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Congress Declares War on File Leakers
An anonymous reader submits "Bush is expected to sign a law that essentially makes it a crime punishable by up to three years in jail for a user to put a single 'copy of a film, software program or music file in a shared folder and should have known the copyrighted work had not been commercially released.' Whichever side you're on in the copyright debate, you have to agree this legislation is draconian and excessive, to say the least."
Why? The damages are greater to the copywrite holder.
Yes, I believe copywrite law is being abused (by both the (c) holder AND the (c) violator) -- however, this doesn't appear to me to be an abuse...
Enjoyed my fun little christmas hoax - help me do it for real! ;-)
Hulk SMASH Celiac Disease
That's it, I'm going to go shoplift, commit massive fraud against individuals, and torture cute things in full view of the public, because none of that is nearly as bad as filesharing. After all, it only hurts people, not corporations.
John Rowland defrauded the state of Connecticut, and will be serving a measly single fucking year for it. Pimply-faced teenagers will spend more time being rectally plundered by delinquents named "Li'l Dawg" than our esteemed public servant will for racketeering, conspiract, et al.
ARGH!
--grendel drago
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
My god, I hope sooner or later people wake up to what is happening in this country. We have absolutely lost any semblence of 'punishment fits the crime'. How can 3 years in jail be justified by sharing a single copy of a pre-release movie. Granted it's theft, but theft of one $8.00 movie ticket at the most. Even if it is stealing (which I do consider it), three years in jail is just stupidly over-reactionary and overtly excessive. Of course a possible 25 year prison sentence for spamming is right up there too. Sure I hate spam and it pee's me off, but 25 years in jail? Then lump the loss of due process with the DMCA and you start to see a middle ages picture being drawn here. Isn't this what the founding fathers of our country came here to escape?
[S.167.RH]
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
This law works on two levels. Its primary backing, of course, is Hollywood, and they have a decent case that file leaking -- especially review DVDs loaned under nondisclosure -- can undermine their business model. Okay, I get it, though the penalties do look awfully harsh.
But this also appears to apply to anyone who "leaks" information that the owner doesn't really want out there, ever. Without a deadline on the "release" date, material can be embargoed forever. That's how Big Brother can put information into a Memory Hole, and put anyone who lets it out into Room 101. It accompanies the DMCA stream that makes information Go Away Permanently when its DRM is made unreadable: If it's on a short-lived medium (some DVDs and CDs) and can't be copied, or uses a DRM that is time-limited, then once it goes, it goes, and trying to keep the information alive becomes a Crime Against The State. These secondary agendas are not obvious to the mainstream press, but the Fatherland Security Police apparatus is well aware of how these laws can be used against political opponents.
So does this mean that - for a change - the record companies themselves are on the receiving end?? (Linked article claims that major record companies are actively 'leaking' new singles onto popular blogs to get positive reviews.)
karma police: arrest this man, he talks in maths; he buzzes like a fridge, he's like a detuned radio. [radiohead]
Whichever side you're on in the copyright debate, you have to agree this legislation is draconian and excessive, to say the least."
I am on the side of reducing copyright to a more reasonable time-frame. Five years after the death of the author would be plenty, IMHO.
Were I a King of the US, I would declare that getting rid of copyright entirely would be even better. People wrote some pretty good stuff before the concept of copyright existed, so I disagree that it would all disappear after it was wiped out.
And I do not "have to agree" that it's "draconian" and in fact, I don't agree.
If you are going to bother to have copyright law matter at all, the only way to effectively enforce it is to come down hard on the first person to illegally distribute it. Once it's scattered all over usenet and various torrent sites, it's too late to do jack shit about it.
So, unless everybody wants to agree to my kooky libertarian ideal of abolishing copyright entirely (and we all know that such a thing will never happen), then we need a big hammer to enforce the law as it exists.
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
Otherwise, why even pirate this crap?
I've never so much as considered attempting to download a movie. The amount of effort that goes into pirating such things when you could just drive to a video store and pay a very reasonable couple of bucks boggles my mind. But honestly, at this point I'm inclined to just start pirating movies in bulk without even ever watching a single one of them, just for the purpose of distributing them to others. The movie industry feels like their customers are insidious little criminals out to destroy them? Well fine. Then I want to actually start acting like one.
They shit on the laws of my country, I start shitting on them. It's the least they deserve.
Irritable, left-wing and possibly humorous bumper stickers and t-shirts
I see folks calling this proposal "draconian." It sounds to me, and I did NOT RTFA as of this post, that a max. 3 year sentence is not so much OVERKILL and DRACONIAN as it is a DETERRANT to those who might think about violating the law.
