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Parents Not Liable For Their Son's Illegal Music Sharing, Says German Court
An anonymous reader sends this quote from an IDG News report:
"A German couple are not liable for the filesharing activities of their 13-year old son because they told him unauthorized downloading and sharing of copyrighted material was illegal, and they were not aware the boy violated this prohibition, the German Federal Court of Justice ruled on Thursday. ... The ruling of the Federal Court of Justice reversed a ruling of the higher regional court of Cologne, which found the parents were liable for the illegal filesharing because they failed to fulfill their parental supervision. That court said the parents could have installed a firewall on their son's computer as well as a security program that would have made it possible to only allow the child to install software with the consent of his parents. Besides that, the parents could have checked their son's PC once a month, and then the parents would have spotted the Bearshare icon on the computers' desktop, according to the Cologne court. 'The Federal Court overturned the decision of the Appeal Court and dismissed it,' the court said."
how to justify the 13 year old's apparent love of music from the 60s and 70s...
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
Bad enough that your teenager might wreck your classic sports car, get busted for trying to buy alcohol or cigarettes, become a sex offender for sexting, cause a pregnancy, or thousands of other delinquent acts. At least if they commit piracy, you're personally off the hook now. Too bad your family isn't. You could disown the kid, I suppose.
Intellectual Property is a monopolistic, selfish, and defective concept. It is "tyranny over the mind of man"
And the child duty is to get around all limitations placed on them by the parents. Or did you do as you were told and have no imagination to do other wise when you were a child (you still may be - I don't know)?
He was just downloading stuff, it's not like he was smoking cigarettes or drinking.
Jesus.
Piracy for personal use = total worth ignoring
Love many, trust a few, do harm to none.
Parents should take alternate shifts so there's always one awake watching their child at any moment of the day or the night. Having more than one child should be forbidden because then watching them 24 hours a day would be impossible with only 2 parents.
Exactly! That's why I keep my son locked in a cage, except when he has to go potty. God forbid he ever leaves my sight, as he might buy nuclear arms behind my back... or worse... download some old music illegally!
while(1) attack(People.Sandy);
sorry but that is exactly what the highest court in Germany just decided is NOT the case. You completely got it back to front.
It may be YOUR opinion that the situation is different, but the high court decision in Germany is that the LAW doesn't require this. End of story.
"Age of criminal responsibility"
Differentiating between crimes isn't done in this fine scale (i.e. at 10 you can murder, but at 15 you can't, etc.) - you're either criminally responsible for your actions or not. The offence only determines the severity of the crime, not your capacity to know better.
Most countries have this at an age where the child should "know better", i.e. usually around 10 years old. Below that age, you can't be "criminally responsible" for the acts you've committed, because it's unlikely you understood what you were doing or what the impact would be (i.e. a toddler pushing another toddler off a high-rise block of flats while playing).
What you're confusing is the SEVERITY of the crime, and the capacity to know whether what you're doing is wrong or not. The severity of the crime determines the possible "punishment", the capacity to know what you were doing determines whose fault that was (i.e. parent for leaving you alone, you for not knowing better, etc.)
I don't see why it wouldn't be exactly the same. If the kid robs anything and is caught with whatever he robbed he is forced to give it back and that is about it. If he gets into a fight, he gets into a fight. This happens all the time with a lot of kids if you need a reality check.
You watch over your 13 year old every minute of every day? 13 is more than old enough to have a private life and private activities, in fact I would argue that trying to deny them that would have a much worse effect on society than downloading music does. How long does it take to install some peer to peer software and hide it? 20 minutes? Maybe 5 minutes to queue up each song and move it to the device of your choice. Yeah, letting your teenager have 30 minutes on a PC without your supervision should be a criminal offense. Not digging through every file on the family PC should be a criminal offense. Not spying on your children should be a criminal offense. That all makes perfect sense.
