Slashdot Mirror
British Government Considers Tenfold Increase To Copyright Penalty
Out-Law is reporting that the British government is planning to increase the maximum fine that can be awarded for online copyright infringement tenfold. "The Government and the Intellectual Property Office (UK-IPO) are consulting on the plans, which would allow Magistrates' Courts in England and Wales to issue summary fines of £50,000 for online copyright infringement. The larger fine is proposed for commercial scale infringements, where the person involved profits from the infringement. The plan would implement another of the recommendations of the Gowers Review of Intellectual Property, the 2006 report by former Financial Times editor Andrew Gowers which has been the foundation of intellectual property policy since its publication."
Well, at least it's only going to punish people who are illegally profiting from another's work. I don't see any reason to hate this law yet.
Why is this tagged "patents"? A patent != copyright != trademark. Sure, they're all intellectual property, but they're not the same!
nobody here cares if you prosecute people who are making money off your patents/copyrights.
we only care that they stop prosecuting their customers.
If you can read this, I forgot to post anonymously.
If you take society at face value, you assume that institutions and rules actually control this place.
In reality, values and economics and demographics do.
They can increase penalties all they want, but that's not addressing the economic role of piracy and the new demographic that sees it as normal.
In my view, record labels, software firms and book publishers all had it easy with record profits on super-popular hits, and so they ignored the rest as "niche topics."
Now that everyone can publish, the market is flooded with material, reducing its value. Labels and publishers need to compete more aggressively, not spend money lobbying for laws.
All IMHO.
Anti-Globalism, Traditionalism, and FreeBSD.
UKIPO? Is that pronounced "uki-po"? I'd be embarrassed to work for them, even if the job itself wasn't a disgrace.
mcgrew's razor: Never attribute to stupidity that which can be explained by greedy self-interest
Does that mean theft in the tenth degree? That should carry the death penalty.
Between the UK and Germany (see the article about Germany now refusing to prosecute less sharers of less than 3000 songs, a little bit below this one on the Slashdot front page).
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
But this could very well be a good thing. Especially if combined with the the german idea of not prosecuting casual users ttp://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/08/15/1252217
Assuming of course that one does not over interpret the concept of a derivative work.
They should just switch over to ONLY going after people who are making a PROFIT from copyright infringement. If someone is selling another person's copyrighted work (like that Russian MP3 site) and making a profit, clearly a sale has been lost and the copyright owner should be entitled to compensation.
I'm critical, not cynical...
They raised a fine for copyright and they are increasing the length of copyright as well? Wtf?
Isn't 10-fold 2**10 ?
Every time I come on Slashdot it is my country that is guilty of the latest casual trampling of civil rights. Can anyone recommend a country that isn't blithely gamboling towards outright fascism?
If we can put a man on the moon, why can't we shoot people for Apollo-related non-sequiturs?
Attention: those that would vote Conservative thinking that they would be any better. Remember David Cameron will increase copyright to 70 years in return for state censorship of the media. This is how that utter cleft proposes to solve the youth crime problem in Britain: by stopping the kiddies from seeing the bad stuff.
This government is mild in comparison to the Tories. I wish there were someone we could vote for who aren't a complete bunch of bastards, Monster Raving Looney party perhaps?
<satire style="Stephen Colbert" >
I mean, the nerve of those commoners - copying data without a whim of care towards the strict control of information. Taking good sales pounds from BMI and other sacred institutions. It's downright madness - thinking they could just download and copy what isn't rightfully theirs, and think they could get away with it.
I say, no more - they must be punished further - £500,000, no $5,000,000 per... bit of data copied. By god, they shall learn what it means to write data that isn't theirs.
Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm off to yell at squirrels for taking nuts from my trees - I do believe they now owe me twelve trillion fully grown oak trees - damn selfish squirrels, they will learn, oh yes, all of them will learn what it means to take my precious acorns - potential trees, all of them, stolen from me!
</satire>
I'm rather curious to see how much longer laws can be enacted that seem to be in direct contradiction to what is increasingly the norms of society.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
As is common in other areas of industry, the value of your inventory has changed. Please adjust your expectations.
