the same. Digital radio gives you rights to listen live. There is no slippery slope of digital music gaining copyright control through some reasoning from software copyright, it's all already there.

> To be clear the "gotcha"s as referred to in the comments above aren't "bits of the written law one might find surprising or overreaching" they are attempts at circumventing the meaning of the law by taking it absurdly literally (as in my stop sign example in my sibling comment) and hoping to use that narrow interpretation as legal reasoning instead of paying attention to the actual intent of said law.

The point I'm making is that lawmakers themselves used a similar absurd literality ("actually your computer makes a copy in ram to run a program") in writing this law.

> As I said the law as written doesn't singularly hinge on the process of loading a program into RAM to allow the requiring license to use software anyways, the software can require those additional terms as part of the installation onto the computer's storage which is clearly a copying process.

Software doesn't inherently require installation, but if it does, it doesn't have to be permanent. I can make a temporary installation in RAM.

> Similarly with the point on music, what makes you think it isn't licensed to a copyright holder? Because it doesn't prompt you when you hit play? CDs give unlimited private playback and backup rights

The copyright law does not make personal playback of music an exclusive right of the rightsholder. It's not the CD giving me any rights, it's that the copyright law never took these rights away from me in the first place. That is why you don't need a license to listen to music that you own a legally obtained copy of. They never applied the absurd technicality of temporary copies to music.

> The point I'm making is that lawmakers themselves used a similar absurd literality ("actually your computer makes a copy in ram to run a program") in writing this law.

You're welcome to think any parts of the law are absurd (and given the size you probably will think many parts are) but perceived absurdity does not make a gotcha nor does it mean any other perceived absurdity not explicitly in the law now must also be valid or invalid accordingly. If the law had vaguely said "copies of computer programs are protected" and made no provisions towards the intent of protecting the object code in any form elsewhere then later a an argument in court said "and loading it into memory counts as a copy" to try to expand the right past the intent that would be a case of a gotcha.

> Software doesn't inherently require installation, but if it does, it doesn't have to be permanent. I can make a temporary installation in RAM.

How does the installation being done to a temporary location or not change whether the installer has to produce a copy of the software from itself onto the machine? The action the installer does is independent the medium the bytes are stored.

Software doesn't inherently require installation, but if it does, it doesn't have to be permanent. I can make a temporary installation in RAM.

> The copyright law does not make personal playback of music an exclusive right of the rightsholder. It's not the CD giving me any rights, it's that the copyright law never took these rights away from me in the first place. That is why you don't need a license to listen to music that you own a legally obtained copy of. They never applied the absurd technicality of temporary copies to music.

In the case of CDs copyright law provides the other restrictions explictly listed but the CD (typically) choses to give you unlimited playback ability. Copyright isn't the only law that dictates what you're allowed to do with the content privately, newer (2000s) laws around DRM for instance provide more of the other rights restrictions of digital content.

Remember IT Crowd? "You wouldn't steal a car..." (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ALZZx1xmAzg)

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