Download it!

Polish law recognises the institution of permitted personal use. This means that you may legally and free of charge download and use already-disseminated works - films, music, e-books, photographs - for your own private purposes. The Polish Act does not expressly require that the source from which a copy comes be of a particular "lawful" character; the act of downloading itself, for personal purposes, is not a prohibited act under Polish law. It is worth noting, however, that in one of its judgments the Court of Justice of the European Union held that the private-use exception should not be extended to copies originating from knowingly unlawful sources - and for this reason the interpretation above is sometimes contested in legal commentary. That is, however, only the content of an EU court ruling, not of the Polish Act itself, and it has not so far been expressly transposed into Polish statutory provisions.

"Without the author's permission, it is permitted to use, free of charge, an already-disseminated work within the scope of one's own personal use." - Art. 23 sec. 1 of the Act on Copyright and Related Rights (translation by the author)

You may not, however, derive any financial benefit from the downloaded copies, nor share them publicly. There is also one important exception: computer programs and games. The doctrine of permitted personal use does not cover this category - details are described in a separate section below.

Permitted personal use covers not only you, but also the circle of people who remain in a personal relationship with you - in particular a social relationship. You may therefore lend a friend a USB stick with films, share a music CD among acquaintances, or send your sister an e-book over a messenger.

"The scope of one's own personal use covers the use of single copies of works by a circle of persons who remain in a personal relationship, in particular by reason of kinship, affinity, or a social relationship." - Art. 23 sec. 2 of the Act on Copyright and Related Rights (translation by the author)

The notion of a "social relationship" is interpreted by the courts relatively broadly, but not without limits - what is meant are real, personal relationships, not random contact with the entire internet or a thousand anonymous "friends" on a social network. In the author's view, however, he remains in a social relationship with anyone with whom he has had any social interaction whatsoever - a conversation in person or online, an encounter at a party, or repeated visits to a local shop where the person works and is regularly seen.

To sum up: within the circle of family and acquaintances, the exchange of files remains lawful, as long as it does not take the form of public dissemination.

The BitTorrent protocol works in such a way that while you are downloading you are simultaneously sharing already-downloaded fragments of the file with other users of the network - and these are entirely strangers. This is no longer permitted personal use: it is public dissemination, which requires the author's consent.

"Whoever, without authorisation or in breach of its terms, disseminates another person's work in its original version or in the form of an adaptation, (…) is liable to a fine, restriction of liberty, or imprisonment for up to 2 years." - Art. 116 sec. 1 of the Act on Copyright and Related Rights (translation by the author)

In other words: the act of "downloading" itself stays within the limits of permitted personal use, but a torrent client with upload enabled (and practically every client has it enabled by default) simultaneously turns the user into a distributor - which is a penalised behaviour.

How this looks in practice

Despite the legal limitations described above, the BitTorrent network remains widely used both for lawful and unlawful purposes. Observation suggests that those who choose to use it tend to act in a similar fashion.

1 VPN

Firstly, they use services known as VPNs - services tunnelling internet traffic through an intermediate server. As a result, the internet provider (and, in turn, the collective rights management organisations monitoring P2P networks) cannot see what packets are being exchanged or with whom. It is worth noting that using a VPN is in itself fully legal in Poland - the tool only changes the user's privacy level; it does not affect the legal assessment of disseminating protected works.

2 BitTorrent client

Secondly, they make use of a BitTorrent client - a program that manages the downloading and uploading of file fragments. For many years this category has been dominated by open-source projects, available entirely free of charge and maintained by the community, which makes them a natural choice for people who value transparency in software.

3 Indexing site

Thirdly, they make use of indexing sites - websites on which specific files are catalogued. Such files are most often distributed in the form of so-called magnet links - special URIs starting with magnet:?, which, when clicked, automatically add the torrent to a running client without the need to download a separate .torrent file.

Sites of this kind are sometimes covered by court-ordered blocks imposed on internet providers in Poland and therefore change their domain from time to time. For this reason, those who use them typically check the current address on Wikipedia, which, as a neutral source unaffected by the blocks, keeps the list of active domains up to date. When a site remains unavailable despite an active VPN, this most often indicates a block at the DNS level - a typical workaround is to change the DNS servers to public ones, independent of the national internet provider (e.g. 1.1.1.1 Cloudflare, 9.9.9.9 Quad9, or 8.8.8.8 Google).

Additional information

Among BitTorrent users it is colloquially said that the order in which programs are closed matters: the torrent client should be shut down before disconnecting the VPN, not the other way around. For the same reason, setting the torrent client to launch on system startup is discouraged.

This is a frequent area of misunderstanding. A belief has grown around "permitted personal use" that it covers literally everything that can be downloaded from the internet. It does not. Computer programs - meaning operating systems, application software, and, in practice, computer games - are treated separately under Polish copyright law and are subject to a distinct, much more restrictive regime.

The starting point is Art. 77 of the Act, which expressly excludes the application of Art. 23 (permitted personal use) to computer programs. In other words: the rights that allow you to lawfully download a film or a music album for your own personal use do not apply to software.

"The provisions of Art. 16 pt. 3–5, Art. 20, Art. 23, Art. 23¹, Art. 26², Art. 33²–33⁵, Art. 43, Art. 44, Art. 47¹, Art. 49 sec. 2, Art. 56, Art. 57, Art. 60, and Art. 62 shall not apply to computer programs." - Art. 77 sec. 1 of the Act on Copyright and Related Rights (translation by the author)

In addition, Art. 74 sec. 4 specifies that the mere permanent or temporary reproduction of a computer program (i.e. saving its copy to disk, or even loading it into RAM) requires the right-holder's consent - unless you hold a valid licence and the act is necessary in order to use the program in accordance with its purpose (Art. 75 sec. 1).

"Economic rights to a computer program (…) shall include the right to: 1) the permanent or temporary reproduction of the computer program, in whole or in part, by any means and in any form (…)" - Art. 74 sec. 4 pt. 1 of the Act on Copyright and Related Rights (translation by the author)

In practice this means that downloading a "cracked" game, an installer for a paid application, or a system image from an unlawful source already constitutes an infringement of economic copyright at the moment the file is saved to your disk. It does not matter whether you redistribute the file further, whether you downloaded it only for your own use, or whether the game is old and "no longer being sold".

And what about games? Computer games are mixed works - they contain both a programming layer (code, engine) and an audiovisual layer (graphics, music, story). Polish courts and legal doctrine take the view that a game as a whole is treated analogously to a computer program, which means the same, strict regime of protection.

Additional information

A topic widely discussed in the context of protecting user data is full disk encryption. Should the computer ever physically end up in the hands of a third party, an encrypted drive remains, without knowledge of the password, simply a sequence of unreadable bytes.