UK Government Proposes 10-Year Copyright Infringement Jail Term

An anonymous reader writes: According to a BBC report, the UK government is proposing increasing the jail term for copyright infringement from the current two years to 10 years, which they say would "act as a significant deterrent." "The proposed measures are mainly targeted at the distributors of pirated content — the people creating copies of movies, sometimes before release, and uploading them to be downloaded by thousands upon thousands." Another reader notes a related court ruling in the UK which has once again made it illegal to rip lawfully-acquired CDs and DVDs for personal use. "A judge ruled that the government was wrong legally when it decided not to introduce a compensation scheme for songwriters, musicians, and other rights holders who face losses as a result of their copyright being infringed."

Comments

This is outrageous

[Anonymous Coward]

These jail terms are higher than an armed assault theft, or murder...
All this indicates excessive lobbying or even corruption.

Re:This is outrageous

[Harold Halloway]

No, murder still attracts a life sentence. That sentence will be at least 10 years before parole is even considered. But your point is valid: this victimless crime attracts a potentially higher prison sentence than many violent crimes.

Re:This is outrageous

[Anonymous Coward]

Crown Prosecution Service sentencing guidelines give 10 years as the starting point for raping a child, 8 for raping a teenager. These are, of course, the starting points for rapists "who do not meet the dangerous offender criteria."

So, copyright infringement is now basically the same as child rape. I wonder if copyright infringers fit the description of a "dangerous offender."

Re:This is outrageous

[fustakrakich]

In matter like this I always remind people to look at the election results. It is what the people want, they don't care. The rules of the game are pretty simple. If their wallet is full, they vote for the ruling faction. If it is empty, they vote for the "opposition" (in quotes, because there really isn't any within the spectrum of people that get elected).

Re:This is outrageous

[Anonymous Coward]

This victimless crime undermines the asset value of intellectual property. While it is true that "intellectual property" is entirely imaginary, the fact is that many wealthy people have a significant investment in it. Its free distribution reduces its value (based on how they appraise it), and so they see it as a threat to their wealth.

Throw aside all concepts of justice, and the issue becomes perfectly clear. They see copyright law as a means of protecting their wealth. Further, this is a greater threat to them than muggings, assault, etc., because they already have effective means of protecting themselves against those threats. So, they are focusing their political power on the task of protecting their wealth against what they see as its greatest threat: you.

It doesn't matter that physical violence causes more harm to an actual person...that is a problem largely for poor people so they don't care about it. But you taking their wealth away is something they absolutely will not tolerate....and unlike you, they have the political clout to do something about it.

Your only option is to overwhelm them with numbers (politically speaking). You either accomplish this, or you live under their laws.

Re:This is outrageous

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

this victimless crime attracts a potentially higher prison sentence than many violent crimes

These penalties are the ones aimed at criminal copyright infringement. That typically means large-scale, commercial activity where someone really is completely ripping off all the people who actually worked to produce the movie or game or album just to make a quick buck for themselves.

If you think that is a victimless crime, I invite you to carry on working at your normal job for the next year, but sign all the pay cheques over to some random criminal who did literally nothing to deserve that money. Oh, and sign over those of all your colleagues as well.

Of course copyright laws are widely abused. Of course it's absurd that there are legal technicalities squeezed in through shady EU level shenanigans that mean the UK government lost the case over compensation in exchange for the private copying exception. But it's important to separate advocating reasonable usage rights for normal people from advocating lenient penalties for organised criminals who make large amounts of money at the direct expense of the people who actually did the work. Don't compare large-scale commercial copyright infringement with a crime of violence against an individual, compare it with something like large-scale commercial fraud that costs thousands of people their pensions.

Re:This is outrageous

[Anonymous Coward]

The real problem is that each political party as as bad as all the other political parties. No matter who you vote for you always get the same tosh each time of MP looking after their own pockets and financial expenses and to hell with the UK populous. When was the last time an MP actually found out what his/her constituents actually want him to vote for. A very very long time, all you get nowdays is to do what the whips tell them to vote for. Their don't care what the outcome will be or the consequences of what a vote means just as long as they get their expenses paid. If you not in Government you vote against anything the government puts forward. The political parties need to change for the better. They should only be able to stand as an MP for 5 years and they should vote on what their constituents want. (They can ask what their constituents want via an online voting system) and then vote that way.

Re:This is outrageous

[spire3661]

Imaginary property does not deserve this level of protection. I dont care what kind of infringement is going on, or how much money is lost. 10 years for 'stealing' essentially THOUGHTS is insane. The point of Copyright is to encourage works and it think its quite clear by now that works do not need this kind of protection, humans will produce them no matter what. Throwing people in jail over it is absolutely repugnant. I dont think we can truly call it an Information Age until we seriously hamstring copyright, not make it stronger.

Re:This is outrageous

[ewibble]

Counterfeiting should be illegal, if you are not the creator then you should have to say so. But this problem is largely self inflicted, charging insane prices (compared to actual cost), imposing unreasonable restrictions on products. In a free market and there is money to be made the market will provide, that is the brilliance of the free market. If it is illegal it will just become a black market with higher profits for the criminals.

