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UK Gov't Asks: Is 10 Years In Jail the Answer To Online Pirates?
An anonymous reader writes with a link to this piece at TorrentFreak: Physical counterfeiters can receive up to 10 years in jail under UK copyright law but should online pirates receive the same maximum punishment? A new report commissioned by the government reveals that many major rightsholders believe they should, but will that have the desired effect? A new study commissioned by the UK Intellectual Property Office (IPO) examines whether the criminal sanctions for copyright infringement available under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 (CDPA 1988) are currently proportionate and correct, or whether they should be amended. While the Digital Economy Act 2010 increased financial penalties up to a maximum of £50,000, in broad terms the main 'offline' copyright offenses carry sentences of up to 10 years in jail while those carried out online carry a maximum of 'just' two.
the "property" holders won't mind paying taxes on the property? Right? Like you and me?
Oh, it's different for them.
Mostly random stuff.
10 years in jail for illegally watching a movie....No it is not ok!
I don't know what an "appropriate" punishment is for illegally downloading or distributing someone's content, but ten years sounds incredibly excessive unless you're running a vast, far-reaching network, distributing content to a million people and charging them for the convenience or something like that.
Some Average Joe sitting at home, downloading a bootlegged copy of the latest Hollywood movie... I don't know, a $50 fine maybe?
The thing is, the Internet has, and will continue to change, how media can be distributed and consumed. The old model of ticket and physical media sales just doesn't seem viable anymore. I think the media companies are going to need to find other ways to pick up revenue. Advertising in the movie itself, of course, is an option, but I think we're missing part of a bigger picture somewhere.
Someone, someday, is going to figure it out and make a bazillion dollars.
Love sees no species.
Longer sentences don't matter. Never have, never will. Especially not for white collar crime. You could put the death penalty, or lifetime in prison, behind it and it wouldn't make a difference.
6 months in prison would be enough of a deterrent if it worked. Because the people who commit this ... erh ... "crime" are usually not the hardened criminals that need a revolving door in the jailhouse 'cause they spend more time going in and out that on either side.
Now, it doesn't work, does it? Nope, doesn't. Mostly for two reasons. First, it's a law that is not backed by popular consent. There is exactly ZERO chance that someone would turn someone he knows in for this. Or convince him that it's better to turn himself in. WAY different for laws that have popular support. Make this quick comparison: Imagine you know someone and you learn that he copies files. Do you turn him in? He's not a close friend, just someone you know. Would you? Probably not. You would probably not even ask him to not do it again. Now imagine him having stolen something from a shop. Does it get more likely that you at least ask him to stop doing it and "get clean"?
And that ties in with the second reason: Nobody thinks of getting caught when doing something. I'm not even going to cite the near zero chance to actually get caught because the sentence for armed robbery of a bank is already at 10 years around here and the chance to get caught is near 100%. Still, people do it. Why? Because that's not on their list when they commit that crime.
Now let's string it together: People not thinking of the consequences, a near zero chance of getting caught and no popular support for the law. Fuck, you could have public beheadings and it wouldn't change shit.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
the only punishment that would actually work is one that is actually reasonable... how about, you get caught, you have to pay 5x the price of the item you pirated? people might actually stop pirating. the issue with these ridiculous punishments is that the only people you could reasonably go after for are the outliers who are the ones uploading tons and tons of content and profiting off them. if you attempted to put the average joe in jail for 10 years for piracy, first of all, there would be riots on your hands, second, you would have to put 9/10 of the US in jail... and we dont have enough prisons for that, we are already letting murderers loose because we dont have room for ppl who smoke pot.
One wonders if decades of digital piracy is what leads to the inevitable oppression we are coming under.
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
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Here's an idea, how about we check all of Mike's families PC's and phones and cassettes first to see if there's any copyright infringements.
No?
Waterfox - a Firefox fork with legacy extension support, security updates and better privacy by default.
Longer sentences don't do a damn thing to prevent anything other than removing the problem from society.
In fact, the longer the sentence, the considerably higher chance that person is going to just go straight back to criminal business BECAUSE they will end up blacklisted by a considerable number of companies for work. (which is retarded and only makes society worse for everyone due to it)
The only people that get screwed over in all of this is literally the lesser grunt-work people, very rarely do the higher-ups actually get caught.
The only way to deal with this problem is the media industry stop screwing over customers with region restrictions, overpriced goods and unwillingness to adapt to new technology.
They could be making a killing with online media, which some already are right now and the market is growing.
These companies are the ones that are going to profit most. These dinosaurs that only want to sue their way to a profit are going to die off sooner or later.
How about 10 yrs in the slammer for execs guilty of corruption and bribery? Like creating retroactive changes to the laws, raiding the public domain, and making perpetuities out of basic, limited copyright in faster world of the internet. My contention is that copyright for ephermera, like news, TV and movies, should have been SHORTENED from 28 yrs to a lower number !
Yes. If the crime is comparable then the punishment should also be comparable.
Now the real question is are the crimes actually comparable? Typical cases of physical piracy involve people duplicating and selling software for personal profit. I see no problem with the same punishments being applied to people who do this online. Typical online piracy on the other hand is not done for profit. The most common case is actually for personal use with the side effect that sharing is part of the acquiring process and no money changes hand.
So while the answer is yes another question needs to be asked:
Would you lock up your friend for 10 years for giving you a mixed tape or photocopying a chapter out of a textbook?
If a pirate is caught downloading, charging them a fine that's a little higher than the price to legally see the content makes perfect sense. That's not even $50 most of the time, but after court costs are added in, $50 seems about right. Ten years is ridiculous. Hollywood really over-values itself to the point that we'd all be better off it the whole thing were put out of business. Do they really think that ninety minutes of one of their screenplays or three minutes of a song is worth ten years of anybody's life? That movie or song better damn well confer a PhD just by viewing/listening to it because that's what ten years is worth.
Prison should be used as a way of removing a dangerous person from society until they're no longer a danger. Even people who sell millions of pirated copies are not dangerous.
Not quite, prison is used to remove people who damage our society and to prevent them causing further damage. Someone who embezzles money or commits fraud can hardly be classed as "dangerous" but at the same time society should not have to put up with them.
Piracy, both online and offline, should have the same, long sentences for those who run commercial operations which make significant money from selling copies of films, music etc. Sharing a legal copy with friends and family should not be illegal because the vast majority of the people see nothing ethically wrong with it: the artist was paid for the copy and that copy is now being shared. So the dividing line should not be online vs offline but commercial vs. private and for private I would argue that it should not be a crime.
there's no such thing. fuck off.