UK Has First Verdict in P2P Case

An anonymous reader writes "Two British men have been found guilty of illegally sharing music via a P2P network. The BBC reports that their defense of 'Not knowing it was illegal' and that 'There was no evidence' did not hold water, and they have been ordered to pay the BPI 'between £1500 and £5000' - probably with double that again in costs. Theis isn't the first time the BPI has launched a case of this kind - but it is the first time the accused has tried to fight instead of stumping up the cash straight away. Three other verdicts are pending."

Comments

Ignorance...

[zenmojodaddy]

Since when has ignorance of the law been a valid defence?

Re:Ignorance...

[britneys 9th husband]

Since when has "There was no evidence" NOT been a valid defense?

Re:Ignorance...

[jxyama]

I remember on 9/11, some clever people took advantage of network shortages in Manhattan to withdraw money from ATM, thinking there was no consequence. Some of them were charged and found guilty.

I also heard another case where some people in midwest figured out that they could swipe their drivers license at the gas pump and it would dispense gas for "free." Those people were charged and found guilty.

In both cases, just like this P2P case, you can claim "I didn't know it was illegal." I am guessing that such naive "confession" isn't really applicable or effective as a defense (and shouldn't be, in my opinion) beyond certain point since people were getting things of monetary value for "free."

In all cases, the prosecution had evidence on who and what was involved: withdrawer/money, motorist/gas, sharer/copyrighted music. All "I didn't know it was illegal" defends is the intent. That's not "no evidence."

Re:Ignorance...

[Antifuse]

From TFA: The first defendant, from King's Lynn, said the BPI had no direct evidence of infringement, but the judges dismissed this and ordered him to make an immediate payment of £5,000. Does that mean that there WAS evidence? Or that the judge just said "Bah, we don't need no evidence!"? A very poorly written article.

Re:Ignorance...

[Catbeller]

"STOP SHARING COPYRIGHTED WORKS YOU DON'T OWN"

So if I own the music, it's okay then.

By the way, no one can own music. You can own an object, like a CD or if you're a record company, the master. But music is not property and you can't own it. You can hold a copyright, but that's it. Music belongs to the world. That's sanity. That's how it works.

The idea is to give the copy-rights to someone for a limited time, to encourage the arts and help the artist get paid. Then the music is released into the commons.

This has stopped. The contract has been broken; copyright is forever. We didn't break the deal, they did. So let the war continue, the sane versus the greedy. The war ends when copyrights stop being construed as "owning the music" whereever it exists, and become 15 year limited exclusive rights granted by the law. When music and ideas are not "property", a mad concept designed to meter people's minds.

Re:Ignorance...

[pla]

It's not a valid defense in those cases where there actually is evidence.

So of course, BPI has either pictures of these guys actually in the act of sharing music, or credibile witnesses that claims to have watched them do so?

No evidence means just that. The BPI has an IP address and a filename. By the same standards of "proof", you could convict Richard Nixon of bank robbery on no better evidence than someone wearing a Nixon Halloween mask during the crime.


As unlikely as you may consider it (from the "intent", not the "techical" aspect), 10 seconds from now I could make my machine "look" like yours as far as Kazaa and the rest can tell. With a bit more effort and some luck (such as you running an unpatched XP machine), I could actually USE your machine to generate the offending traffic.

And even going so far as to address intent (why someone would attack these guys' machines) - How long does it take an unpatched machine on the net to turn into a zombie? Last I heard, it happens quickly enough that you can't patch a new install fast enough (if dumb enough to stick it on the net unprotected) to avoid the impending attacks.

So no, no evidence proving the accused gents did anything wrong. The BPI has the murder weapon and the corpse, but nothing else.


Just for the record, I don't make this claim because I support file sharing. It scares the hell out of me that the goverment may apply the same reasoning to real crimes. "Well, someone hacked into the pentagon, and they logged your IP address, so the prosecution rests".

Re:Ignorance...

[Tim C]

That's all well and good, and forms part of a valid method of protest. However, in that case, you must be prepared to accept the consequences of your actions - protesting a law like that means being prepared to go to jail, protesting all the way that the law is wrong.

Re:Ignorance...

[Kjella]

This has stopped. The contract has been broken; copyright is forever. We didn't break the deal, they did. So let the war continue, the sane versus the greedy. The war ends when copyrights stop being construed as "owning the music" whereever it exists, and become 15 year limited exclusive rights granted by the law. When music and ideas are not "property", a mad concept designed to meter people's minds.