Anyway I don't actually see how anybody could make money by selling pirated movies or songs when it they are available easily for free. Unless they are claiming they are not pirated, then of course they are committing fraud anyway. I am sure this has been a big boost to VPN providers though.

Re:This is outrageous

[TWX]

Copyright and other intellectual-property laws have always been about protecting the income of the content owner. In the short-term I actually agree with them; I don't think that it's wrong for those who create content to make a living off of that content as they produce it. My biggest complaint is the trend of indefinite copyright where works that have influenced culture aren't eventually released into the public domain, as it gives too much a degree of control over our very culture to powerful entities that own the works that have helped define that culture, further empowering them. It'd be one thing is most copyright was held by the people that created content and if that copyright ended some set duration after their deaths, but when media companies can hold copyright for the better part of a hundred years that's just getting ridiculous.

The other side of it is the challenge in calculating how much financial damage is done to a copyright holder when unlicensed copies of their work are distributed and 'consumed'. Case in point, older movies that are available on the Internet that weren't popular releases when they initially debuted. If someone watches Spaced Invaders for free simply because they have access to it, who wouldn't have paid any amount of money to watch it however small, is Disney/Touchstone actually out anything? If the viewer would never have watched it to begin with then it's hard to say that Disney is financially hurt by someone watching it without paying for it.

Re:This is outrageous

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

Imaginary property does not deserve this level of protection.

All property is imaginary. The natural state of things is that if you have something I want, it is mine if I have a more powerful weapon or a bigger gang.

The idea of having a civilised society with laws and recognised rights and due process is to try to avoid descending to the ethical level of a caveman.

10 years for 'stealing' essentially THOUGHTS is insane.

The people these laws are aimed at aren't "stealing thoughts". They are directly defrauding the rightsholders, and ultimately everyone who works in creative industries and earns their living contributing to these works, of staggering amounts of money. We are talking about organised crime here, not little Suzy sharing her latest Taylor Swift MP3 with her friend from school.

Throwing people in jail over it is absolutely repugnant.

I wonder if you'd feel the same way if, say, the person responsible for managing your pension fund took risks they weren't supposed to, lost, and left you with no savings. It's only financial crime and no-one got hurt (directly). Should we just fine them the money they will never have to pay back everyone's pension fund?

You can't make some things good after the fact, particularly things where the actual damage is likely to be substantial but is hard to measure objectively, so all you can do is try to create a legal framework that discourages the behaviour in other ways.

Re:This is outrageous

[mark-t]

You do of course realize that the exact same arguments could be made to apply to things like counterfeiting. Money is, after all, imaginary property in a sense, since it typically has a perceived value associated with it that is not connected with any material value the raw materials the currency is manufactured from may possess.

Re:This is outrageous

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

But this problem is largely self inflicted, charging insane prices (compared to actual cost), imposing unreasonable restrictions on products.

It's fascinating that someone can write the above and then advocate free markets in the very next sentence. Do you understand that what you're arguing for is economically equivalent to having a free market, except that any time someone wants to back out of a deal they just keep what they received but don't bother giving what they promised in return?

Re:This is outrageous

[AK Marc]

All property is imaginary.

So the shoes I'm wearing aren't there? Or are you saying that ownership is imaginary? Because that's unrelated to the question of the thing being claimed as owned being imaginary.

The people these laws are aimed at aren't "stealing thoughts". They are directly defrauding the rightsholders, and ultimately everyone who works in creative industries and earns their living contributing to these works, of staggering amounts of money.

Either there are no laws against "fraud" in the UK, or this isn't about defrauding anyone. In a sane world, the person making copies, 1 or 10,000, would get a fine of no more than 3x retail value of the loss (that's the US standard for punitive damages), and if they were making a separate transaction of selling the song for profit, that'd be one fraud case per transaction, as they would be presenting themselves as having the "right" to sell that. So those that sell copies can go to jail for fraud, and those that copy with no financial motive could be fined for more than any "loss" they caused the copyright holder.

But that's too sane and logical for the 1%, who want to rain down vengeance on all those who oppose their quest for profit.

I wonder if you'd feel the same way if, say, the person responsible for managing your pension fund took risks they weren't supposed to, lost, and left you with no savings.

That's a form of fraud here. Not sure about the UK.

It's only financial crime and no-one got hurt (directly).

So taking $1 from someone and giving them back $0.50 doesn't harm them in any way? By your logic, muggings don't hurt anyone.

Re:This is outrageous

[AK Marc]

Anyway I don't actually see how anybody could make money by selling pirated movies or songs when it they are available easily for free. Unless they are claiming they are not pirated, then of course they are committing fraud anyway.

DVDs in China. Street vendors selling pirated content openly as pirated. Why do people pay? Because you pay (About $0.50 USD equivalent) for it on DVD/CD. The convenience factor of buying a "DVD" of the movie you can walk home and play in any DVD player. Though I worded it as I did because you can end up buying a CD with the movie (a cam or screener version) on CD, not DVD, and rarely are the rips highest quality. Though many are the full-feature DVD with menus and languages, for the same $0.50. Part of the risk is not knowing what you have until too late to do anything about it if you don't like it.