He was just downloading stuff, it's not like he was smoking cigarettes or drinking.
Jesus.
Piracy for personal use = total worth ignoring
I totally agree. However, he was not just downloading, he was "sharing", uploading as well. So he stole a pack of gum, and gave a few away. That's the size of this case. Give him a good spanking, and let it go.
These laws are stupid. How in hell are parents able to tell what a kid is doing on his/her computer? How many parents are able to tell the difference between two icons that don't look like Word or IE? After this ruling, all kids know to delete these icons from their desktop. Or they learn how to change the icon into something else. There is probably an app for that.
Any parent who is truly aware of everything their child is doing should be reported to child services.
By giving kids no autonomy to learn the world for themselves you're not only potentially stunting their mental growth but potentially also breeding one hell of a rebellion when a child gets to that age.
The 13 yr old probably knows more about how to circumvent the measures suggested by the earlier court than the parents know about installing them. It was a stupid ruling and should have been struck down. The only reason for it is that those that are prosecuting know that the parents have money and the boy does not.
I love stacking my barbecues in the shed at the end of summer - you can't beat a bit of grill on grill action.
You need at least 3 persons for an 8 hour shift. Also you will have to plan for sickness, weekends and vacation time. I'd say you need 6 people to watch a kid around the clock.
And since we are talking about teenagers those propably should be armed with more than just harsh language.
So for proper parenting you will need to hire 6 Blackwater mercs just to make sure.
Also: what does a Bearshare logo look like? Hadn't heard of that before. I would have understood Beavershare. He is an adolescent after all...
20 minutes into the future
But what if a kid steals, gets into a fight or robs people? Who will be liable?
What's that got to do with this? Those are serious crimes that result in real people being injured or deprived of their hard-earned property. The only "damage" in the case of copyright violation is the slim, hypothetical possibility that, if the kid hadn't been able to get the material, he'd have paid for them and the artists would have got a thousandth of a cent in royalties.
Wake me up if the kid was running a large-scale illegal download site shipping ripped-off content to sufficient thousands of people to make a difference. Even then, the sensible thing for the content owners to do would be to shake him down for some free advertising space and punt gig tickets, t-shirts, action figures and premium-rate SMS services to his customer base.
In a survey of 100 programmers, 111111 thought that duck-typing was a good idea.
Probably not but the kid is. Big difference between a felony and a civil issue anyways. Even then the kid should be treated a lot differently than an adult in respect to the felony.
I'm a parent I believe in parental responsibilities at the same time I'm not the sue everybody sort. My son stole something once he was 2 and a half at the time, I noticed a couple minutes later brought him back into the store had him give it back and apologize. I do not think you need to get into litigation, police etc, this is part of growing up and being a parent. I think the thing people tend to forget is the parents need to be the ultimate authority as far as the child is concerned to do otherwise undermines there ability to parent. By the RIAA/MPAA definition reading a magazine in the store constitutes theft and you should pay 1000 times the real value to account for the people they did not catch and and the store should enforce this for them, check out lines would never be the same.
No sir I dont like it.
I don't have access to the first courts ruling.
But during the higher courts session it became clear: THEY HAD A FIREWALL and had tried to restrict his users rights to install new software.
Ofc. it is beyond any laymans responsibility to install aditional software to 'guard his children' from illegal activities.
Even more annoying: the law situation is crystal clear. Nevertheless the 'music company' sued in the hope to get a cheap victory in a lower court from an unexperienced judge.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
What about the internet enabled phone? PS3? Wii? Toaster?
And then, forget P2P applications like Bearshare, which I only found out today still exists, and I did some of the early beta testing on it. Forget it because because MP3s can be downloaded from all manner of places. FTP, IM, HTTP, teh browser.
Bah to it all.
This post contains benzene, nitrosamines, formaldehyde and hydrogen cyanide.
So does this mean a 13 year old will bet sent to jail?
