Because the law considers scale.

It's legal for you to possess a single joint. It's not legal for you to possess a warehouse of 400 tons of weed.

The line between legal and not legal is sometimes based on scale; being able to ingest a single book and learn from it is not the same scale as ingesting the entire published works of mankind and learning from it.

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krisoft 7 months ago | parent [-]

Are you describing what the law is or what you feel the law should be? Because those things are not always the same.

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lelanthran 7 months ago | parent [-]

> Are you describing what the law is or what you feel the law should be?

I am stating what is, right now.

I thought the weed example made that clear.

Let me clarify: the state of things, as they stand, is that the entire justice system, legislation and courts included, takes scale into account when looking at the line dividing "legal" from "illegal".

There is literally no defense of "If it is legal at qty x1, it is legal at any qty".

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krisoft 7 months ago | parent [-]

> I am stating what is, right now.

Excelent. Then the next question is where (in which jurisdiction) are you describing the law? And what are your sources? Not about the weed, i don’t care about that. Particularly the “being able to ingest a single book and learn from it is not the same scale as ingesting the entire published works of mankind and learning from it”.

The reason why i’m asking is because you are drawing a paralel between criminal law and (i guess?) copyright infringement. The drug posession limits in many jurisdictions are explicitly written into the law. These are not some grand principle of laws but the result of explicit legislative intent. The people writing the law wanted to punish drug peddlers without punishing end users. (Or they wanted to punish them less severly or differently.) Are the copyright limits you are thinking about similarly written down? Do you have case references one can read?

	▲	lelanthran 7 months ago \| parent [-]
		I made it clear in both my responses that scale matters, and that there is precedence in law, in almost all countries I can think off right now, for scale mattering. I did not make the point that there is a written law specifically for copyright violations at scale (although many jurisdictions do have exemptions at small scale written into law). I will try to clarify once again: there is no defence in law that because something is allowed at qty X1, it must be allowed at any qty. This is the defence that was originally posted that I replied to, it is the one that is not valid because courts regularly consider the scale of an activity when determining the line between allowed and not allowed.