Re:This is outrageous

[jedidiah]

> All property is imaginary.

No it isn't. Real and personal property can exist in a fixed place and time. It can only be owned, used, or possessed by one person at a time and deprivation of it is a real rather than theoretical harm.

It's also often quite easy to establish ownership of a physical thing where there is no such easy method for "ideas" or copies "art".

Furthermore, content cartels are unable or unwilling to assign any kind of real damages to any incident of infringement. This is further muddled by the fact that these "assets" have no official valuation of any kind.

There's really no way to really judge this kind of "crime" against anything else. The "victims" do their best to avoid disclosing the necessary information.

Re:This is outrageous

[jedidiah]

The harm you do to someone you pass a fake bill to is not imaginary. It's actually trivially easy to assess on a pure tort basis.

There are some crimes that society decides should come with medieval and draconian penalties. The idea that even commercial copyright infringement belongs in that category is dubious at best.

Re:This is outrageous

[loonycyborg]

Actually I have a deeper issue with the way current copyright works. If people pay merely for right to make a copy of particular work and peruse it then it serves basically as money printing machine since it doesn't require any effort for copyright holder to grant such a permission. The fact that making original work requires effort is irrelevant in this case because copyright license and creative efforts are unrelated and there's no economic mechanism to ensure that copyright holder will stop taking money for it once his investment in its creation has paid off. Thus there's no place for actual creative people in this "industry" now. It's only for rentier who want to establish another aristocratic class.

Re:This is outrageous

[jedidiah]

Except copyright is not a free market. It's a state sanctioned monopoly. Of course it's going to have some of the defects of a monopoly. The trust in question may or may not realize this and adapt to the situation. They don't have to really. The monopoly they have insulates them somewhat from market pressure.

Re:This is outrageous

[gnasher719]

So, copyright infringement is now basically the same as child rape. I wonder if copyright infringers fit the description of a "dangerous offender."

Ten years is the proposed _maximum_ for copyright infringement. For most crimes, there is a huge range of how bad the crime is. For example, growing pot: You might have a flower pot full, or you might have a 100 acre farm. Surely the maximum sentence should be fitting for the one using a huge farm to grow drugs. With copyright infringement, you might make a copy of a CD for a relative, or you might run a major operation with multi-million dollar revenue. You want a maximum sentence that fits the multi-million dollar operation.

Now of course it needs to be made clear which sentence is appropriate for which level of offence. For example, with copyright infringement there is probably a factor of one million in severity between the most harmless and the worst possible offenses.

Re:This is outrageous

[Anonymous Coward]

But you taking their wealth away is something they absolutely will not tolerate....and unlike you, they have the political clout to do something about it.

Your only option is to overwhelm them with numbers (politically speaking). You either accomplish this, or you live under their laws.

No, there actually is another option. Stop giving them any more wealth. Don't buy the CDs. Don't buy the DVDs or the Blu-Rays. Don't pay for streaming music or streaming video. Don't go to their movies, and don't go to their concerts.

Don't misunderstand me -- I'm not saying steal any of this stuff as opposed to buying it. Neither steal it nor buy it. Go without. Do. Not. Participate. Give them neither the pounds sterling from your pocket nor the attention of your ears or eyeballs that they can sell to advertisers. Ignore them and their products.

But getting large numbers of people to even imagine going through their day, let alone their entire life, without music or video to distract and entertain them, is a nigh impossibility.

Re:This is outrageous

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, a boycott is one of several methods of applying political pressure. And, just like all the methods available to the poor, it requires huge numbers of participants in order to be effective. That happens when-and-only-when enough numbers of people feel enough pain from the situation to be willing to make such a stand.

As it stands, most people are content with the situation as it is, as evidenced by the absence of this boycott.

Re:This is outrageous

[Anonymous Coward]

These penalties are the ones aimed at criminal copyright infringement. That typically means large-scale, commercial activity where someone really is completely ripping off all the people who actually worked to produce the movie or game or album just to make a quick buck for themselves.

Sounds like most recording/movie associations. So who is going to jail for "Hollywood accounting"? Nobody. So it is pretty clear that this is not for protecting the people who actually worked to produce the movie or game or album. It is for protecting the flow into the pockets of those who completely rip off the creators in order to make a quick buck for themselves while paying the proper bribes to the lawmakers.

Re:This is outrageous

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

Or are you saying that ownership is imaginary?

Yes. Ownership of anything -- a physical object, a certain exclusive right, a theoretical amount of money that lives as bits and bytes in a database somewhere -- is just a concept we have invented to help society function, like any other legal or financial instrument. We might all agree (or at least most of us would, I hope) that physical ownership is a useful concept and we should respect it and not commit theft, but ultimately that is just a social norm, enforced through other social norms such as laws and courts.

So those that sell copies can go to jail for fraud, and those that copy with no financial motive could be fined for more than any "loss" they caused the copyright holder.

