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?
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
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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…