Slashdot Mirror
Congress to Ashcroft: Go After Song Swappers
saikou writes "Yahoo has published a news about proposal of 19 lawmakers to prosecute P2P systems' users. Allthough Texas Republican Rep. Lamar Smith, said that FBI should not go for casual users but but instead to go after operators of "network "nodes", there is not enough info in the story to see if this "should" will change to "must in addition to", if or when trying to arrest major node operators fails to curtain song swapping online. Of course, questions of what to do about foreign users and foreign music are omitted. RIAA claps its hands. I guess we should expect network congestion because of users, downloading everything in their sight to beat this initiative."
Dude just uninstall your KaZaA, run Ad-aware, and install KaZaA Lite No more ads or spyware!
Among those signing the letter were:
Delaware Democratic Sen. Joseph Biden *
Wisconsin Republican Rep. James Sensenbrenner
Virginia Democratic Rep. Bobby Scott
Michigan Democratic Rep. John Conyers
North Carolina Republican Rep. Howard Coble *
and California Democratic Sen. Dianne Feinstein. *
* We know many of these names by now, and I wouldn't be surprised if some of the other payola-beholden media-whore "lawmakers" made up the other 13 signatures.
Because it IS illegal. Lending a CD to a friend is fair use (an important right that should be protected), "sharing" copyrighted material with one million "friends" is not.
Copying is only a criminal offence if (a) you do it for profit or (b) you do it "on such a scale as to adversely affect the rightholder."
releasing 128Bit MP3s to the P2P networks, and selling 256Bit ones on their websites for a couple of dimes.
The vast majority of of people are happy with 128. Why would they pay for something which they can tell the difference?
It becomes possible for a regional band to make a few tens of thousands of dollars of MP3 sales per year
I doubt it. Didn't Stephen King try to sell a serial novel online then give up near the end? How much better could a regional band do?
The surprise isn't how often we make bad choices; the surprise is how seldom they defeat us.
While the Congress did provide for Criminal remedies for copyright infringement, they did so only in cases where the individual was doing so for private financial gain, or for cases where the infringement was egregious and amounting to actual privacy (at least $1,000 value in 180 days). For Justice to actually make a case against any individual would require intensive investigation and monitoring over an extensive period of time.
It is for precisely this reason that the Congress provided for civil remedies for copyright infringement including awards of an attorney fee -- so that private copyright owners can pursue their remedies on their own dime -- if it actually creates a meaningful cost to them (and presumably to society).
RIAA would like for us to spend tax money to support them, and save them the costs of prosecution. These Congressmen are engaging in the worst kind of pork by suggesting that our Justice department should waste tax and precious law enforcement resources prosecuting penny-ante civil copyright infringement cases. RIAA neither needs nor deserves such public assistance. Save Justice resources for meaningful pirates, yet, or more important, for meaningful law enforcement matters. The RIAA should take care of itself.