Excep that 95%+ of all copyright violators I know don't give a flying fsck about any of that. They couldn't care less about what was released 15 years ago, they want what was released at the cinema last week. The war is between the greedy and the greedy, And the people who are really getting screwed are the customers who'd like to make some sort of compromise. I've never ever gotten a rootkit via MP3s, do put it quite frankly. I've never had any downloaded movie tell me that I'm in the wrong zone or that it won't let me fast forward. And I sure haven't had a movie disable my player, like Blu-Ray threatens to. Trusted Computing is gong to make me a dog on a leash, only allowed to do what my master the TCPA computer will let me. "Leashed computing" would be much more accurate. Why should I let myself be treated this way? And with apologies to Harry Potter: "Dark and difficult times lie ahead. Soon we must all face the choice between what is right and what is easy."

Re:Ignorance...

[IgnoramusMaximus]

That is only sane of course if the law is either simple enough to be comprehended by an average citizen or is intuitively obvious. Unfortunately, not only this is no longer true, some, particularly those who profit from this situation, do everything in their power to make sure that average citizens do not have a chance to understand the law. Thus yet another form of tyranny is born. And it is no coincidence that a vast majority of politicians are ex-lawyers.

Declining CD sales are inevitable?

[digitaldc]

The BPI says it believes internet music-swapping has led to a decline in sales of singles since 1999.

As for the opinion that most music today just isn't that great (IMHO) and therefore leads to declining CD sales - was never mentioned.

People legally downloading songs, on the other hand, might have been another argument, but that wasn't mentioned either.

Re:Declining CD sales are inevitable?

[hattig]

Increases in costs (taxes, etc) in Britain since 1999 mean that people have less money to spend on frivolous things.

Increase in uptake of alternative media (games consoles, DVDs, etc) also meant that limited budget is being spread around more things.

Of course people are going to stop buying music. It's the easiest thing to access (radio, tv) and it isn't important to own. Especially if it isn't that good.

Re:Office Space said it best

[Spy der Mann]

If your getting something for nothing that you are supposed to pay for, then it is called stealing.

Wrong! Stealing = Taking the property of someone without permission (Destruction of others' property is taken into account, too). The overinflated prices the RIAA sets on music do NOT make that money their property. Besides their prices are on the labelled, stamped, colored, decorated, copy-protected, and maybe even autographed CD's - but not on the music itself. And even that is nothing compared to the "additional costs" that are nothing but price fixing.

So what this guy stole are actually one or two dollars, who rightfully belong to the music groups. Why then do the courts make him pay so much to the recording labels? This doesn't make sense at all.

Tell me, who's the one really stealing?

More information?

[Teiresias_UK]

According to the Register:

The organisation began pursuing alleged copyright infringers in October 2004, and to date has come to terms with 88 people, some of whom have paid up to £6,500 to avoid a court hearing.

Considering the number of people downloading music from P2P clients in the UK, you're going to have to be really really unlucky to be one of the 88.

One thing to consider is how 'targetted' these cases were. Do we know if the BPI are chasing the people who are providing the files for download or just those downloading? I believe the RIAA were doing chasing the content providers in attempt to 'cut off the supply' of files available for download.

It might also be interesting to find out what client that these guys were using - more for my own personal benefit so I never use it ...

Re:Evidence?

[BarryNorton]

Intent to commit a crime is called conspiracy

This is not general in UK Law - the Criminal Law Act of 1977 removed the slapdash use of this concept from Common Law, and replaced it with specific statutes.

Bravo!

[stlhawkeye]

The more of these people who are legitimately caught via law enforcement instead of bullying extortionistic letters from the attorneys of the content cartels, the better. This can only be good for the rest of us, who never download anything illegally, and just want the government to keep its laws off of P2P technology. This is how copyright infringement should be handled - as a law enforcement matter - rather than lobbyists trying to make DRM a legally-mandated hardware feature for new playback devices. This is a great example of people who really are breaking law getting caught and punished via the court system rather than pushed around by a bunch of attorneys. I expect this to be universally lauded on Slashdot.

Unless, of course, we don't really care about P2P and just want free music and all of our righteous and indignant howling over curtails on p2p technology is a reaction to having buy all the trash music we claim so much to hate.

Re:Scary

[shark72]

"I'm no law scholar here, but doesn't the judge have to actually refuse any defendant's claim with some logical arguement instead of simply claiming "nah, I'm pretend I didn't hear that?""

Yes.

I'm guessing you're assuming this didn't happen because you didn't read about it in the article? Keep in mind that it's a 15-sentence writeup on a mainstream news website. The brevity of the writeup should not be taken to mean that something didn't happen just because it did not go into detail.

