I pay for games because it's more convenient than pirating them. For movies and tv however... They make it so difficult to be a customer.

>I can torrent everything and do what I want with it, as long as I don't redistribute the exact same thing?

this is an incorrect interpretation (in the usa, at least).

downloading a game/movie is still the creation of unauthorized copy, which is not allowed. not to mention that playing/watching does not count as a "novel transformation".

(17 U.S.C. § 106 and 17 U.S.C. § 501 are the relevant pieces of reading)

No, that’s literally why Anthropic got sued. If they’d paid for a copy of the copyrighted works they pirated, they wouldn’t have had a problem. There were two issues in their case: does the AI infringe on copyright and did Anthropic obtain all their materials legally. The first they won on, the second they lost.

So if you pirate a bunch of content you still get in trouble for that. But if you somehow make a business out of that that isn’t just redistributing those materials, then that business itself isn’t infringing.

IANAL (plus a whole suite of other caveats) but torrent-baiting works in Germany along these lines.

ISPs and trigger-happy law firms don't send you a C&D for downloading a torrent, they do so for seeding a torrent. It's just that practically nobody "just seeds" a torrent so people colloquially claim they got busted for downloading a torrent.

In theory this means if you torrent as a 100% leecher and turn off seeding from the get-go, you should be in the clear. But nobody sensible would dare test the extent of German Legal Spite, much less do so repeatedly to science the shit out of it.

If you can download through another protocol, say HTTP, however---<Sendung unterbrochen!>