Like for example: a drug raid, or they’re accusing you of illegal hacking, or some sort of TheSilkRoad type of stuff.
Assuming the original investigation find no evidence and leads to no charges, could they use the pirated content that you have as a last ditch effort to get you in prison? Not distributing, just personal use.
Not limited to any specific jurisdiction, just want to know what happens in general.
Depends on what they were looking for? I would think so if they need an excuse to lock you up on charges while they investigate something else or to squeeze you.
Not a lawyer, but my understanding is if they find illegal stuff during discovery for an unrelated charge, you can be charged for that as well. One caveat would be if the original search was illegal, so say you see some police in public and you start recording them, then they come and take your phone away as evidence for the crime of recording police, which everyone knows is not actually illegal. They did not have the right to take your phone to begin with so anything they find on your phone then should be not admissible as evidence against you. Again, not a lawyer.
The thing about illegal searches is once they find something it is easy to put it back - then you go look for evidence and soon you have enough to get a warrant to search that. few criminals are so good at hiding their tracks that the police can’t find enough evidence once they know who to look at.
It depends on where you live. In Germany they can use whatever they find in a raid against you. So you could get additional charges.
Just as an aside but encryption is good.
Yeah, I wanted to tell you about my procrastination problem, but… eh… maybe I’ll explain later…
(I wish there was a way to automate all that lol)
Asking for a friend, huh?
In Canada there’s a cap on how much you can get sued for piracy and it’s all infringements combined, not per item. The cap is so low nobody ever gets sued because nobody would make any money off it and it wouldn’t financially ruin me.
So they’d find a NAS with every video game ever made in all languages up to 7th gen and partial 8+9. All legacy PC games and partial archive of modern. A lot of music, and some less popular/rare video media. I mostly moved to debrid for video content outside of some stuff I worry could get lost to time while I’m alive and youtuber archives. Sacrifices of a limited budget.
Tl;dr: the max worst case scenario here is a maximum $5,000 penalty and theoretically I suppose they could tech ban me. Forbid the usage of a computer or limit it.
In reality I get the occasional scare letters from ISP and pin them to a wall like trophies. The reseller ISP I’m with is pro user and doesn’t care.
Not limited to any specific jurisdiction, just want to know what happens in general.
what would happen is, in general, all about the specific jurisdiction. in my country, downloading anything is not illegal, what can be illegal is sharing stuff you don’t own.
so in your case, nothing would happen, not because of the pirated content. (i mean if they really wanted to get you and all they had to work with would be your disney collection, they would probably try to prove you shared/sold it).
Possession of content – with the unique exception of CSAM – in the USA does not draw a distinction between how it was acquired, whether or not it may have violated a license or copyright. The primary provisions of the Copyright Act of 1976 are to protect the production and distribution of copyrighted works. So unless your stash of content is being hosted on a server for others to access – which constitutes distribution, though one could possibly argue that if no one ever accessed it, it’s not distribution – then the mere possession does not incur criminal liability. Of course, civil liability may attach, meaning that the copyright holder could sue you for the cost of buying a legit license. Though there’s zero reason for the police to pass that info to whomever the copyright holder is. Whether police can gratuitously share investigation info with a third-party is a matter of state law.
But the other potential criminal charge could come from the infamous DMCA, whose provisions make it a crime to circumvent DRMs. Though this provision has an out, whereby certain circumvention is permitted as exceptions for designated purposes, created and renewed through a regulatory process. Outside these exceptions, the standard defense of fair-use for copyright infringement does not apply to a charge of DMCA circumvention. So if the police could put together evidence that your content stash is the product of circumvention, and other evidence shows that you used or have the tools/software to perform that circumvention, that’s technically a charge which could be leveled.
This would take a colossal amount of effort, for something which generally has to be brought by the (federal) US Attorney’s office, rather than a state-level District Attorney. So realistically, this would only really be considered if you somehow managed to annoy an FBI investigator enough. And even then, it’s quite petty to charge DMCA circumvention alone.
As far as the US is concerned (because a lot of this stuff does depend on jurisdiction), you’re most likely going to be raided by a state-level police department (local PD, county sheriff, etc). They don’t give a hoot about pirated material because that’s a federal crime.
If you were raided by the FBI, ATF, DEA, etc., they could use any pirated content they found to bring up criminal charges against you.
There are four essential elements to a charge of criminal copyright infringement. In order to sustain a conviction under section 506(a), the government must demonstrate: (1) that a valid copyright; (2) was infringed by the defendant; (3) willfully; and (4) for purposes of commercial advantage or private financial gain.
source