Watch out Seagate, Western Digital, Apple, and any other company that "seeks profit" from the abuse of piracy.
Terabyte hard drives, CD/DVD burners, Broadband providers and portable music players all owe a good portion of their success to the business of "copyright infringement." They have all, at some point, advertised the fact that they are the tools for anyone who wants to download, store, and play digital media. And none of them really care where that media came from, so long as you fill them up and buy more of their hardware.
If anyone is making a profit off the business of piracy, it's the hardware manufacturers and the services that allow the infringing material to be transmitted or recorded. When will we see THEM up against the wall?
I highly recommend skimming through the Gowers Review of Intellectual Property, the 2006 study on IP that seems to be the basis for this new law.
It seems to be a truly balanced study, full of interesting insights and recommendations. Some bits I liked:
And I could go on with the remedies suggested by the study, but I'll stop here. If the world were to adopt the recommendations in this Study, I do think it would be a huge step forward.
"We receive as friendly that which agrees with, we resist with dislike that which opposes us" - Faraday
the bribes from IP lobbyists I'm sure
Can anyone recommend a country that isn't blithely gamboling towards outright fascism?
China?
Might be communist, but they don't give a *$%&* about IP law.
Think Deeply.
Just make it the death penalty for copying a SINGLE song. That will teach them darn pirates....
Of course that will also cause a revolt and we will all finally overthrow these insane governments.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
soon the status quo will be reached as the Pound will eventually be worth 1/10 of the USD or Euro.
I notice...
...that when 2 different penalties are out of agreement with each other, it's never suggested that the harsher one be brought down to the level of the milder one.
...that the British government seems not at all interested in serving the interests of the British people at all.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
I was hoping your homepage was this one.
Let us not forget Sony, who feeds both ends of this equation.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
Option 1: You pirate a song that you never would have bought anyway from another music lover - the artist gets no money.
Option 2: You buy the song from the record company - the artist gets less than the credit card company processing the transaction gets.
Tell me again how this as all about the starving artists (and their families for decades after the artist is dead).
Now tell me just who has been starving the artists in the first place?
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
countries for immigration. why ? with such stupid draconian, boot licking laws as these, graduates in other countries will not be choosing britain either for grad study, or immigration and working.
there britain goes down the drain in terms of brain power. right at the time the entire population average was becoming too old to support the country too.
you gotta love politicians. for a few dollars, they can sink their own country.
Read radical news here
Just when I thought the human race couldn't get any dumber, something like this always proves me wrong. I mean seriously, do you really expect me to believe that a 10 fold increase in punishment will deter this kind of "crime"? Give me a fucking break!
"I bow to no man" - Riddick
If people subjected to RIAA suits were simply willing to declare bankruptcy this whole adventure would be a no-op. "You want to fine me" Here is my bankruptcy filing. Indeed if most file sharers were willing to follow this model it would probably overwhelm the legal system. A bankruptcy filing is erased from ones record in 10 years. So why bother about it?
They can only take you to the limit over what you care about. Choose not to care about it.
Having RTFA, I'd like to point out a few things. Firstly, this is a consultation paper, so it hasn't happened yet and it's unclear whether this would require additional legislation to through Westminster. Assuming it does, I'd like to remind you what a precarious state the Labour government is in at the moment.
There have been a few articles posted recently about various horrible draconian laws being proposed in the UK (and quite rightly so), however most Slashdotters seem to forget that the current Westminster government is incredibly unpopular and is likely to lose power in 2010, if not before as Gordon Brown's leadership might not last much longer than the end of the year, and that could trigger an election. While I don't trust David Cameron and the Tories any further than I could throw them, they're trying to be as populist as possible and IMHO, they'll hopefully be a little less trigger happy with our civil liberties. Any general election is also going to mean an increase in support for other parties such as the SNP who are arguably have more of a Social Democratic leaning than any of the big UK parties. While traditionally they haven't had enough seats to make much of an impact at Westminster, this could change in a Parliament with a fairly small Tory majority.