Granted, it's a little nuts, but think about it -- some kid starts seeing a PSA on TV and reading online hearing about other kids getting threatened with 3 years max. for violating the law? Shit -- if I were a parent, I'd think "family" in terms of this law, 'cause spending money to defend my kid for something he probably shouldn't have been doing in the first place affects my fucking "family" financially.
Personally, it sounds like a horseshit law in the works, but most of the ones coming from DC these days are horseshit. However, as a deterrant, 3 years for, say, my kid violating the law is plenty effective.
IronChefMorimoto
It seems the bastards cannot legally check my non-shared directories without physically taking my machine away, but they can easily see and record what I share.
So do multiple files aggregate then? Say there were multiple offenses. Would one then receive life imprisonment for a massive amount of file transfers?
Axe murderer: What are you in for?
File swapper: I shared a master copy of Britney Spear's newest cd before it was released.
Axe murderer: The Villainy!
This bill was introduced by the notorious pirate Hatch. It seems to read like a preliminary to a more restrictive law. IANAL, but it seems to me that it would actually be hard to convict a casual file sharer.
An excert:
(a) Prohibited Acts- Section 506(a) of title 17, United States Code, is amended to read as follows:
`(a) Criminal Infringement-
`(1) IN GENERAL- Any person who willfully infringes a copyright shall be punished as provided under section 2319 of title 18, if the infringement was committed--
`(A) for purposes of commercial advantage or private financial gain;
`(B) by the reproduction or distribution, including by electronic means, during any 180-day period, of 1 or more copies or phonorecords of 1 or more copyrighted works, which have a total retail value of more than $1,000; or
`(C) by the distribution of a work being prepared for commercial distribution, by making it available on a computer network accessible to members of the public, if such person knew or should have known that the work was intended for commercial distribution.
`(2) EVIDENCE- For purposes of this subsection, evidence of reproduction or distribution of a copyrighted work, by itself, shall not be sufficient to establish willful infringement of a copyright.
`(3) DEFINITION- In this subsection, the term `work being prepared for commercial distribution' means--
`(A) a computer program, a musical work, a motion picture or other audiovisual work, or a sound recording, if, at the time of unauthorized distribution--
`(i) the copyright owner has a reasonable expectation of commercial distribution; and
`(ii) the copies or phonorecords of the work have not been commercially distributed; or
`(B) a motion picture, if, at the time of unauthorized distribution, the motion picture--
`(i) has been made available for viewing in a motion picture exhibition facility; and
`(ii) has not been made available in copies for sale to the general public in the United States in a format intended to permit viewing outside a motion picture exhibition facility.'.
... makes it a crime punishable by up to three years in jail for a user to put a single 'copy of a film, software program or music file in a shared folder and should have known the copyrighted work had not been commercially released.
A literal reading of this would say that some music files that I and a few friends made and put online are going to become illegal. Consider:
1) The files are copyrighted by default (by us).
2) We haven't released these files commercially.
3) The files are online, on my web site.
Are they really making it illegal for people to put their own files online without first releasing them commercially?
This sounds like they're basically outlawing the act of giving things out for free. You can only sell things; you can't give your own things away as a present.
I suppose this wouldn't be surprising, coming from the Bush administration.
I've also put a number of small scripts online, for the benefit of anyone who might find them useful. They're too small to sell. They must be copyrighted since in the US, everything is copyrighted by default. So it sounds like those giving out those little scripts is soon to be an illegal act.
I wonder what the chances are that the courts would toss this law?
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
Due to the fact that many zombie machines can be manipulated to publish copyrighted content, to say the least, why not make a war on people who design weak operating systems knowing that they can be exploited with evil purposes?
In other words: How do you know the files in my shared folder weren't put there by hackers who exploited yet another vulnerability in Microsoft Windows? (remember the case of the planted warez in Sweden?)
I see, but in that case it is still messed up because it would seem easy for someone to plant any file into my full-of-trojans machine (as an example) and then report me to the authorities. Then would I still be liable? What if I am guilty and then remove all the protection software and infect my computer with trojans when they come to take it, I'll say, sorry I am a sociology professor and I have no clue how to use computers, it has been acting "strange" lately.
To fix this loophole they would have to prosecute the ones that they can prove weren't infected with anything and just did it to themselves to get away.
I prefer fixed terms of no more than 56 years in length (preferably shorter, maybe around 20 years). Why?
Life+5 years gives $BigPublishingCompany or $BigFilmCompany large incentives to see that Stephen King (or any other big-selling author) has an unfortunate "accident". Five years later, they no longer have to pay his estate any royalties on his works.
Such corporations couldn't exist at all without the government giving them the legal right to exist. As a libertarian, the idea of giving a corportation any of the rights of a person is completely disgusting to me.
-- Give me ambiguity or give me something else!