No, this is the civilized world, where they don't usually send children to prison.
Or anyone to prison for what's clearly not crimes where the society needs to be protected from the individual.
Prisoners, USA: 0.73% of the population
Prisoners, Germany: 0.083% of the population (and that's high by world standards).
Children serving life without parole, USA: ~2500
Children serving life without parole, rest of the world combined: 0
Oh, come on. That's not their only option. I count a few other options:
1 - No access to any computational device, ever.
2 - The parents could have become IT specialists.
3 - The parents could have paid a firm to monitor their child 24/7.
Help! I'm a slashdot refugee.
Well, downloading illegal music is a criminal offense. Illegally downloading (legal) music is a civil offense. Illegal music in Germany would e.g. be Nazi songs etc...
cpghost at Cordula's Web.
But what if a kid steals, gets into a fight or robs people? Who will be liable?
Why the presumption that someone has to be liable?
If a bear cub comes crashing through the woods and breaks into a tent, it's bad. But we don't put the bear or its parents on trial, nor sentence them to pay back the owner.
I buy insurance to cover the cases where bad things happen and no one is liable. It doesn't cover everything, but if it happens, it helps.
That said, parents are of course responsible for investing the time and resources in rearing their children as well as they can. If they don't, they're guilty of neglecting their children's upbringing -- a rather serious crime in itself, but unless they teach their children to break the law, they're not guilty of the crimes their children commit.
It's pretty disturbing that you got modded up to "Insightful." Disobeying one's parents from time to time is inevitable, but "getting around all limitations" is not a filial "duty." What rubbish.
Oh please. If this was 25 years ago and involved a kid sharing music via cassette tapes, no one would have batted an eyelash. The only stupid thing is that it gets take to court now because 1 kid among literally millions gets caught and has to be made the scapegoat for the rest of society. Total and utter bullshit.
GEMA should go fuck itself.
Backhanded attempt?
2500 to 0 speaks for itself. It requires no explanation.
Children serving life without parole, rest of the world combined: 0
Not quite true. There are also child prisoners in North Korea who are unlikely to be released.
From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Camp_22:
Based on the guilt by association principle (Korean: [some Korean text that Slashdot won't print here], yeonjwaje) they are often imprisoned together with the whole family including children and the elderly.[12] All prisoners are detained until they die and prisoners are never released.[18]
So no, not just the USA.
Of course, if you meant the rest of the civilized world, then you'd probably be correct.
You never know what is enough unless you know what is more than enough. - Blake
Can you break down the ages of the ~2500? When I see 'Children', I guess I'm thinking 18 and under, but in Germany (as noted below), children are 11 and under. Are there ~2500 kids under the age of 12 in prison serving life without parole in the US?
[John]
Shit better not happen!
You know, I was able to bypass this problem by making my son's cage floor a wire mesh. Now the droppings fall right through. As an added bonus, when I need to hose the floor down I can also spray the boy for his shower. Two birds with one stone.
So your parents know of everything you did when you were young? Methinks not, guv.
In some countries, 16 is a legal adult.
In other countries, 16 is effectively an adult.
So Europeans whining about the American incarceration of "children" is a little disengenuous. Kind of reminds one of how American fundies like to trivialize young adults.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
People who were betwen 13 and 17 when the alleged crimes were committed. I believe there are 40 who were age 13.
Compared to the zero figure for the rest of the world combined, any figure 1 or higher is way too high.
It's pretty disturbing that you got modded up to "Insightful." Disobeying one's parents from time to time is inevitable, but "getting around all limitations" is not a filial "duty." What rubbish.
What are you a nipple-neck?
A child's job is to hack reality. A child's three primary goals are to 1) experience, 2) learn, and 3) test boundaries of their current experience/knowledge. Fun and entertainment is an evolutionary benefit to physically/physiologically promote those goals. Like hunger being painful and sex being pleasurable.
