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."
Why is this tagged "patents"? A patent != copyright != trademark. Sure, they're all intellectual property, but they're not the same!
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 see a reason to hate it. It takes the UK that much closer to imposing higher fines on ordinary, not-profit-seeking citizens who download movies and music. It also opens up yet another channel of abuse, where a person's actions can be construed as profit-seeking even if they really weren't, to levy a higher fine against them.
Palm trees and 8
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
I agree to your first statement, that it may indeed lead to higher fines against regular users, however the slippery slope is a fallacy. For all we know this could lead to lower fines against people who aren't profiting. As to your second point, I assume it can only be construed as profit-seeking if you actually would benefit monetarily from posting the content. And I mean, as much as I hate the RIAA (or the UK's equivalent) and the idea of copyright as it stands in general, I do disagree with people profiting from another's work by direct copy of that work.
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.
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
This law could also be used to generate more money for developers by suing people or companies violating the copyright of GPL'd software when they don't comply with the GPL requirements...
--jeffk++
ipv6 is my vpn
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>
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.
Only if the person who owns the site, and the person who posted the copyrighted content are the same person I'd surmise.
Yeah, I totally trust the government to make that distinction.
You'll have that sometimes...
A bad law which turns out to have good uses does not become a good law.
"16MB (fuck off, MiB fascists)" - The Mighty Buzzard
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?
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
But this is a law which definitely has some good uses, but only in a hypothetical future version has some bad uses?
The "slippery slope" argument is a fallacy as a matter of logic, not necessarily as a matter of empirical evidence.
If a government is known to create palatable laws as a way to introduce what would otherwise be less-palatable laws later, then there would be cause to believe that the slippery slope argument is valid in this case.
Empirical evidence trumps logic.
Rule of Slashdot #0: You and people like you are not representative of the larger population. - A.C.
No, actually it's great.
For too long have amateur pirates been downloading and sharing material. It has almost destroyed professional piracy.
Where it used to be possible to sell burnt CDs and DVDs of music and film, and have pay to use FTP sites with ratios, now people expect to get it all for free.
Tighter laws will be a boon to the piracy industry, and we can finally get back to making some proper money again.
Spare us the FUD. These decisions will be made in a court, and in the lowest court at that. The government has no direct say in such cases; government ministers wouldn't even get out of bed to attend this sort of case.
And for the record, as someone who has actually seen a Magistrates' Court in action, they are IME sombre, serious places where the decisions are made carefully and with extreme care. It's a side effect of getting lay people to make the decision: they tend to consult their legal advisor frequently, but come from an outside perspective.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
That line sounds best in the style of K-9 being smug with his "I'm far superior to you humans" attitude.
Or have I just been watching too much old Doctor Who?
Moore's law is not a law. Theory, yes; Predictable trend, certainly; Law, no.
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.
Well, no, I don't mean anything like that. Perhaps you noticed that this is a story about the UK?
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
So is downloading movies and music supposed to be OK then? Why? If you can't be bothered to buy it, do without it.
Have a look at soylentnews.org for a different view
Oh, for goodness' sake, get some perspective.
The point of this law is to bring the penalties available to a court for commercial copyright infringement on-line to the same levels at those already available for off-line copyright infringement. It is closing a loophole. There is nothing to say that courts must arbitrarily hand out fines of 50k for infringement that did not deserve that level of penalty. There is nothing new in the scale of the maximum penalty, either.
Also, this is only the cap on what a Magistrates' Court can impose. It is normal under the legal system here that higher courts have access to higher sentences for more serious illegal behaviour. Magistrates' Courts, being run only by lay people rather than legally trained judges and without the use of a jury, are limited in the punishments they can impose.
What is your problem here? Do you think that not only must the legislature be inherently corrupt, but now the judicial system is as well? What next, every member of the population who doesn't agree with your personal right to freeload is also wrong and a danger to humanity? Get some perspective, for goodness' sake, and at least understand the basics of what you're criticising before you post knee-jerk flamebait like that.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
Of course not. That said, there is such a thing as too extreme a punishment, and I don't know that $100,000 is merited, even for criminal copyright infringement.
"16MB (fuck off, MiB fascists)" - The Mighty Buzzard
So when are the government going to do something about the music industry and film industry cartels that are anti-consumer? Those kickbacks to politicians also working well in the UK.
Take Nobody's Word For It.
Profit does not necessitate a monetary return just that they have profit by minor copyright infringements. P2P. generally you must upload content to down load content, upload represents the major infringement and that in turn facilitates downloads at higher speeds, how the individual profits via the upload.
The will lie cheat and steal to maximise the profits, nothing more should be given to them in fact, some of the protections should be taken away or reduced.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen