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Comment by spindritf | Hacker News Reader

In Poland you can make a backup copy of a DVD circumventing "security" measures where necessary. More, you can share that copy with members of your family and people in your social circle. It's considered fair use.

Anyway, while this law seems completely and horribly broken, technology allowed us to escape it a bit. I don't even have optical drives in my computers any more.

Of course, this means that watching any movie or tv show on a computer requires downloading it from... a source because popular online players (some offer content for free, like TVN, a large private broadcaster; and not just a clip here and there — full episodes, even whole films) usually require Silverlight which doesn't really work on Ubuntu. Luckily, that — downloading copyrighted materials for personal use — is, again, legal†.

† some exceptions apply.

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> which doesn't really work on Ubuntu

It's nothing official, but Erich Hoover [1] patched wine so that it could run silverlight, and created a package that allows streaming netflix via wine+firefox+silverlight [2]. Since Steam and this, I haven't had a single reason to boot my old windows partition. It's nice.

It's possible that this same solution could work for your problem sites.

[1] http://www.compholio.com/ [2] https://launchpad.net/netflix-desktop

> a package that allows streaming netflix via wine+firefox+silverlight

I've tried this, and the performance is pretty bad. I'll stick to torrents + MPlayer until that's fixed.

It might be legal from criminal law POV but you can still be sued in a civil court for most of those use cases. Of course that rarely happens.

For those interested how a post-communist country criminalizes copyright violations, here's a link to the relevant section of our Copyright Act:

http://prawo.legeo.pl/prawo/ustawa-z-dnia-4-lutego-1994-r-o-...

It's all about distribution ("rozpowszechnianie"). If you download copyrighted material - the people that made it available without permision offended tha law, but you had not.

I think it's very useful distinction, and the only one that makes sense.

Also there are exceptions for short excerpts from copyrighted material, satire, etc (considered fair use).

That's why Poles were so infuriated when USA tried to enforce ACTA on us.

"It might be legal from criminal law POV but you can still be sued in a civil court for most of those use cases."

You can get sued for anything, but the court will throw it out if the civil case is unfounded. I don't know how you have it in Poland, but the Czech copyright act stipulates that private copies ("copies for sole personal use") of everything except software and "electronic databases" (telephone directories etc.) are completely outside the purview of copyright protection, up to and including the disregard for the legality of the source of the copy (confirmed by a verdict of the Supreme Court in 2006) If something similar is the case in Poland, what basis could a civil case possibly have?

The OP wrote "† some exceptions apply." and you could drive a truck through those exceptions to fair use.

For instance, "copies for sole personal use" that you mentioned, in Poland are "single specimens shared by people in a personal relationshiop" (link to this specific rule: http://prawo.legeo.pl/prawo/ustawa-z-dnia-4-lutego-1994-r-o-...) which literally indicates that the digital transmission between people who don't know each other is excluded from its scope.

Also, the fait use section ends with a limitation clause: http://prawo.legeo.pl/prawo/ustawa-z-dnia-4-lutego-1994-r-o-... - which is a totally unclear ruke but means something similar to "fair use cannot hurt author".

What about Moonlight?

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