Adulthood is a word for the stage of life when strictly obeying your progenitors is merely one option.
And THIS is why we need the government to install security cameras in everyone's home. To save the people from having to monitor themselves or their children. Isn't that the government mandate?
Bonus points if they can just install a V-CHIP into all children's brains to not only monitor their behavior, but to actually alter it so that they can conform to being good passive citizens!
So you'd rather have 2500 psychopathic children free to roam the streets of your town, and potentially grow up to commit more horrible crimes than they have already been convicted of doing?
The rest of the world appears to manage. And with every other country having a much lower adult prison population too, I can't see the American policy having solved a lot of the problem with adult crimes?
At the risk of being modded into oblivion I'm going to go out on a limb here and suggest you may be a moslem shill. I say this because of the statistically young age of suicide bombers and the high probability they suffer from a severe pathology.
I'm sorry to burst your bubble, but I'm a white freethinker with no sympathy for absurd nonsense like religion and dogmatism, on either side.
"The UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, which entered into force more than two decades ago, expressly prohibits the imposition of life imprisonment without the possibility of release for offences -- however serious -- committed by people under 18 years old. All countries except the USA and Somalia have ratified the Convention.
USA the land of freedom. Well not if you are a child obviously.
So Europeans whining about the American incarceration of "children" is a little disengenuous.
How about an American whining about it?
Anyhow, 13 year olds are, I believe, children by any country's definition.
And if you think the US definition of children is too high, you need to work to rectify this then, because children are to be given special rights and protections according to the UN charter of children's rights. You can't pick and choose and give people a certain age the limitations of a child but not the protections. Either give them both, or neither.
We actually call people under the age of 18 young offenders, and they are tried in juvenile courts, and sent to "young offenders instituions" if found guilty.
don't call me Shirley
(sorry, somebody had to say it)
A recent visitor of mine reported that at the age of 12 he installed a key logger to get the password that his parents had put on his PC to limit his use of it... He only told his dad recently (he's 19...) The court is clearly right in refusing to hold the parents responsible. It's HARD!
Thirteen is old enough to think through things rationally and question social mores. Filesharing is largely a victimless crime and the thread of reasoning for it carrying a punishment is tenuous at best. It's easy to see how a person with a well developed sense of right and wrong can think filesharing isn't wrong.
Anyway, he was downloading old music, right? Some of it was from artists that are now dead. The bigger stretch is saying that it's wrong to deprive media executives income derived from the works of other dead people. It takes a much more twisted sense of right and wrong to justify eternal (forever minus a day) style of copyright with massive financial or criminal penalties.
If you want a vision of the future, imagine a youtube comments section scrolling - forever.
But this is an adult crime:
"(11-16) 10:57 PST VALLEJO -- A 14-year-old boy has been arrested on suspicion of kidnapping, sexually assaulting and attempting to murder a 65-year-old woman in Vallejo, police said Friday.
The suspect was booked at Solano County Juvenile Hall on allegations of attempted murder, assault, carjacking, armed robbery and kidnapping for ransom.
Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/crime/article/Boy-14-arrested-in-assault-of-woman-65-4043616.php#ixzz2CPmK03Sr"
This was today, near San Francisco.
This is an adult crime. Talk to the 65 year old woman he raped about "children are to be given special rights and protections according to the UN charter of children's rights".
Ask her what she thinks about that.
You're clearly applying feelings and not reason to what happened.
Did the child in question enjoy the rights you and I have, to work, vote or otherwise change his situation? No? Then how is he responsible for actions his situation put him in?
This is a child. Yes, the acts were heinous. That doesn't mean that the child is beyond our help. Yes, help is what he needs, desperately.
What good would it do anyone to put him in jail for life? It wouldn't be preventative, cause children don't look at sentence levels before doing things. It wouldn't rehabilitate him. It wouldn't unrape the woman.
Get this child help now, and stop letting your base feelings for revenge dictate what should be done.