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.
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?
-fold, a suffix added to a cardinal number signifying "multiplied by"
<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>
Profit shouldn't have anything to do with copyright enforcement.
Nor does it have anything to do with compensation, or sales.
"They" shouldn't go after anybody for what is a civil law issue. It is not for the government to enforce. If you violate somebody's copyright, and they sue, that should be it.
What really needs to happen is that terms should be sane, criminalization should be undone, and penalties should be realistic and proportional.
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?
Piracy is a norm, just as much as breaking the speed limit.
You may not like it, and it may not be a good thing -- we'd have less pollution and fewer fatal accidents if people didn't speed, after all -- but whether it's desirable or not has nothing to do with whether it's reached the point of being the effective status quo.
(While I work with Free Software, the games I play and the software my wife uses for school are commercial, and I do spend money on them; likewise, I've been buying music from Amazon MP3 since it became available. This isn't an attempt to rationalize my own behavior, but rather an observation regarding what's generally considered acceptable behavior in public).
Anyhow, inasmuch as this really is targeting commercial infringers, more power to them -- if, at least, it's actually liable to help. Commercial infringers are scum, and that meme is widespread enough to be considered a norm as well. On the other hand, if it leads to suits targeting individuals for far more than their total net worth for what once would have been a civil violation worth treble actual damages... well, that is thoroughly unfortunate. Even if the police can't pull over and fine folks every time they're speeding doesn't make it acceptable to confiscate a person's car, house and other worldly possessions on the one occasion that they're unfortunate enough to get caught; why is that approach considered acceptable in the context of copyright infringement?
Having the law so divorced from reasonability that I could have statutory liability greater than the present sale value of my house for this act is frankly unconscionable.
You make good points, but I just want to reply to the above, because on this one I really do disagree with you. I would far rather have laws that permit a wide range of penalties if they are broken, and trust that a court with the facts of the specific case will decide an appropriate level in those particular circumstances, than have the legislation mandate a certain level of penalty based on whatever Parliament happened to consider at the time the law was written. If an unreasonable penalty were handed down by the magistrates or the court proceedings somehow deviated from acceptable practice, there are several levels of higher court to which an appeal could be made. The maximum penalty in this case isn't something that is automatically awarded by default, without the copyright holder having to prove anything. It is simply that now a Magistrates' Court can give a more representative penalty to small-time commercial operators whose damage may exceed the previous £5,000 cap.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.