this post was submitted on 23 Sep 2023
48 points (92.9% liked)
Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ
54462 readers
274 users here now
⚓ Dedicated to the discussion of digital piracy, including ethical problems and legal advancements.
Rules • Full Version
1. Posts must be related to the discussion of digital piracy
2. Don't request invites, trade, sell, or self-promote
3. Don't request or link to specific pirated titles, including DMs
4. Don't submit low-quality posts, be entitled, or harass others
Loot, Pillage, & Plunder
📜 c/Piracy Wiki (Community Edition):
💰 Please help cover server costs.
Ko-fi | Liberapay |
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
With a torrent you’re downloading from many unknown peers, one of which could be a rights holder lawyer who will log your IP and send a threatening letter to your internet service provider. With Soulseek you are downloading from only one peer.
With a torrent you are downloading and uploading chunks at the same time. With Soulseek you have options about what you share for upload. If you were to get in trouble legally on Soulseek, it would probably be for what’s in your shared library, not for what you downloaded.
However, it’s not super polite to download from others without sharing. Some users block uploading to peers who aren’t sharing anything. My advice would be to go to your local library and find a few rare CDs of local music. Rip them to MP3 at a good bitrate and share them. Or maybe classical music? I’m not a lawyer, but just think of what music you can share where the artist or record label isn’t going to sue you. Independent and smaller record labels are probably not going to sue you.
Classical isn't necessarily non-suable. You can share the sheet music Beethoven wrote, since he's been dead for a long time and his work is in public domain, but each new performance and recording of a given composition is also copyrighted by the musicians(s), since they have invested creative effort into its realisation.
Not that you'd be remotely likely to get fined either way, unless the publishing label is very prestigeous, Warner Classics or maybe Deutsche Grammophon (though even then if you're outside of US/UK or Germany I don't think they'd care).
At least in Germany they get you by pirating and logging who seeds to them, as uploading is the killer not downloading. If you throttle your upload to 0kb/s aka disabling it you can torrent safely.