Is it a crime to share my jellyfin library with only one friend of mine?

federino@programming.dev to Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ@lemmy.dbzer0.com – 46 points –

I would like to share my jellyfin movies and tv shows with my friend. I was thinking about allowing only his IP address to connect to my jellyfin server.

Is it a crime? Can I be arrested for this? I do not plan on running a mega operation for hundreds of people.

Is that ok to do?

39

That'd depend on your local copyright laws, but it's probably illegal.

Getting caught without your friend calling the cops on you is extremely unlikely, at least assuming you don't do anything fantastically stupid

That'd depend on your local copyright laws

Exactly. In Poland that would be legal because it's personal use with close circle (family, friends). It's legal to download a copyrighted media file that's been shared online and share it within that close circle but not share it publicly or to larger groups. So downloading a copyrighted file via torrent is still illegal because you are simultaneously sharing the file with wide audience.

The regulation roughly translates to 'fair use' and there need to be similar laws on other countries as well, at least for the download part. You should be free to assume that whoever put a media you see online had the right to do so (if they didn't, they broke the law but not you by downloading). If downloading a copyrighted media file was illegal then visiting any website would be a crime because they contain media (images, videos) that our browsers automatically download in order to display them.

This does not apply to software.

Ah surprising that Poland's still got copyright laws that relaxed, I thought they'd been more or less harmonized in the whole EU. Finland's laws used to be pretty much like what you describe too, but they were changed… uh, fuck, I think 10 – 20 years ago to be stricter and I have a vague memory that they claimed it was to be more in line with how most other countries are in the EU, but it's very much possible that either the politicians behind this lied, or that I remember wrong

In the US, it’s a violation of copyright. You could be sued, but wouldn’t likely be arrested.

I would say that the odds of being sued are minimal, close to nonexistent, if it is just a few close friends and family. Jellyfin uses password protection which helps, but you can improve your odds of staying off the media companies’ radar by keeping the server on a private VPN like Tailscale and remembering the rules of Fight Club.

Technically a crime; but there's no one to out you for criminal activity.

depending on where you live, unless you/your friend openly talk about it, no one will care lmao

In my country that would be a civil offence, not criminal.

I'd recommend at least taking some precautions (e.g. use TLS or Wireguard, firewall if possible).

That depends on your local laws. We don't know where you live.

Defs use a P2P VPN solution like Tailscale, Netbird, etc.

It's more secure anyways and allows finer control.

All responses are saying "it is illegal". But is it more illegal than pirating a movie for yourself only? Would it still be illegal if you would have paid for the movie? In that case it seems like lending the dvd to a friend...

Distributing to others is "more illegal" than consuming it yourself

For instance, right now it is not against the law to watch a video on YouTube that somebody else uploaded.

If it turns out after the fact that somebody's intellectual property rights were violated by the original video upload, you will not be punished for that, only the original uploader can be punished for the IP violation.

To apply that analogy: It wouldn't be against the law for your friend to watch it. If this was the case. Your court case would be different. You'd be in the role of both YouTube and the uploader here, since you operate the Jellyfin and also uploaded the movie there.

Yes but if you torrent a movie just for yourself to watch, you're distributing it to hundreds of people, so it's way worse

I'd say two people pirating a movie is exactly double as illegal compared to one person doing it. At least in total. And sharing a legal copy with friends is completely fine in lots of jurisdictions. I mean other terms and conditions apply... You might have to circumvent some copy protection to be able to do that, and that might be a different offense. But apart from that, it's similar to lending them a DVD (Well, actually since you're copying it, it'd be more like burning them a copy of one of your DVDs).

Giving them access to Jellyfin is not fully "copying" a movie, it is just access to streaming (they can download, but that's on them).

Overall, this makes little sense anymore and I feel that limiting data sharing is hard to conceptualize, let alone prevent with regulation.

You're right. I mean technically it gets copied at some point, more by them than by you. But we can't really go down to what's happening technically because then almost everything involves copying content... It's just how computers work. Even watching Netflix requires your device to copy around the stuff internally. And we're having issues with that. For example illegal images ending up in the browser cache. The browser needs to hold on to things intermittently and then you're in possession of them even if you never really saw (or saved) them... And there are lots of similar things with copyright and copying. And if we can't look at what's actually happening, what then are we judging things by?

In the end every "DVD" or "lending" analogy breaks at some point. With law everything depends on the exact jurisdiction plus the exact circumstances of that case, anyways. So the correct answer will be "It depends." nearly every time. But also copyright law wasn't made for this. It's from a different time. And it'd need a complete overhaul to address the real world as it is today. But instead, it mostly got amended and revised incrementally.
If your law addresses sharing content with friends... That's the proper way out of the debacle. Now it also needs to factor in the two cases that you could share something that you yourself obtained from a legal or not legal source. And we'd have a proper answer to the initial question.

In my opinion the practical questions are different anyways: Is that friend going to rat you out? Are they going to share the credentials to your library with other people? Or brag to their friends about not paying for streaming anymore and having access to a 30TB Jellyfin library? Because if word spreads, you're bound to get in trouble. (And you'll have to deal with other people wanting access...) If they keep it a secret... Nobody will know, so there also won't be any additional consequences attached to it. Apart from you already downloading and saving the stuff...

don't most people have dynamic ips?

I technically have a dynamic IP but my IP address has not changed in nearly 3 years.

I live in a city with 500,000 residents.

But to answer op's question, technically yes. You would be committing a crime to share your videos to a friend even if it's only one friend.

However, should you do something like set up a VPN for your friend so that the communications between your home network and their home network are completely encrypted, it is highly unlikely that you will ever be caught or punished for the crime.

You should check your router to see if it offers a VPN generation function. My Netgear router allows me to VPN into my home network from any openvpn endpoint with the appropriate certificate installed, and the process is quite simple.

Having said that, I am not a lawyer, and if I were a lawyer I would not be your lawyer, so do not take my words as any form of incentive or instructions to actually convince you to commit a crime. You must rely on your own best judgment and act in your own best interests before doing anything that is legally shady.

Doesn't matter really. If you use something like cloudflare and a domain name. You have programs like DDNS-updater that can update all the A records as soon as your IP changes.

to send:

GZIP=-9 pax -wz /some/files | openssl some-cipher -k 'really secure password' | ssh user@host 'cat >file.ustar.gz.enc'

to unpack:

openssl some-cipher -d

If this is a crime then this world is fucked up.

Of course it's a crime (or at the very least illegal, but a civil matter), you're distributing pirated media.

Are you going to get caught? No.

Not distributing. The person never possessed it. They looked at something on your server.

That's like charging me for smelling the steak they're cooking on the grill next door.

Discuss with a lawyer or local law enforcement. This is not a reliable place to ask if you are genuinely concerned about this