Right, and that is broadly what the UK legal framework does. Non-commercial infringement is basically a civil offence, punishable in a civil court through damages, and under UK law those would normally be actual damages, not the dramatically overstated hypothetical or punitive sort. But professional copyright infringement, where you're actively ripping off works for substantial profit, can be a criminal matter, punishable in criminal courts with fines and jail time. And that's what we're talking about here.

So taking $1 from someone and giving them back $0.50 doesn't harm them in any way?

It harms them to about the same extent as ripping a copyright work with a market of two paying customers so that you sell one copy to a paying customer for your own profit and the legitimate rightsholder then sells only one copy to the second paying customer.

Copyright is a reasonable economic instrument, in my opinion, at least until we find a better model for incentivising creative work that does at least as good a job. Likewise, infrigement of copyright causes economic damage, more like fraud or misleading advertising than theft of some physical item. But the claim that professional-scale copyright infringement causes no actual damage at all is about as likely as the claim by the other side that every illegal copy represents a lost sale. Those professional infringers are sure making a lot of money doing something that supposedly doesn't cost the legitimate rightsholder anything.

Re:This is outrageous

[Anonymous Coward]

You want a maximum sentence that fits the multi-million dollar operation.

No, I don't want that. If someone's actually making millions of dollars off copyright infringement, it's a sign that there's high demand for his services as opposed to what the music industry is providing. It's a sign that copyright laws are hindering the market from squeezing out bad service. In that case, we're just punishing a better entrepreneur.

Instead of jacking up the penalties on copyright to further protect bad business models, we should eliminate copyright. I won't weep for the sudden demise of lousy pop and rap megastars that won't be profitable anymore nor for the parasitic industry surrounding them. Once the market clears and the dust settles, the artists that survive and emerge will be the ones who make music because they enjoy doing so -- just like it was before the twentieth century's industrialization of culture -- and culture will be free to share, with some modest profits for those who provide actual benefits to consumers and who develop business models not centered around imposing artificial scarcity on a freely copyable good.

Re:This is outrageous

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

So who is going to jail for "Hollywood accounting"? Nobody.

And that's a real problem, and something should be done about that as well.

For that matter, the continued dominance of middleman organisations like movie studios, book publishers and record labels is arguably the biggest problem with the creative industries right now. Modern technology should reduce that imbalance over time, but there is also an imbalance in knowledge and understanding that pushes strongly toward the status quo and that's harder to fix.

But neither of these things is the problem we are talking about today, and neither of them makes the problem we are talking about today any less significant for those affected by it.

Re:This is outrageous

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

Real and personal property can exist in a fixed place and time.

No. A real, physical item can exist in a fixed place and time, but it is only the law that makes it any particular person's property.

It can only be owned, used, or possessed by one person at a time

No, no, and no. Shared ownership is possible. Many things can be used by multiple people at once. Many things are in the possession of multiple people at once.

and deprivation of it is a real rather than theoretical harm.

So if I went into your home while you were on holiday for two weeks, borrowed a book that belongs to you to read it for a week, returned it in its original condition, and then left again causing no damage, what real harm have you suffered exactly? You literally didn't even know I was there, and yet for a week that book was in no practical sense your property or in your possession, and of course if there were proof of my actions then the law would probably frown upon them.

As I said, if you stop and think about it, these concepts we take for granted are really all social conventions. A lot of these debates are just between people whose subjective personal preferences are for some conventions but not others.

Re:This is outrageous

[mark-t]

Copyright is just an extension of the exclusivity that creators had over a work that creators enjoyed in the days before the printing press. Copying was hard enough and error prone that natural checks and balances tended to discourage most (but admittedly not all) from engaging in unauthorized copying. As I said, it didn't stop everyone but it was sufficient. As copying became easier, the only thing that was left was to either shrug and disregard it (in which case many creators would resort to self-censorship as a means of holding onto their exclusivity), or to manufacture a legal structure by which people who disregarded that exclusivity for at least a certain period of time could face punitive action for such behavior. As the law itself becomes increasingly unable to deter people who would violate a copyright, creators are again faced with the same choice of resorting to self-censorship if nothing is done, and reducing the availability of anything that has any hope of becoming a mainstream work to only whatever pop culture demands (oh, and you can bet that it will so laden with DRM and unskippable ads that it will make even what happens today look like a paradise). In the end, it will be a self-serving cycle with no real capacity for diversity or capability to enrich society, the very purpose for which copyright invented in the first place.

Re:This is outrageous

[Anonymous Coward]

"They see copyright law as a means of protecting their wealth"
That's the whole issue. They consider wealth to be all those unearned royalties generations after they die, not the money they already made. That's what they're protecting, the right to resell the same goods over and over.

These laws, this whole situation ... it really makes you question the whole legal system.

Re:This is outrageous

[Anonymous Coward]

There's no money lost. If there were, then it would've been called theft, embezzlement or some other name for which there are plenty other laws.

Re:This is outrageous

[AK Marc]

Ownership of anything is just a concept we have invented

Which is unrelated to your initial claim that "All property is imaginary." My shoes are property, and aren't imaginary, thus your opinion is directly contradicted by reality.

