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Music Industry Raids Taiwan Campuses For MP3s
martijnd writes: "The Taipei Times newspaper reports that in Taiwan at least the music industry and police agree that possesion of illegal music must be as dangerous as having other substances hidden in your dorm room. In an attempt to stamp out MP3 file trading on campus the music industry is going after individual university students and has the police bring them in." The article says that some students are teaching others "techniques of erasing files without a trace, keeping hidden backup files, and even smashing one's own hard drive in the event of a police search in school dorms." Those sound like pretty good things to encourage anyhow to me.
They probably aren't doing this because they are very upset about MP3's, but because it is a demonstration that they are working to stamp out piracy.
-m
First, as has been mentioned by another poster, the government of Taiwan is under unbelievable pressure from the United States to enforce intellectual property rights laws. Somewhere around 30% of Taiwan's economy is based on the export of goods to the United States. Threatening trade relations is a remarkably effective stick to beat the government with.
In 1993, Taiwan passed a law protecting intellectual property rights. Here is a link to the English translation of the law if you are curious. The general understanding is that the text of this law was delivered from the American Institute in Taipei (the official unofficial embassy since the United States does not maintain formal relations with Taiwan), with instructions to pass it, as written, without ammendments or modifications, or suffer punitive tarrifs under Section 301 of the United States Trade Act of 1974.
Eight years ago, the issue was bootleg microchips. Now it's bootlegged MP3s. Little else in the basic dynamic has changed.
To condense a very deep topic into a paragraph, Chinese law enforcement is based the principle of "Sha Yi Jing Bai" -- kill one to warn a hundred. Rather than trying to consistiently enforce laws, the police excercise a crackdown mentality where a number of people are run in on the crime of the week, extremely harsh sentences are metted out to the few unlucky folks who have been caught, and then the usual state of barely controlled anarchy which makes up Chinese society resumes.
This promotes a lot more flaunting of the law than respect for it in my mind, but how can a gawailo like me comment on a legal system which has been using this technique for the last thousand years?
A final aspect of the legal system in Taiwan (and China to a great degree) is that you can apologize your way out of a lot of things. I suspect that very few of the students arrested will actually see any jail time for their sins. Most of them will act very contrite, and will be set free to go forth and sin no more.
Cheers!
j.
Their actions are nothing more than a form of legal terrorism. The only difference in my opinion between these industries (intellectual property) and the terrorists that have in the past struck fear in countless nations' civilian populations is the weapon of choice. For Osama Bin Laden and the like it is a bomb/gun, for these guys it is a court brief. The end result is the same: extreme response against those that are the weakest, most defenseless targets to send a message to the strong/rest of society saying that "none of you are safe from us, all of you are at our mercy." That my friends is how terrorism works. You don't strike the strongest, most visible targets in this case organizations like Philips Electronics for making stuff like mp3 cd players, you attack the small targets that everyone assumes are more or less outside the conflict.... the students in this case. Why do terrorists of all stripes do this? Simple: the more visibile targets usually have more than sufficient resources to retaliate in full force. Who here honestly thinks that if IBM were to make a lot of really good mp3 players and the like that the RIAA would dare take them on in court? IBM's annual revenues are probably at least 2x the entire recording industry's combined! So you go after the middle and lower class guys that you know will be forced to play russian roulette in that they have two options: submit and be forgiven for now, or fight for their rights and run the risk of paying off legal bills for the rest of their life and/or destroying their family's economic future. Finally one thing to keep in mind is that other industries don't behave this way when they are "robbed" by the public. Most other industries don't deceive themselves and their member companies' stockholders into equating not achieving the maximum profits with being victimized by thieves. The fact of the matter remains that even when other industries are affected by theft, they don't respond by lashing out at a great many of their potential customers. They isolate the problem few and deal with them and leave the rest out of it. That is the difference between an intelligent, shrewd corporate approach and the insanely stupid and self-defeating approach most intellectual property giants have. To the IP companies I say keep it up bozos, the more people you all go after, the less sympathy you all will have and the more contempt the average joe blow will hold you in.