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."
I dunno. Is linking a torrent or posting a MP3 or video clip on a website that has AdWords, or something like that going, enough to say someone's making a profit on illegal copyright infringement?
"It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education." -Albert Einstein
I agree, I've always thought there should be a distinction between mere piracy (taking something for free) and illegally profiting from infringement. There's been a push in the US to equate the two, which I think is a mistake. In the majority of cases involving piracy, the person obtaining the work is not going to pay for it anyway (they just want it for free), so even though it is against the law the original creator is not losing any money. When people are paying someone else for the work that does not own it, that is a direct illegal transfer of money that should be going to the copyright holder.
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.
Slippery slope is hardly a "fallacy" in a legal system built on it.
If they want to address profiteers then they should frame it in that
manner: the ill gotten gains. Although this ends up being "inconvenient".
They just want to punish without the burden of actually proving anything.
Beware of any escalation of copyright fines/damages not tied to actual
real damages or gains.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
I agree that penalties need to be significant enough to provide deterrence. In the U.S., there's a rule of thumb frequently used, which allows for triple damages in cases where, for example, simple negligence gives way to criminal levels of negligence. I think that is derived from English common law so the U.K. probably has similar principles in some areas of modern law.
But often, that idea means instead that the penalty becomes stiffer if the tort or crime is one that most of the time goes unpunished or uncorrected.
This can end up resulting in punishing more severely anyone breaking a law the public often disagrees with. If the public (or a big segment of it) actually doesn't want to turn in people committing crime X (i.e. drug use), then the additional penalties would get adjusted upwards to make up for that reluctance. The U.S. already has some penalties like this - for ex. the HOPE tax credit, which the taxpayer can't get if the student was ever convicted of a drug related felony, but could theoretically still claim if the student was convicted of rape, murder or even treason.
The fact that a large minority disagrees with a law, and might passively disregard it, should make the government think the law might be too harsh, rather than serve as an excuse to make it harsher.
Who is John Cabal?