Non-commercial infringement [...] is basically a civil offence. But professional copyright infringement [...] can be a criminal matter,

That's unrelated to TFA. "the people creating copies of movies, sometimes before release, and uploading them to be downloaded by thousands upon thousands." So a single user "downloading" a single movie with bittorrent could fall under the 10-year rule. That they don't is your opinion at the moment. It isn't coded into law, or otherwise protected. That's how these laws go. They pass a broad law, stating the goal of stopping screeners and pre-release leaks, but word them to cover everything, so there are no gaps or holes, then apply them to the targeted area, for a year or two, then target anyone using bittorrent.

It harms them to about the same extent as ripping a copyright work with a market of two paying customers so that you sell one copy to a paying customer for your own profit and the legitimate rightsholder then sells only one copy to the second paying customer.

So "lost profit" is the same as robbery. I can just toss you in the "batshit insane" category and ignore you.

Re:This is outrageous

[davester666]

As well, how many people have they actually prosecuted and convicted for this offense? Is it even 10 people a year for the UK?

Re:This is outrageous

[Anonymous Coward]

Here's some political numbers to overwhelm them with...
Overwhelm them by ripping and sharing the FUCK out of all your physically owned copies.
And doing it on anonymous overlay networks such as I2P and Phantom.
That way NO ONE has a need to buy their shit (with $9.50+++ to them and $0.50 to the artist) and you can Bitcoin your money straight to the artists that make a difference in your life.
The only thing these record labels and distribution companies do is TAX both you and the artist.
FUCK THAT.
Crush these companies once and for all.
SHARE AND SHARE AT WILL MY BROTHERS !!!

*** approved shit ***
http://www.freebsd.org/
https://www.archlinux.org/
http://open-zfs.org/
https://geti2p.net/
http://code.google.com/p/phantom/
https://transmissionbt.com/
http://xiph.org/flac/
http://xiph.org/paranoia/
http://www.cdda2wav.de/
http://cdrtools.sourceforge.net/
http://www.exactaudiocopy.de/
http://www.videolan.org/vlc/
http://www.mplayerhq.hu/
http://www.labdv.com/aacs/
http://www.slysoft.com/en/anydvd.html
http://www.dvdfab.cn/mlink/download.php?g=DVDFAB9

Quality is paramount, bandwidth and storage are cheap, therefore...
CD and DVD *must* be shared losslessly, FLAC and VOB dir only.
BluRay *may* be shrunk to DVD-9 iso/vob before sharing.
Don't waste people's time and quality by fucking around with other formats.

Re:This is outrageous

[Actually, I do RTFA]

For example, growing pot: You might have a flower pot full, or you might have a 100 acre farm. Surely the maximum sentence should be fitting for the one using a huge farm to grow drugs.

You imply that the 100 acre farmer would get the maximum penalty, and the flower pot full would not (presumably, the minimum). In reality, the 100 acre farmer would go free for flipping on his buyer, the flower pot guy who insists on a jury trial, and the flower pot guy willing to deal gets the minimum sentence.

You want a maximum sentence that fits the multi-million dollar operation.

No, you want a different crime for that. Because too much prosecutor discretion is bad (except for with regards to mercy).

Re:This is outrageous

[Anonymous Coward]

While I don't think that copyright infringement is like theft, this is like arguing that a mass murderer is just a sign that the people want class/racial/holy war.

Re:This is outrageous

[Mantrid42]

Hi, creative person here. Why would you want to live like that?

Re:This is outrageous

[Jhon]

" this victimless crime "

Lets be honest. This is *NOT* a victimless crime. If someone releases countless copies of some song or movie then it devalues the original media just like copies of $100 bills devalue currency. Yes, there are many many examples of those wouldn't pay for a DVD or CD if they couldn't get it for free -- but it's not universal.

I know my purchasing habits have changed -- and so have my rental habits with the availability of media the way it is.

Re:This is outrageous

[hackwrench]

But only if he is a paid assassin.

Re:This is outrageous

[Anonymous Coward]

There is not really a free market for movies, music, or books. Too many big fishes and too asymmetric dependency relationships.

For instance, if I wish to attempt to make a living as a novelist, I need to find a publisher. The publisher then takes at least 80% of all revenue from your works, 85% and less is also common. From the remaining 15% your literary agency will take 20%. The problem is that there is no way around this if you want to earn money, because the publishers have a monopoly on the distribution channels. (Self-publishers are punished by the industry in a silent agreement.)

The same for music, only that it's much worse. They will ask you to sign 360 contracts, meaning that they get their 90% share from anything you do, not just from your music - from any paid interview, any talk show, any postcards or coffee mugs you sell. If you don't sign, bad luck for you, because they own the distribution channels. If you build your own distribution channel, they will sue you into oblivion and not cease to sue you until your completely bankrupt. (See MP3.com, for instance.) Oh, and they also fake and manipulate all sales statistics. They also frequently simply don't pay the royalties they owe you, and there is nothing you can do except if you have a few hundred thousands of dollars of spare money for an extended law suit. Yes, it happens all the time, they sometimes simply don't pay.

