> That's an interesting thought. What would happen in court if you went with that? "The license said to only install if you accept the license, but since I reject the license, I'm not bound by its contents, so I installed even though I didn't accept it".

The license is what gives you legal permission to make copies in the process of installation; copying is otherwise an exclusive right of the copyright owner. So that’s very much an “if you win the argument on rejecting the license, you still lose” situation.

> The license is what gives you legal permission to make copies in the process of installation

In France and Germany, you are allowed to copy copyrighted works, as long as it's for private use (including family and "private circles") and you don't sell it. https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copie_priv%C3%A9e#Principes_g%...

Poland also has a Personal use exemption due to a copy tax we get on computer media like CDRs, USB drives and even ordinary HDDs. Permissible_Use_of_Protected_Works: https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Polish_Copyright_Law#Division...

Art. 23. Copyright

The scope of the work's own personal use

1.

Without the author's permission, you may use an already disseminated work for your own personal use free of charge. This provision does not authorize to build on the basis of someone else's architectural and urban planning work and to use electronic databases that meet the features of the work, unless it concerns own scientific use not related to profit-making purposes.

2.

The scope of personal use includes the use of single copies of works by the circle of persons remaining in a personal relationship, in particular kinship, affinity or social relationship.

but software is explicitly excluded by 77:

https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Polish_Copyright_Law#Chapter_...

Art. 77.[32]

Provisions of Article 16 subparagraphs 3-5, Articles 20, 23, 231, 27, 28, 30, 331-335, 49, paragraph 2, Articles 56, 60 and 62 shall not apply to computer programs.

What kind of copyright work? I have heard from friends in Germany that ISPs sniffing all transport so if you download movie with torrent they will send you exact titles, and ask you to pay 1000-2000 eur or they will take you to court where you will pay 1000 per each movie downloaded ... And I have friends that actually paid fine.

France also has an agency doing this, HADOPI, but it works by joining Bittorrent swarms to collect IP addresses. What they punish is the download itself, ie. the acquisition of a copy. Not copying something you acquired legally.

For example, before fast internet connections, people would borrow music CDs from libraries and copy them.

> What they punish is the download itself, ie. the acquisition of a copy.

In some countries, such acquisition of a copy is legal on its own.

German ISPs don't do that ('sniff all transport' and automatically sue? for copyright infringement). ISPs have no business in doing this (Why would they? DPI infrastructure is expensive, so it setting up some magical automation to detect torrents, check against some database, etc. Plus, pre-preemptively suing someone will likely cause them to not be a repeat customer.).

Traffic inspection by ISPs (let alone sharing of collected data with third-party entities) in the EU is required to have a legal/technical basis and/or user consent, depending on what is being done and for what purpose [1]. Even attempts at blanket (meta)data retention for law enforcement agencies have pretty much been ruled illegal in the EU [2] and Germany [3].

What probably happened is your friends were torrenting, and some entity acting on behalf of copyright holders got their IP from public trackers/DHT. Then they came knocking to the ISP with a cour order, asking for information about the person behind that IP address, and the ISP gave them that [4]. Finally, the entity sent a C&D to your friends.

[1] - See the EU DPS' opinion on how the existing EU legal framework affets ISPs' data inspection abilities: https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/PDF/?uri=CELE...

[2] - See Directive 2006/24/EC, tl;dr https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_retention#European_Union

[3] - htps://www.bundesnetzagentur.de/DE/Sachgebiete/Telekommunikation/Unternehmen_Institutionen/Anbieterpflichten/OeffentlicheSicherheit/Umsetzung110TKG/VDS_113aTKG/VDS.html

[4] - https://blog.raychenon.com/file-sharing-violations-in-german...

Sorry for making error in terminology yes it is some Lawyer agency or what not, but result is the same. If someone can sniff your transport regardless who it is end result is the same, you do not have privacy and idea that you can copy something for your own or your family use is just plain wrong.

I mean you can, we can do "anything" but there are repercussions for each action.

There is no need for any sniffing for the above scenario to happen.

It’s literally just using the P2P nature of bittorrent to get peers’ IP addresses (you can do that too! Just start any torrent and look at the peers tab in your client), then using the legal tools to request data about a person breaking the law using such and such IP address.

That is true but unless static address why would anyone give you exact geo location of the IP address?!

If you extend this to everything you can have massive surveillance without cookies, MAC address of device, IP address for each package and you know who is accessing what kind of content on internet. So, why wait whenever someone reads article about class 1 drug just brake his door and arrest him, isn't it ?! I mean fork privacy, democracy, and judicial process, just lets immediately arrest everyone :/

Anyway, in German scenario how can you certify that someone was not hijacking your router?

(As per friends case, they had friend who was sleeping over and connected to their Wifi ...)

The sniffing relies on people trading files using p2p connections (and exposing their IPs) and lawyers getting the user of the IP at that time from internet providers, either via court order or some other back channel. There is no deep packet inspection.

Some lawyers are even using sites similar to https://iknowwhatyoudownload.com/

It probably costs less to pay the amount than fighting it in court. I think it's capped at 450 Euro or something? But I know some people who got scot free by merely having a lawyer send a response.

You can get the exact geo location of an IP address in the US or almost any other country too. Don't even need a court order, just pay for an expensive GeoIP Database, which will work 99.9% of the time to get someone's postal address by zooming in on Google Maps.

In United States, copyright law explicitly allows for copying that is essential to operating a piece of software.

That is a big part of why companies try to claim they never sold you a copy in the first place, only licensed it.

Is there any legal precedent on what qualifies as "copying"? By the time you are even presented with the license agreement, you already copied the program several times (unless it is a thin installer that litterally avoids downloading the content until you accept).

Well in this case of a video game. There was a loader loading the image into ram then hot patching it. They deemed the loader copying it into ram was copying. IANAL but sometimes they take the term copying very literally.

I would assume this falls under Severability [1]. In most cases, the button you click on literally says "I accept", which the corporate lawyer would interpret in a similar way to signing a contract in full.

In other words, if I click "send" on my resignation email to my employer, but later argue in court that I totally didn't mean to actually resign, but only to check if my email program works, I may have a challenging case.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Severability

How do they know that I didn't patch the binary to replace "I accept" with "I reject"?