Speaking of the SNP (who are the minority Government in Scotland), this paper only affects courts in England and Wales - as it also mentions, Scotland and Northern Ireland are separate legal jurisdictions with their own devolved Governments. I can't remember offhand (and can't be bothered checking), but I've a feeling that legislating for these penalties would be a devolved matter in Scotland at least (although not in NI) and I'm not convinced these proposals would go down well in the Scottish Parliament (at least with pretty much every party except Labour, who are possibly in more severe in Holyrood meltdown than in Westminster).
In summary, just because our totalitarian friends in the Labour party are trying to salvage votes by being tough on everything, it doesn't mean it's going to happen.
Weaseling out of things is important to learn. It's what separates us from the animals... except the weasel."
Ten fold increase in penalties for copyright infringement? Good news at last. Now we all we need is for the UK justice system to take the more mundane crimes such as murder, assault and robbery a bit more seriously. These crimes aren't as important as copyright theft as they don't generally hurt those who donate to political parties, but they are still fairly important as they can occasionally harm voters.
It depends what you mean by government, I suppose.
At a general election, the people elect MPs to the House of Commons, which is the main part of the legislature. The second part is the House of Lords, but under the Parliament Act they must (eventually) defer to the Commons if a conflict arises.
The leader of the party with the largest number of MPs in the Commons is appointed Prime Minister, and formally invited by the Queen (our official head of state, but relatively powerless in reality) to form a government. Essentially, that refers to the executive, since the PM appoints Secretaries and Ministers of State. Normally, these people are drawn from members of the Commons and sometimes the Lords, so we don't have the same kind of separation of powers that countries like the US are supposed to have: almost by definition, those with ministerial or secretarial office come from the party that also has the biggest say in the Commons, so in practice as well as holding executive office they also set the direction of most parliamentary debates. (There is some scope for both the Opposition and individual MPs to bring motions for debate as well, but they get less of the available time.)
There are a few exceptional cases that will probably be cleared up, but other than that, no-one can hold both a parliamentary office and a judicial one, so judges are independent in that sense. In fact, in a Magistrates' Court, which is what we're talking about here, the court is run by three lay people (the Magistrates, one of whom will be senior to the other two) who are basically volunteers who very possibly have other day jobs and donate some of their time to the courts. Since the Magistrates aren't formally trained in the same way as a lawyer, they tend to rely (from what I've seen when I've been to Magistrates' Courts) on the Clerk of the Court, who is so trained, to provide professional advice as needed.
Magistrates' Courts are limited in what types of cases they can hear and what punishments they can hand out, and usually deal with low level crimes. It's somewhat similar to the misdemeanour/felony distinction in the US in terms of where the standard falls. Under various circumstances, a case may be transferred to a Crown Court, where it will be heard by a full judge and jury. (More serious cases would go there by default anyway.) Those judges cannot be serving Ministers or Secretaries of State at the same time either, and there are some restrictions on jury service to prevent conflicts of interest. The same goes for the High Court and Court of Appeal, the next highest levels.
We start to get into serious conflict after that, because then things wind up with the House of Lords/Law Lords, who are also part of the legislature. There's also a question at the moment over the status of the Attorney General, who is in some senses accountable to the government of the day and is their chief legal advisor, yet who supervises the public prosecuting authority, the Crown Prosecution Service, which is effectively a judicial role given the power that organisation wields in practice.
However, on this matter as I understand it, we are talking only about the penalties available to Magistrates for cases heard in a Magistrates' Court, so it's unlikely any cases on this scale would get anywhere near the level where conflicts of interest might arise between the judiciary and legislature/executive government. That would be a bit like the US Supreme Court hearing a case of petty theft, totally disproportionate. So I think it is fair to claim here that while the courts are ultimately administered using public funds etc., there is no direct say by the current administration in the outcome of this sort of case beyond setting the legal and punitive boundaries within which a Magistrates' Court must operate.
(Be warned that I am by no means a legal expert of scholar of government processes, so any of the above may be somewhat misleading or outright untrue in specific circumstances. I imagine Wikipedia and the like will have copious extra details if you're interested.)
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.