For movies, it's the same, only much worse. If you're a script writer, for instance, you can get anything between $500 to a million, but it solely depends on the whims of some studio boss. They can screw you over as they like, and if you want to get your work realized some day, you have no choice than to sign the contract. If you're an actor, bad luck, too. Some big stars might get tons of cash, but others often get nothing due to "Hollywood accounting".

If you're the end customer, there is no free market anyway. Works of art are unique, so the company who owns the copyright has the total monopoly. They can set any price they want or deny you the purchase (which happens in many countries) as they like, and if you want to see, read, or listen to some artwork you'll have to accept their terms. You cannot punish them by not buying, since there are only very few companies who act on a global scale and are not in real competition with each other. For example, many so called "independent labels" in reality belong to Time Warner, Sony, or Universal. They hold 75% of the market. The same for books and movies.

A free market requires a relatively large number of competitors. If you buy a washing machine, cigarettes or a broom you have free market. But not with music, books, or movies.

Re:This is outrageous

[hackwrench]

Throw "creative" in with create, intelligence and design as words we are all expected to just know what they are supposed to mean without really teaching what it means.

Re:This is outrageous

[hackwrench]

Care to explain what you mean by "creative" when you call yourself a "creative person"?

Re: This is outrageous

[Anonymous Coward]

spire3661 does have a good point. I would go further and say an area of law that humans in a country are not generally in agreement on should not have as high penalties. It's like running a dictatorship and prevents any debate or rebellion to demonstrate why the law is wrong or needs to be adjusted.

Many people believe such laws are forming monopolies and hindering progress or even making access to art a class thing. I believe copyright is essential for artists to get rewards for their work, but some of the way laws around it are managed flies in the face of proper democratic process and is bad for society.

Re:This is outrageous

[hackwrench]

What is "creative work" exactly?

Re:This is outrageous

[hackwrench]

The law seems to have something to say about trespassing onto the premises, but I'm uncertain what it has to say about the situation the book was in. I'm not certain what concepts are even being used much less taking them for granted. Scary thing about society is that they teach nothing about the law in K-12. I would find myself hard pressed to find any debate that isn't about subjective personal preferences are for some conventions but not others.

Re:This is outrageous

[hackwrench]

Nobody defines what creation means, like they don't define intelligence, or design. Do parents create their children?

Re: This is outrageous

[Anonymous Coward]

Lobbying ***IS*** corruption.

Re:This is outrageous

[russotto]

I invite you to carry on working at your normal job for the next year, but sign all the pay cheques over to some random criminal who did literally nothing to deserve that money. Oh, and sign over those of all your colleagues as well.

Oh, so kind of like taxes? I see why the government doesn't like it; seems like competition.

Re:This is outrageous

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

In this context, I'd settle for a pragmatic generic definition, say "work that produces information that was not previously available". Obviously creating physical products or providing other services can also be creative in the general sense of the word, but I think we're talking specifically about what are generically referred to as "creative industries" here.

Re:This is outrageous

[enantiomer2000]

Won't somebody think of the children?!!

Re:This is outrageous

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

So a single user "downloading" a single movie with bittorrent could fall under the 10-year rule. That they don't is your opinion at the moment. It isn't coded into law, or otherwise protected.

Well, that rule doesn't exist yet, so none of us know that.

However, assuming it is a direct extension of what currently attracts a maximum two-year sentence, that is still quite a stretch. The specific circumstances under which copyright becomes a criminal matter are in fact enumerated in statute law. Here they are.

Notice that the recurring theme in almost all of the specifics is something along the lines of knowing or having reason to believe that the copy is infringing. The CPS guidance specifically notes that this means a requirement for criminal intent must exist.

If you do knowingly choose to participate in a system that causes mass-distribution of a specific work and you know that work is infringing someone's copyright, then yes, your actions might be criminal infringement. But even then it appears unlikely based on cases tried so far that a court would hand down a significant custodial sentence on conviction in a case where there was no profit-making involved.

They pass a broad law, stating the goal of stopping screeners and pre-release leaks, but word them to cover everything, so there are no gaps or holes, then apply them to the targeted area, for a year or two, then target anyone using bittorrent.

Given that the maximum penalty for these offences is already two years, and it has been more than a decade since the relevant SI was introduced, can I assume you have a whole stack of citations waiting to show me how dangerous it is to run BitTorrent today as a result? Because I don't see a lot of people in the UK even getting prosecuted for criminal copyright infringement because they ran BT, never mind convicted or sentenced to jail time.

So "lost profit" is the same as robbery.

Taking money that someone else was entitled to by law is pretty much exactly the same as robbery, or at least fraud. And arguing that they weren't entitled to it even though there was demonstrably a customer willing to pay for the work because that customer paid a copycat for their copy instead of the legitimate rightsholder is another stretch.

I can just toss you in the "batshit insane" category and ignore you.

