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There's a piece of software called "Plex" that basically lets you operate your own private streaming service. You load it up with music and video files, and then you can connect to it from your phone or TV or laptop and play them back.

As I understand it, it is common to set one of these up, fill it with your own legitimately purchased media without doing any illegal circumvention of effective copy-protection measures, and then not only use it yourself but also hand out logins to your housemates, immediate family, extended family, friends and lovers, and so on.

Assuming that these streams to your buddies are all private, rather than public, performances, and that you only actually make one "copy" of your media (which you put onto your server much like you would put a legitimate copy from a CD onto your iPod), does one need any sort of special license to do this? Or is it legal to do with media you just buy at the store?

interfect
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2 Answers2

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This is one of those "are kitchen knives illegal since they can be used to kill people" questions.

Legally, handing out logins to your private streaming service is no different from simply sharing the media files themselves. Either way, your friends pull down a copy of the media. When streaming, the copy of each frame may be immediately deleted once it's been played, but that does not nullify the fact that a copy was made.

(Popular streaming services break no laws by facilitating such "copies" because they are licensed to do it, and the copyright holders are happy with such licensing precisely because the subscriber's copy of each frame is immediately deleted upon appearing on the screen.)

That said, the piece of software in question is as much illegal as a kitchen knife (the legality of using which depends on what kind of flesh you cut with it). What matters is just what media you share and with whom. So long as you can legally share the original files with someone, you equally can do it using Plex. Likewise, if you can't share the files, you can't do it with Plex either.

Greendrake
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Sometimes

Format shifting for private use is allowed under copyright law since 2007.

There are restrictions: the owner must make the copy, only one copy in each format is allowed (which makes cloud storage problematic), for cinematographic works, you cannot copy digital works (so you must make your copy from an analog tape, not a DVD or Blue Ray), and replaying is only allowed on devices owned by the copyright holder.

Dale M
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