baneonplane

If a bookstore buys a book, they now have a book. What they do with it is mostly up to them. They have the right to "sell or otherwise dispose of" the work, according to the first sale doctrine / 17 U.S.C. 109. They do not have the right to copy it. The Pirate Bay involves one person sending a copy of a file to another person, but that doesn't mean the original copy was destroyed. That lack of destruction is really the foundation of BitTorrent in a way - files are shared among many people. Then, if one person has the file active, it can be downloaded again. So people who upload a new torrent on TPB are breaking the law in that they're copying something they aren't allowed to copy. People who download and then seed a torrent are illegally obtaining a copyrighted work. The fact they upload it also means they're illegally copying it, as the author has the sole right to copy it.

That's because a license was granted to Hacker News to display their comment, per Hacker News' TOS. If you read a publication that person did not have publicly available or that they charged for, that'd be illegal. You have the ability to view the above comment, as HN permits people to view the comments that they have license to. Still, HN could decide to ban you from viewing their content, they have that right.