Of course you can. You're free to hold whatever opinion of me you like. But my post contains citations of real laws and official prosector's guidance, and yours contains a slippery slope argument about something that has demonstrably not actually happened in far longer than the timescales you claimed. Your opinion of me won't change those facts.

Re:This is outrageous

[Anonymous Coward]

Hi, creative person here too.

Because my employer, a "creative" organisation actively steals both my income and work and rewards not the funding taxpayer, from where comes my wages and equipment but the multimillionaire at the top.

So far, by my count, they've stolen more than sixty five thousand from me, plus they require us to work an extra 5-15 minutes for free each day - all in the name of creativity.

Quite frankly, if my employer collapsed tomorrow I'd keep creating, but I'd find different avenues to do so and I wouldn't be restricted by an employer trying to monetise my work in such a restrictive fashion that we're not actually being creative, we're simply doing the same thing every time we do anything.

That's the nature of creativity owned by big media.

Starve the entitled bastards out.

Re:This is outrageous

[Anonymous Coward]

That typically means large-scale, commercial activity where someone really is completely ripping off all the people who actually worked to produce the movie or game or album just to make a quick buck for themselves.

This is just a fiction created to make the position of the corporations seem more morally justifiable.

I get paid minimum wage for most of my work - I say "most of my work," because there is a fair portion of work for which I do not get paid.

If you think that is a victimless crime, I invite you to carry on working at your normal job for the next year, but sign all the pay cheques over to some random criminal who did literally nothing to deserve that money. Oh, and sign over those of all your colleagues as well.

My employer insists that I transfer my rights to be identified for that unpaid work the moment I got paid for other work. My roles range through sound or video tape operator, NL-editing, camera, lighting, and occasionally floor managing. I work on location, in studio, for both public and private gigs.

I usually get paid within a tiny margin of unemployment while my workplace pockets fifty thousand for a gig. This happens to all of the employees. In fact, my manager works approximately 70 hours a week which brings his salary down to less than the legal minimum wage.

As you can see, this employer does transfer my pay, and - without my permission - my ownership of my unpaid work, to someone else.

They use "clever" accounting to transfer ownership of equipment that's outside of its tax life from one part of the corporation to another (tax fraud), political influence prevents investigations of illegal labour practices and grants them all sorts of new rights, and their media control prevents public scrutiny of illegal practices.

Suddenly, at the insight of someone employed by the industry that you're claiming is most deserving, all your arguments disappear in a puff of smoke:

they lie to you, they cheat the taxpayer, they steal from their employees, and then they bitch that when other people make copies they've lost out.

Re:This is outrageous

[Pubstar]

If you build your own distribution channel, they will sue you into oblivion and not cease to sue you until your completely bankrupt.

Yeah, I mean, places like Beatport or BandCamp don't exist.

Re:This is outrageous

[cpt kangarooski]

Yes. Ownership of anything -- a physical object, a certain exclusive right, a theoretical amount of money that lives as bits and bytes in a database somewhere -- is just a concept we have invented to help society function, like any other legal or financial instrument. We might all agree (or at least most of us would, I hope) that physical ownership is a useful concept and we should respect it and not commit theft, but ultimately that is just a social norm, enforced through other social norms such as laws and courts.

That's true. The problem you face, however, is that the social norm concerning creative works appears to be that it's perfectly okay for ordinary people to do things that constitute copyright infringement, at least if they aren't doing so for direct financial gain (i.e. if they aren't selling the copies). If the law were to reflect this social norm, copyright would not be as interesting an issue as it has become in the past 30-40 years. Instead we see copyright holders suing individuals, and trying to control the Internet so as to indirectly control individuals by limiting their options, so as to preserve the laws that enable a particular market, regardless of whether or not they conform to social norms.

But professional copyright infringement, where you're actively ripping off works for substantial profit, can be a criminal matter, punishable in criminal courts with fines and jail time. And that's what we're talking about here.

And it looks as though even for a sort of infringement that most people would agree should be illegal, the copyright maximalist faction is still going overboard. I certainly would agree that professional, profit-oriented copyright infringement ought to be prevented, but I would not go so far as to say that it would ever be appropriate to put someone in jail for as much as ten years over it; it's just not that important. Punishments should not be so draconian, especially given that it seems unlikely that it will accomplish a damn thing. A better solution would be to reform copyright so that there's less of a point in engaging in professional, profit-oriented infringement, rather than the current strategy which is to simply make it high risk, high reward. For example, just as repealing Prohibition undercut the mafia, and just as drug legalization and decriminalization undercuts criminals in the drug trade, legalizing some copyright infringement by people acting not for profit, and thus able to act openly, could undercut professional infringers.

Copyright is a reasonable economic instrument, in my opinion, at least until we find a better model for incentivising creative work that does at least as good a job.

Well, I'd point out two things here. First, there are pre-existing incentives that act independently of copyright; in many cases, copyright is not the primary incentive, and in many cases copyright is not even a necessary incentive.

