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."

Comments

Why?

[Anonymous Coward]

Why is this tagged "patents"? A patent != copyright != trademark. Sure, they're all intellectual property, but they're not the same!

Re:Ouch

[faloi]

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?

Re:Ouch

[betterunixthanunix]

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.

not news.

[Kingrames]

nobody here cares if you prosecute people who are making money off your patents/copyrights.

we only care that they stop prosecuting their customers.

Re:not news.

[Artifakt]

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.

Don't take it for the face value

[burnitdown]

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.

Re:Don't take it for the face value

[CRCulver]

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.

On the other hand, the fact that for a few decades now a huge percentage of young people in various countries has considered smoking marijuana completely fine has not resulted in the total decriminalization of it. There may very well remain a disconnect between the attitudes of the people and the severity of the law in the "intellectual property" issue as well.

Re:Ouch

[Atheil]

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.

Re:Ouch

[ravenspear]

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.

Re:Ouch

[statusbar]

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++

Those damn commoners.

[RyanFenton]

<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>

Re:Why is it always the UK?

[Anonymous Coward]

Antarctica?

Hmmm...

[MightyMartian]

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.

Re:Ouch

[tha_mink]

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.

Re:Why is it always the UK?

[ivan256]

I could make you a list, but you be dismayed to find it full of countries that have already achieved outright fascism...

Re:Why is it always the UK?

[TheGratefulNet]

no, we cannot find another country. this is NOT about the UK or US. or even the west. its a 'catchy virus' that all countries are not embracing ;(

take a lesson from brer rabbit (ie, from the BANNED film 'song of the south', by disney). you cannot run away from your troubles.

seriously, there is no where to run to - as soon as you try, THAT place will increase the anti-freedom crap that you are seeing in the UK (and we also more or less see here in the US).

Re:Ouch

[bigstrat2003]

A bad law which turns out to have good uses does not become a good law.

Re:Personal use

[ivan256]

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.

Dear recording industry

[DI Rebus]

As is common in other areas of industry, the value of your inventory has changed. Please adjust your expectations.

The Gowers Report is well worth reading

[davide marney]

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:

• Page 34, Models of Innovation - a nice explanation of 'open' and 'closed' innovation
• Page 35, Cost of licensing spending - where I learned that in 1999, 90% of companies spent less than 10% of their R&D budget on licensing, but by 2009, that figure had dropped to only 10% of companies spending less than 10% on licensing. Wow.
• Page 49, IP "performance" scorecard - a frame for judging the cost/benefit of patents, copyrights, trademarks, and designs.
• Page 56, Revenue Distribution of Songs - where I learned that even the credit card companies make more on downloaded songs than the artist does (!). That's just sad.
• Page 58, Sales of fiction by year of publication - proof that an extremely small number of works makes any money beyond just a few years after publication

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.

Re:Watch out Seagate, Western Digital, Apple, ISPs

[ccguy]

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."

Indeed. In Spain it is assumed that consumers buy this stuff with piracy in mind and they make everyone pay just in case. Buy a new hard disk, pay 12 euros (plus tax, to add insult to the injury) that will go to the 'authors'.

Now, I won't claim that I bought my last Tb for my own pictures, home made movies, etc. But the following industries are getting nothing of my 12 euros: Porn, sports (I downloaded the last Wimbledon match for example), software...

I wonder what is going to happen when they demand a piece of the cake.

Re:Ouch

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

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.

Re:Ouch

[jedidiah]

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.