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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
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.
Bad enough that your teenager might wreck your classic sports car
However, if his friend does it you get a truly great movie.
Regarding the court decision, it sounds at the headline level to be very sensible. Parental responsibility has to have boundaries, and the parents seem to have taken reasonable steps.
This should never have reached court in the first place. Revise copyright laws, etc.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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
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.
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
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 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.
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.