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Comment by tyingq | Hacker News Reader

Not that I agree with it, but here's the FBI view:

"Not only can the violation of intellectual property rights damage the economy, it also poses serious health and safety risks to consumers, and often times, it fuels global organized crime."

https://www.fbi.gov/investigate/white-collar-crime/piracy-ip...

No helpful detail on why it's not safe.

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Since they went wide with "intellectual property rights" there, the references to health and safety are probably more in the realm of trademark and maybe patent... think counterfeit drugs.

You can probably gin up a copyright example from, I dunno, the DRM system on some medical device or something, though that's obviously not the real focus of their copyright enforcement work.

But drug safety is not an issue of copyright, but of physical control of medications. You don't need to break the copyright of a drug to create and distribute fake medication.

But you might be able to trick more people to buy your fake medication if you put another company's logo on it. I'd hate to think that a country's procedures for stopping copyright infringement are so efficient that they are the optimal route for preventing the distribution of fake medication (even making trademark law pointless), but I must admit that comparing two images is simpler than comparing the composition of two medications. Corporate needs you to find the difference between these two approaches.

Because the FBI might ask your government to enforce US copyright law and your overly enthusiastic leader sends helicopters filled with heavily armed Police officers to raid your house at dawn, perhaps?

https://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/dotcom-wins-settlement-from-po...

That's the FBI's general view on IP rights infringement and covers more physical products. You can apply of that to file sharing.

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