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Jail Time for Movie Swappers
ArmenTanzarian writes "The MPAA is at it again, reports CNET in a story from yesterday. Apparently, suing the pants off of teenagers RIAA-style isn't good enough, they want to go ahead and throw you in jail. To that end, their senators will introduce the Artists' Rights and Theft Prevention Act today; which carries with it a maximum sentence of 3 years in prison and a $250,000 fine. Here's the best part: you don't have to infringe on copyright to be found guilty!"
Anytime you see legislation like this. Feinstein has taken payoffs to the tune of $264,566 from the Tv/Movies/Music lobby. No one should be suprised by her involvement.
It reassures me to know our "leadership" is spending its time on important things like catering to the complaints of insanely rich corporations instead of trying to fix trivial problems like the state of public education or massive government waste.
it does not say any actual copyright infringement must take place--only that the file be available in a shared folder, Web site or FTP (File Transfer Protocol) site. "It says we don't care if anybody got any of these copies," Jaszi said. "We're going to conclude that at least 10 people did. It relieves the copyright owner of having to prove that any violation of their rights actually happened."
Good thing these guys aren't involved in the security of the retail sector. If I owned a store, these guys might put ME in jail because I have merchandise sitting out, available for someone to steal!!
What a wonderful breakthrough in law enforcement: assuming that an actual crime has been committed and acting accordingly. In a day and age when people can be automagically declared enemy combatants and permanently removed from the legal system, I guess this was the next step.
Since we're all theoretically capable of criminal actions, I think we should all pre-emptively surrender to the proper authorities.
In any case, we don't know if John Titor was a real time traveler from 2036 or not....his postings/messages make a lot of interesting reading though. He "predicted" the development of CERN's blackholes, China's space mission, and more importantly, the American Civil War, which is supposed to start in the next two years (2004-2005) or so.
The primary reason he mentioned was the ever increasing highhandedness of the US government (this was in 1999-early 2000), before Sept 11 happenings/Patriot Act etc.
Anyway, what he said was, that people got tired of the US government monitoring them all the time, passing more and more unjust laws favoring corporate America, and curbing basic freedoms of the people.
True or not, every time another such YRO story comes up on /., it makes me wonder where America is headed.
From the article:
The Cornyn-Feinstein bill also creates another federal felony, punishable by up to five years in prison, for using "an audiovisual recording device" in a movie theater to make a copy of a film and boosts civil penalties available to MPAA member companies when suing over prerelease movies placed on the Internet.
This is truly astonishing, and to my knowledge, unprecedented. Note that all cases of prohibition of cameras, tape recorders, MD recorders, etc from concerts, variety shows, etc, have ALWAYS been civil matters; rules set and enforced by the persons or companies doing the entertaining.
This is the first instance I can think of where this type of activity has crossd over from civil to criminal jurisdiction. The only possible good that can come out of this is that a conviction will require unanimous guilty verdict from a jury, whereas civil cases are decided by judicial fiat or a majority of the jury.
I don't use p2p myself, but I'd be interested to know where the MPAA & RIAA would stand if a huge worm hit 10,000's of windows systems and installed a p2p client, and then hosted infringing movie/music titles for others to download using any of the currently available p2p apps.
If the worm had a high propogation, surely this would make life very difficult for the MPAA & RIAA.
Come to think of it, if such a worm got into a computer system through a weakness in the operarting system, could the creators of the operating system be held responsible?
Ok, how about OLD movies? Say, something you have a copy of that has since gone out of circulation on DVD and has no chance in hell of being re-released in theaters or shown on TV? This happens with books and music quite often, not everything is in circulation.
So do my files become jailbait again when the studio decides it's no longer profitable to press more copies and blockbuster ditches it to clear shelf space?
Introducing the new Occam Fusion! Now with sqrt(-1) fewer blades!
I think there is a legal and moral principal that says that the punishment should fit the crime. Here if there is any crime it is the depriving of the artist of maybe a few dollars of revenue from a copy of hundreds of thousands of copies that are sold. Do you think that that is worth years of someones life. Or maybe we should make swearing a crime by act of congress and toss your sorry ass in jail for infraction of community standards. What do you think, your crime has been spread to millions of eyes rather than a single small file transfer. Which is the worse more far reaching infraction.
... to the 50's; yes. But it's the 1850's, not the 1950's.
Solution 1 - encrypt the file. Then it's a DMCA violation for them to unencrypt it.
Solution 2 - name a garbage file w. the same name as an unreleased movie and share it, then counter-sue when they have you arrested.
Solution 3 - Move the file to a non-US site
Solution 4 - Send a (short) clip as an email atachment to each senator and congressman, with a note saying that they are now, without having done anything except check their mail, violated the proposed legislation and are liable to 3 yers in jail.
There really is no solution for the **AAs except to build more value into what they're offering. Doing world-simultaneous openings of stinkers like Matrix Revolutions in the hope of ripping of consumers doesn't cut it any more than re-releasing the same song in yet another different format/compilaton/variant.