The likelihood is that the judge did look at all the evidence and deem that the guy was full of crap. My guess is that he was trying some of the the typical Slashdot defenses ("maybe somebody was sitting in my driveway tapping into my wireless network!", "maybe those were just a thousand Excel spreadsheet files which I happened to rename after songs by popular artists!", and so on) and found out that real courts usually work in a much more matter-of-fact way than many Slashdotters are aware.

Re:It's A Brave New World.

[Kjella]

For one, you can definately 100% not be the expert witness, neither should any of your good IT buddies who'd do it as a favor. Plus, someone has to make a legal defense out of the IT person's testimony. Anything that makes you look techy-savvy like making a good legal defense regarding computers would be self-defeating, you will need a lawyer to argue your case. As this point with a lawyer and an expert witness, you're already racking up a huge bill. And the best you're likely to get away with is not to get convicted - I don't know if you can be made to pay your opponents legal costs in the UK. Around here you can, but that's usually reserved for completely groundless lawsuits - such a case wouldn't qualify as it has too much circumstancial evidence for that to happen.

Re:Office Space said it best

[Anonymous Coward]

Blah blah blah

Value is a funny thing. Something is worth whatever people are willing to pay for it. If people will pay $20 for a CD, then it's worth $20, even if you disagree. You don't get to decide how much things are worth.

That being said, it's still stealing. Since you see nothing wrong with copyright infringement (as this comment proves), I'm sure you wouldn't mind if I, uh, "borrowed" your computer for a while. Just post your IP, username, password, and favorite remote connection utility (telnet, ssh, VNC, Remote Desktop, whatever).

I just want to "borrow" your computer for a bit, play around with it, download some questionable material, troll the Wikipedia, nothing serious. I'm sure you see no problem with that, because you have no problem with copyright infringement, so that wouldn't be stealing after all.

Whenever someone starts mincing words ("copyright infringement" vs "stealing") it's in a (feeble) attempt to justify their sins. File sharing is morally wrong: you know that. Stealing CDs is morally wrong: you know that. Yet your entire post was a poor attempt to construct an argument where it wasn't wrong. Just like how Clinton redefined sex, you're redefining morals to try and free yourself from the wrongs you've commited. It doesn't work.

Bad Lawyers

[TorontoImporter]

I agree with some earlier comments regarding a bad defence. There are many reasons that the judge in this case got away with deciding them in this manner:

1. Bad lawyers for the defendants. (There was obviously a lack of professionalism)

2. Most lawyers in both the U.S. and Europe have little, if no understanding of the copyright system. For example in the U.S. alone the copyright laws have been amended so many times that only a handful of lawyers even understand what the law "says", let alone is interpreted as.

3. Pressure! (These lower court decisions obviously have huge pressure inflicted by the lobbying groups involved, it would take a good lawyer to get taken seriously)

4. The arguments involved in defending yourself for these sort of cases tends to be much more complicated then typical civil action. In these cases the defendant must prove "lack of evidence" under a much wider argument generally along privacy, fair use, copyright details, what is infringment etc...

5. The judges in these cases generally don't have a lot of precedents to refer to.

6. The world is undecided currently on what to do with the Internet in a legal sense of rights and fair use.

Hope this clarifies some issues a bit.

Re:Office Space said it best

[RingDev]

Luckily for 'your friend' there are many legal options to do this. Both Amazon.com and iTunes offer preview copies of songs, and with services like Yahoo music you can get 'lease' song you want legally and if you want to keep it for ever, you can buy it at will.

You are looking at this from a 'possible loss' point of view. Let's turn the tables and look at it as a 'definate gain' possibility.

Let's say that you like song ABC. You like it very much, enough to the point that you are willing to give up $12 for the band's latest CD. You the consumer see a gain in $10 worth of music and the label sees a gain of $10 cash. Now, if you are given the option to get that same CD for free and you take it, you have now seen a gain of $10 in music, but the creater of the music has not seen any gains.

At this point, you have definately gained money, and the label has definately NOT gained money. But there is more to the story. You see, that label had to pay to have the albumn produced and mastered, it had to pay the performers and buy the rights. That one $10 CD might have cost $5 million to record, produce, and market (notice I'm not including production, distrobution, or sales). True, the label will make a but load of copies to recoup that lose and make a profit. But since that is the case each copy of the content can be given an exact value. If we print and ship 1 million CDs we can say that each copy costs the label $5.

So now we have a consumer who has gained $10 in music and the label who has not been reimbersed the $5 it cost them. So the customer gains and the label loses (albeit half of what the consumer gains).

Is it unfair then to goto the consumer who downloaded the must and require them to pay the $5?

-Rick