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Cameron's IP Advisor: Throw Persistent Copyright Infringers In Jail
An anonymous reader writes with this excerpt from TorrentFreak: "During a debate on the UK's Intellectual Property Bill, the Prime Minister's Intellectual Property Adviser has again called for a tougher approach to online file-sharing. In addition to recommending 'withdrawing Internet rights from lawbreakers,' Mike Weatherley MP significantly raised the bar by stating that the government must now consider 'some sort of custodial sentence for persistent offenders.' Google also got a bashing – again."
The article goes on to say "Weatherley noted that the Bill does not currently match penalties for online infringement with those available to punish infringers in the physical world. The point was detailed by John Leech MP, who called for the maximum penalty for digital infringement to be increased to 10 years’ imprisonment instead of the current two years."
John Leech? I take he doesn't seed back, then?
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
"withdrawing [...] rights from lawbreakers" I don't think that's how rights work?
is not to play the game. The rise of creative commons and the like will end this oppressive copyright regime. Free software and free culture is the only way to go.
The only way to fight personal, noncommercial "sharing", is to provide a one-stop download center with reasonable prices. It has worked for Amazon and Apple, but the media companies stubbornly refuse to cooperate and make their complete catalogs available in one place...so Pirate Bay does it for them.
The market is speaking as loudly as it can, but the media companies refuse to listen.
UDHR article 19:
Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.
Since enforcing copyright against people who share information online non-commercially is clearly a violation of a human right according to UDHR, to which UK is a signatory, how about throwing copyright enforcers in jail instead? How long is the public going to put up with this oppression?
I can see it now, someone arrested for copyright infringement accepts a plea bargain for a violent crime conviction to get less jail time.
mfwright@batnet.com
You seem awfully confident it couldn't get passed into law.
I'm less certain of that. The copyright owners and their lobbyists are working to chip away at our rights to make them secondary to theirs -- because they essentially want all digital technology to be controlled and used as they allow us.
I fear this could be something which happens eventually. And I fear that they will be pushing this exact same agenda elsewhere.
Case in point, the FBI gets called in because someone was wearing Google Glasses in a movie theater, even though he wasn't recording. And ICE and DHS do domain takedowns of places suspected of violating copyright (or facilitating it).
Governments are increasingly becoming tools of corporations to enforce their wishes on us.
So what you and I is becoming irrelevant, it's what the big corporations can pay for. And they have far more money than we do.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
Great, it should apply to everyone. Government officials, corporate execs, and the music industry itself.
The problem (besides jail time being a disproportionate punishment for copyright infringement) is that when someone in the government is found to have stolen an image or text from the internet, nothing happens. When a politician illegally uses a song for a campaign rally and the band finds out, all the politician has to do is release some press statement saying an aide made a mistake. When corporations infringe on copyrights nothing happens. When the music industry is found to have infringed on copyrights nothing happens. The only people subject to punishment are the commoner.
If laws applied to us all equally then lawmakers would stop passing asinine laws.
It seems to me when politicians or corporations misuse a photo or song they get off with a "opps". Yet they want to throw people in jail.
Step #1 should be much steeper penalties to corporations and other functioning entities that should have proper procedures in place to avoid violations.
And as long as you convince the older generations (or the wealthy) that you're being tough on crime, doing your best to cut taxes, and cutting social spending ... they'll keep voting for you. Because they don't give a damn about much else.
And, as we saw from the Occupy protests ... they'll just turn the national security forces against them, and either deem them to be terrorists, or actively work to find other ways to make sure they can't get very far -- which is easy when you monitor everyone's communications just in case you need to single someone out later.
Even democracies suffer from those in power trying to keep the world the way they want it, and there's a huge imbalance of power.
I agree with your hope. I'm just far less confident in it.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
...is legalisation. Non commercial sharing of information isn't wrong, or bad for the economy, so the best solution is to legalise it.
A pizza of radius z and thickness a has a volume of pi z z a
So when technology and the interests of the people and technology all change around them and their business model, the best answer they can come up with is punishment? This is the interests of a few dominating the interests and even the needs of the masses. Perhaps not the best definition of tyranny but it rather fits.
Is it possible to make lots of money from copyright infringement w/o breaking lots of other laws?
If that's not the case, why do we need more?
Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow.
This! This! 1000 Times!
Unlike theft, when you share a file it doesn't deprive anyone of their copy, when the **AA lobbies congress to extend copyright it deprives us all of any (even unprofitable) works entering our public domain.
The certainty of all works entering the public domain after a limited time is key to understanding copyright. It was not supposed to devolve into the IP dynasty creation that it is now.
I think most people by now understand the difference. The real question is do we want (what I will call) common copyright infringement, which is already against the law as a civil matter to be criminal fineable or jailable offense.
But now, do we want common copyright infringement infringement to be a crime?
I think most hear can agree that using someone's copyright against their will is wrong. But is it a moral wrong, a civil wrong, or a criminal wrong? Clearly those who own the copyrights don't want others using their copyrights without their authorization/compensation. But is this a battle that we want the government involved in, criminally? Some copyright infringement already is criminal. Remember all of those FBI warnings at the beginning of DVDs? If you start selling copyrighted materials as your own, you could be going to jail. And I think we call all agree that this is a crime. Clearly in large scale infringement cases, for example Microsoft using some Apple copyright, a civil proceeding is warranted and suitable.
But what do we do with individual offenders? The Pirate bay types. What type of crime is is? A moral one like adultery? (used to be a crime, but is not anymore **exceptions noted**) or should it rise to a punishable offense? What is the line between the two?
These are the questions we should be asking ourselves and as a society and not allowing special interest groups to drive the discussion.