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TheSpiceIsLife

> I'm not sure a good¹ lawyer on the other side would let you get away with claiming

Fortunately that’s not how courts work.

I’m not familiar with the case, but it’s possible setting a 1 byte per second limit showed intent to not distribute.

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It’s also possible that setting a 1 byte per second limit showed they were aware what they were doing was illegal.

Intent matters. I can well imagine a judge saying something like this:

While I am satisfied it has been proven you are aware that by torrenting said files, distribution also occurred. However, I am also satisfied it has been proven that by setting a 1 byte per minute upload limit, you had taken those steps you could to limit uploads in an effort to prevent the prohibited activity. Other evidence presented to the court demonstrates you are regularly employed, that your finances are generally in order, and you have not received payment for the meagre distribution that occurred as a consequence of your behaviour.

It is my opinion that the case brough by the prosecution does not rise to the level of requiring a sentence, nor even a conviction.

You're free to go.

You'd still be conspiring with others to violate copyright.

That would be a hard sell in court, the prosecution would have to prove at least that you have personally communicated with the other persons seeding a specific file.

If multiple people get caught speeding on the highway, are they conspiring with each other to violate law? Probably not, unless they were racing.

Organized seeding could be passable as criminal conspiracy, but a single person — nah.

> Intent matters

I agree with you intent matters, and I agree with you that setting the upload limit to 1 byte per second shows intent, I just disagree about what intent it shows.

In the context of a book, that could still be seeding a book every few hours..

1 byte per second would give you a couple of pages every few hours. So probably not.

I byte pee second translates to a little over 3KB/hr. Depends on the book.

It's 3600 bytes/hr. 60seconds per minute and 60minutes per hour. 60*60*1byte. Not to be condescending but the math here really isn't hard.

I mistyped a letter (thanks for indirectly pointing it out, fixed) and I get this flippant response. I guess this really is reddit.My real answer is close enough, I don't need to delineate on the level of bytes.

Either way this is oedantry. My point doesn't change; it depends on what kind of book you download.

Further, compression makes this all substantially more complicated, i imagine you could compress flat text down to extreme levels using a hashtable and leveraging book specifics (lack of Unicode characters, etc).

Either way, the argument is moot, most torrent clients set a minimum upload rate of 1-5kb/s.

One page is like 2K. It would need to be an incredibly short book.

Or you would just need to be patient.

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