EU Weighs Copyright Law

Braedley writes "Some members of the European IT industry are unhappy with a proposed law that would penalize various parties, from software companies to ISPs, to even some hardware manufactures, but not the end users for infringing on intellectual property. Penalties for this aiding and abetting could include jail time for employees if found guilty."

Comments

Copyright is a matter of respect

[cdrguru]

If you do not respect it, about as much can be done as not respecting anyone or anything else.

We have moved to a period where a great deal of wealth is in the hands of patents, trademarks and copyrights. This means that "respecting copyright" or not can mean the difference between people being paid a salary or not. That starts to get pretty serious, at least as far as the affected people are concerned.

All the talk about rich corporations out to squeeze the last dime from the consumer is just a smoke screen. What it comes down to is can people rely on patents, trademarks and copyrights for a livelihood.

50 years ago the answer was an unqualified yes. Today, there are serious questions about this. In the near future the answer is likely to be no. This will certainly put a lot of people out on the street that today are employed because money can be had from patents, trademarks and copyrights.

I can't imagine that anyone growing up today will have any respect whatsoever for "copyright" in any form. Anything they can put their hands on will be redistributed, copied and plagiarized. DRM certainly isn't going to have the desired effect. Harsh lawsuits aren't having the desired effect. Education isn't working as most schools teach more about downloading music and copying software than the students find out of school.

Re:Copyright is a matter of respect

[Anonymous Coward]

Copyright has fulfilled what it was meant to fulfill; can anyone and everyone write a book? Can they make a million copies of a book per second? Can they make, bind, and sell the book?

Yes. For about $800 I can set you up with all the hardware you'd need.

Fact of the matter is we now have this fantastic technology which enables us to copy books freely, cheaply, and even make and bind our own. The only thing which costs anything is the time invested in writing.

The labor of creation is becoming less of a commodity as the ability to implement that creation on a massive and personal scale escalates.

What you need to realize is that the major social dilemma of our day is that we are very quickly realizing technology where 10% of the worlds population produces 100% of the worlds goods, and where the need for many goods is not particularly fantastic; there's only so much a person can consume. We started before, as small tribes roaming around finding food and water, then escalated to a massive scalar society where a 5 million square foot warehouse employes a tribe of 1000 people and 5000 people worth of families are taken care of by that job. That society is breaking apart again; there are few efforts left that require the manpower of an empire and soon we'll be back to small units producing what they need and specializing for their tribe or business.

What's happening is we are restructuring our society to handle the technological phuenominon; the old world way of doing things, and the new world concept, are continuously being made out of date; both of their power bases are eroding slowly and surely. In 50 years, bands will still tour, but if you think that the RIAA will still exist, think again; those bands with have a $400 media duplicator on-site at their conserts that will sell full package media for them; a nice metal plated case with a full paperback insert and a high-quality disk, all made on the spot, as well as on-line and band-stand sales. Big bands with big hits may have more distribution, but that just means more $400 burners.

Re:Copyright is a matter of respect

[j1m 5n0w]

I agree with you. I don't respect copyright law as much as I used to, for several reasons:

• I perceive that copyright law ought to reflect my interests as a consumer as well as content owners, but it doesn't. If it did, the maximum copyright length would be much shorter.
• Huge penalties for violation and selective enforcement.
• Intellectual property tends to be overpriced to begin with (CDs especially).

That doesn't mean I go out and copy everything I can off of P2P networks, I'm just saying I don't feel much outrage when other people do so - quite the opposite. I think if the government (the US government in my case) wanted to regain my respect for copyright law, they should:

• Enact more reasonable copyright laws (this might mean leaving TRIPS).
• Reduce penalties for infringement that isn't for commercial gain, but shut down the guys that are, for instance, making a living selling anime bootlegs from China on Ebay.

and content owners need to

• Reduce their prices.
• Cater more to the "heavy tail" consumers.
• Stop trying to control what we do with the stuff they sell us (DRM).

The most likely way I see that these last three are going to come about is that new companies that actually want to sell the products that people want will replace the ones that don't. Some government action may be necessary to break up monopolies, I don't really understand the industry well enough to know if market forces are enough.

Not sensible

[cyberbob2351]

Well, at least they are not focused on penalizing the end users...

Realistically however, theres only so much one can do. If ISP's start policing the nets more, it just means that the filetraders will resort to shadier and more secure methods of transport. The content distributors will rely more heavily on botnets and compromised webservers to hold the information, and we will see a higher prevalence of strongly encrypted darkets like WASTE for getting the information around.

If anything, people will go underground with sneakernet.

And how dare we hold hardware manufacturers accountable? Copying of information is just an inherent property of the technology. Writing implements can be used to copy written works, do we hold pencil manufacturers accountable? If sneakernet becomes the norm, do we hold ipods and portable hard drives the culprit?

Give it up. Filetrading is here to stay, regardless of what prohibitions the governments place on it.

Re:Sigh.....

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually one problem with making it a civil matter is the lower standard of proof, the lack of a right to an attorney (which you do have in a criminal case) and therefore the likelihood that people who don't actually do any infringement could be stuck with large monthly bills for the rest of their lives. Even if the court agrees that they are innocent, they are stuck for attorney's fees, unless they countersue.

The criminal system has protections for defendants that should not be ignored.

(I write from the vantage point of the United States, but I'm sure that the EU also has better protections for defendants in criminal cases than in civil cases.)

They just can't wait to kill the internet

[SpaghettiCoder]

It's been their plan all along to implement something called "The Grid" - a massive centralized network including phones, computers, televisions, etc. This "Grid" would be accessible only by first giving personally identifiable info in the form of some kind of digital signature. The UK government proposed this to the telecoms industry in 1999 or thereabouts.

IIRC, this particular legislation would, according to the masterplan, be about 2 or 3 years ahead of schedule.

The EU is a very sinister machine. Power resides in the hands of the Council 100%. The Council proposes legislation, and submits them to the European Parliament for rubber-stamping. In most cases, the MEPs haven't read the legislation they're voting on (this isn't a piece of Slashdot bull - this is really the truth) and wouldn't be able to understand it anyway. They are there because it's a very easy way to get fat without doing anything. The European Parliament can send a piece of legislation back to the Council for amendment (and the Council usually just makes superficial changes), but the second time around it goes through (different rules regarding the majority).

Make no mistake: the Council itself is a puppet of the G6, the Carlyle Group and other secretive friends. It's been decided the internet (in the form it is in right now) has to go down. The Council has to formulate a 5/10 year plan and direct national governments and the EU about what they have to do.