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Stiffer Penalties for Copyright Violations
smallfries writes "US Attorney General Alberto Gonzales has proposed much harsher punishments for copyright violations, including jail time. The Intellectual Property Protection Act [PDF Warning] doesn't appear to change the fundamentals of US copyright law but does allow more leeway for the police when investigating suspected crimes, and harsher punishments for those convicted. A response with a link to one site's look at the bill is up on Linux Electrons. Now that attempting the crime has such severe consequences, who will be the first to go to jail for running a p2p client?"
And in tomorrow's news...
President Bush is pleased to introduce the Protect Democracy Act which would ensure the death penalty and forfeiture of all assets for singing a song written in the past 500 years without written permission from the copyright holder.
The nation's test case is already in the pipeline, with an entire boy scout troop under indictment for singing The Star Spangled Banner before playing a game of wiffle ball.
It is hoped that these new regulations make the world safe, in our continuing war on terror.
What are you eating? isItVeg?.
Throughout history, this has always been the way. Can't stop people stealing in droves? Make stealing punishable by death. Can't stop people blasphemy? Mak the crime punishable by death!
It is a natural reaction to make the laws tougher when people start to defy the law in droves but I urge people to ignore that reflex because often it is more instructive to look at root causes. Why do people pirate? Because the CDs are overpriced. Your average individual actually prefers the boxed CD to an MP3 but is not prepared to spend £15 on it. If you priced your CDs to reflect this desire then you could reverse the decline in CD sales.
Often, real change does not come from politics but from the sound of a million feet. Politicans still believe that people want the artist to be compensated to the tune of £15 for a crappy manufactured album. The people do not. In the end the people will win; they always do. The question is how much political capital are they willing to spend fighting this change?
The Internet has changed everything. I was working a project for a band a fairly high profile band in the UK who have totally ditched their record label in favour of a web-based approach. I can't blame them! Why get 1% of the CD record sales when I can get 100% and make more money than the labels were are paying?
Another thing, They REFUSED to use DRM. Saying that DRM protects the artist is rubbish. It protects the label's reveune stream, that's all. This band understands the internet. They're saying they want you to copy because it's a bonus to them just to get heard by that one new fan. That one new fan might spend £50 on a ticket to see you at a concert. They may even by the tracks off the site just to support you. It builds loyalty when you trust your fans rather than hold them in contempt.
The future is just getting started and we're about to see the big labels get their wing clipped.
Simon.
As long as the argument keeps getting framed as a battle of pirates cheating honest American companies out of their God-given profits, we will continue to see a push for harsh penalties. But frankly, this creation of a whole new class of criminals is not a world that I want to live in. So how can we convey to people that the bulk of IP violations don't deserve to be criminalized?
* Tape a TV show for a friend
* Play the new White Stripes CD at your office party
* Forward an interesting email rumor
* Make a cool picture you found on the web into your desktop background image
These are all things that people frequently do without any sense of transgression. Are we as a society going to start sending grandmothers, middle school students and so on to jail? Are we prepared to start using web browsers without "save" functions, email programs without "forward" functions, software that reports on us if we're doing anything possibly illegal? The illegalization of non-DRM'ed mpg, avi, txt and mp3 files? Because that is where we're heading unless we put a stop to it.
Where the hell does this end?
About the same point the "donations" do.
More laws lead to more criminals; more criminals need bigger jails, and government employees to build the jails and catch the criminals. Hiring more government workers requires higher taxes and additional bureaucracy to track and collect the money. Meanwhile, Joe Senator gets re-elected because he delivered the legislation specified by his large corporate donors.
And the people in charge get more powerful. Everybody wins!
I totally can't wait for a world government to make this process even more efficient.
--Larry
Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by incompetence
The central notion of copyright is that the act of making copies was difficult, and therefore served as a kind of chokepoint to control distribution and make sure someone got paid. The justification for legal sanction is more complex, though I like the American version, that encouraging creativity is beneficial for the society.
The copyright premise of difficult copying is totally broken. Staying with BitTorrent as an example, it was trival to distribute thousands of 75 MB copies of OpenOffice 2 in a few days. It could have been millions, and it would have made no difference from the usage perspective. When I got my download, it quickly maxed out my connection. More copies simply make it easier to do so.
Since the foundation has crumbled to sand, it doesn't matter what sort of reinforcements they try to use. Gonzales is just being a typical BushCo idiot and is trying to steer by looking backwards. We need to rethink the entire notion of copyright and how to compensate creativity, not focus on "new" ways to keep a dying publishing industry on life support.
Freedom = (Meaningful - Coerced) Choice != (Speech | Beer^2), and sad sock puppets' bad mods avail them naught.