this post was submitted on 01 Oct 2026
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In Sweden you are allowed to make copies for private useage. I can record and save whatever piece of media I want, as long as I don't distribute it to other people and the material itself is not illegal (abuse material for example).
The problem in cases like this is not the copying, but the ability to bypass DRM. Creating and distributing tools that can do that is illegal in the US due to the DMCA. I think there are similar laws in the EU but I'm not sure.
Bypassing copy protection is not a crime in my country. The DMCA is a joke here and TPB creators knew it. Unfortunately the media companies used their threats of sanction on Sweden if they were not persecuted. Straight up maffia tactics.
Edit: TPB wasn't really relevant to copy protection but I brought it up because of DMCA. TPB never hosted any copyrighted content and should not have been held liable.
I grew up in a town with a huge standing weekly flea market everyone knew about where everyone knew you were buying stolen stuff, fake IDs, bootlegs, etc. The way I finally convinced my family that TPB wasn't illegal was by asking them if it was a crime to tell someone where the flea market was.
The funny part is if you could buy fake IDs then technically it was a crime to tell them where the flea market was.
Knowing where to commit a crime is not illegal.
Aiding and abetting is though my dude.
Telling someone how to do a thing isn't aiding and abetting.
If I tell you that you can kill someone by shoving them off the Brooklyn Bridge, I'm not potentially taking part in a homicide.
No, drm of that kind is also illegal
DRM of what kind is illegal where?
You're going to get downvoted because pirates, by and large, feel entitled to other people's labor for free. I've been pirating for two+ decades and I'm fully aware that what I'm doing is wrong. It'd be great if people could stop trying to justify their actions.
Its actually the capitalist class that feels entitled to other people labor for "free", or grossly underpaid
Their labor was already exploited before it became a product for you to download
Think of the poor billionaires!
Piracy is morally right, we don't owe them anything.
We see that copyright only matters to them if it is convenient, the latest example is training AI on copyrighted works without licenses. But there are many others.
It is also ironic that copyright was originally created to protect small authors from having a big corporation steal their creation and profit from it. Which is still happening. This is also the reason why originally copyright supposed to last 14 years. Because it was thought that 14 years was long enough time to have monopoly on idea
Only after corporations started bribing politicians they extended it to such ridiculous times and completely changed what copyright really was.
I didn't make a statement on the morality of piracy, though. I only stated a fact about the DMCA and said I'm not sure what the EU situation is, hoping someone might know and add to the discussion. If people are downvoting me because they think I said piracy is bad, as you believe, then they are imagining things.
Personally, I think piracy is totally fine most of the time. The copyright system is immoral and does much more harm than good. Case in point, downloading a video from youtube should be allowed and the DMCA is working against the interest of the average person in making it illegal.