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RCMP Won't Go After Personal Filesharers
mlauzon writes "The RCMP announced that it will stop targeting people who download copyrighted material for personal use (Google translation). Their priority will be to focus on organized crime and copyright theft that affects the health and safety of consumers, such as copyright violations related to medicine and electrical appliances, instead of the cash flow of large corporations. Around the same time that the CRIA successfully took Demonoid offline, the RCMP made clear that Demonoid's users don't have to worry about getting prosecuted, at least not in Canada. 'Piracy for personal use is no longer targeted,' Noël St-Hilaire, head of copyright theft investigations of the RCMP, said in an interview. 'It is too easy to copy these days and we do not know how to stop it.'"
In a sudden outbreak of reason and common sense, a government has decided that its own people are not "the enemy"
The usual fallacious argument. I'm not a fan of the RIAA's *tactics*, but the fact that a whole lot of people break the law doesn't make it OK, and that seems to be the crux of your argument. Basically, people have found a way to get for free what they used to pay for. The fact that they have little chance of being caught have empowered people to break the law, but that's about it.
And please don't make a lame ass 'civil disobediance' arguement next. If you feel that strongly about it, don't listen to the RIAA's tripe *at all,* pirated or not.
Personal duplication amongst friends might not be too bad but mass distribution via P2P apps is clearly wrong and just as harmful to the industries that are supported by the protections provided by intellectual property law.
I have to disagree. I believe that outright theft of someone's copyrighted work is wrong, regardless of whether it's done for personal use (what I call micropiracy) or commercial profit. Similarly, I believe that making copies of something you have (either that you bought legally or copied from somewhere else) to give to other people is wrong, with some exceptions.
I also have to state my objection to a single broad classification of 'piracy'. I believe there are legitimate uses of obtaining copyrighted works without paying for them, that do not fall under any ethical definition of 'theft' or 'piracy', despite being generally illegal (depending on your country). The biggest one of these I can think of is sampling before you buy; I can't see any moral problem with listening to an album a couple times to decide whether you want to buy it, provided you either buy it or stop listening to it afterwards. Similarly, there a number of things falling under 'fair use', such as educational purposes, criticism, etc., that the MAFIAA consider illegal that I do not consider wrong nor 'piracy'.
As for the topic of this thread, I believe they made the right decision for a couple reasons.
1. The cost/benefit ratio of prosecuting people committing micropiracy is far too high to be practical even with conventional definitions of piracy (e.g. any file sharing is piracy), and would be a huge drain on anyone who tries to enforce it
2. As there are legitimate uses unpaid for copyrighted media via file sharing (or otherwise), I don't believe it's enough to simply consider downloading or uploading copyrighted works to be piracy; the purpose must also be taken into account, which sets an impossibly high bar for enforcement
3. They couldn't stop micropiracy if they tried, at this point
You have tried to support your argument with faulty reasoning! Go directly to jail; do not pass Go, do not collect $200!