[dan1son]

Its the difference between crimes and torts. I am NOT a criminal, but I maybe COULD BE held financially liable if they could prove their case (which I make it hard to do).

Thats the thing though, the laws with copyright are all set up that just HAVING the content isn't an illegal offense, but distributing IS. Without any sharing I never distribute so they can't hit me with that.

And as far as I know (and I have looked), there is NO legal precedent where a media company sued a person for just having copyrighted info. It would be a nightmare for them, as they would be left with a burden of proof that I didn't just time-shift the content from my satellite. My opinion is until there is a legal precedent that says that what I am doing is illegal, it is not illegal.

I don't disagree that it hasn't been "tested in court." But the laws are relatively clear. Even in the Jammy Thomas case a lot of time was spent showing that she had "downloaded" content. They didn't only talk about what she uploaded, I believe the 24 songs in question were all shared though because the value is MUCH higher.

http://www.copyright.gov/title17/92chap1.html#106 says "(1) to reproduce the copyrighted work in copies or phonorecords;" Basically how that has been argued is that the downloader actually makes the copy locally. Which is EXACTLY what happens when you download from usenet. You copy it from the usenet server to your machine. You initiate the copy, therefore violate copyright law. Pretty straight forward.

Now again, it's highly unlikely you'll get sued for it (it's not worth suing for petty copyright violations), and it's not criminal (as you said, but civil law is still illegal). It's like speeding... if you're going 70 along with the crowd, you'll probably be fine, but you can still get a ticket for it.

It's a risk... usenet downloading is almost definitely safer than public bit torrent. Private bit torrent users have never been sued either (that I know of), but they have been regularly shut down. Probably because there's plenty of prey using the easy to find public sites.