Second, I agree that copyright is useful, but we ought to regulate how much copyright we have, and for how long it lasts, with an eye toward its utility. I'd bet good money that adding a ten year sentence for certain copyright infringements, and even enforcing it, will have zero meaningful effects on how well copyright serves society. Therefore, such punishments are inappropriate. Indeed, we ought to pare copyright down to the point where it has both the fewest restrictions on the public with the greatest incentivizing effects. Given the economics of the various copyright-related fields, I think you'll find that this would involve no criminal punishments, minimal civil penalties, minimal restrictions on individuals, and copyright terms of far shorter length than we see now.

Those professional infringers are sure making a lot of money doing something that supposedly doesn't cost the legitimate rightsholder anything.

I don't think that's true. Sure, I know about the lifestyle of someone like Kim D

Re:This is outrageous

[cpt kangarooski]

Copyright is just an extension of the exclusivity that creators had over a work that creators enjoyed in the days before the printing press. Copying was hard enough and error prone that natural checks and balances tended to discourage most (but admittedly not all) from engaging in unauthorized copying.

What the hell are you talking about?

Unauthorized copying was absolutely standard practice everywhere in the world until the 18th century, and most places until well into the 19th and 20th centuries. Hell, some places, like Alexandria during the days of the famous library, made it government policy; any books that entered the city had to be turned over for the library to make copies of, if the librarians wanted.

And it's a good thing too, since every written work we have from antiquity which wasn't carved into stone or clay survived only thanks to unauthorized copying -- often many generations of copying, by many different copyists. Even then, we've lost a tremendous amount of material.

As for the difficulty of copying books by hand, that was equally difficult for everyone, whether authorized or not, so it didn't deter piracy.

As copying became easier, the only thing that was left was to either shrug and disregard it (in which case many creators would resort to self-censorship as a means of holding onto their exclusivity), or to manufacture a legal structure by which people who disregarded that exclusivity for at least a certain period of time could face punitive action for such behavior.

Copyright originated because publishers printed books (often without authorization; the authors had no rights) but didn't like to compete amongst themselves. So the publishers set up a cartel whereby they would agree which of them had the right to print a particular book. The author had no real say. And the government cooperated so long as they could censor anything they didn't like. It wasn't until substantially later that this system fell apart -- because people didn't like the monopoly -- and a replacement based on authors getting the rights was suggested. (And then the publishers fought that when they were unable to fully control it in the way that they had before, and even now publishers are the real powers behind and beneficiaries of copyright; authors need publishers far more than publishers need authors)

Re:This is outrageous

[KGIII]

Quite frankly, if my employer collapsed tomorrow I'd keep creating, but I'd find different avenues to do so and I wouldn't be restricted by an employer trying to monetise my work in such a restrictive fashion that we're not actually being creative, we're simply doing the same thing every time we do anything.

If that were true then you would not currently need your employer and would continue making content on your own.

Re:This is outrageous

[Anonymous Coward]

Often, copyright infringement is caused by a lack of affordable, quick and comprehensive offer of media in various countries. It's just the internet routing around a legal and business problem. They want zoning to extract more income from their clients, but in doing so they severely restrict accessibility and the usability of the product. It's only natural in the digital economy to get rid of these blocks to universal access. Maybe they can find a way to tax media consumption in a way that doesn't limit its accessibility.

Re:This is outrageous

[bzipitidoo]

It's called a boycott. We don't want to live like that, but it may be worth it for a while, to break a monopoly.

There are other options. We, the people, could rise up and demand that these laws be changed. That option is not likely while an easier option exists: we'll just ignore you and copy and share what we want. You can't stop it. You can cry about reality not working the way you want, giving only you and fellow artists and Big Media owners the ability to change a thing from not scarce to scarce and back at the toggle of a switch. You can wail and gnash your teeth about how artists will all starve to death if we the people won't play along and buy those ridiculous and horrendously wasteful physical packagings your peers seem to think must be forced upon the public even as we become more and more unwilling to countenance the waste. Or you could get busy building a business model that does work. Crowdfunding, patronage, endorsements, advertising, bundling with hardware are among those other business models.

Re:This is outrageous

[Anonymous Coward]

> If the viewer would never have watched it to begin with then it's hard to say that Disney is financially hurt by someone watching it without paying for it.

The trend towards social networking and gaming is so strong that people can do without so much corporate produced media. People are more funny, irreverent, direct and relevant. A forum discussion here is like a panel debate with very intelligent people - compare that to a regular TV show. People want to produce content out of fun. We don't need them (Hollywood), we can make our own. Average unemployment for actors is 90% - and decent HD video cameras are cheap. We live in a world where the corporate producers need to convince us they still make worthwhile productions.

Captcha: cremates

Re:This is outrageous

[KGIII]

I will take a stab at it and try to keep it simple.

Creation - making something (be it a combination of ones and zeros to a painting or whatnot) - uniqueness not required
Intelligence - knowledge, knowing something - not to be confused with wisdom which is application of knowledge
Design - organizing the results of creation and may be creation in and of itself or contain aspects of creation

I am not sure I am correct nor am I certain that the above attempts at a semi-definition cover all aspects we are considering. However, for the sake of a brevity, I would say those (or someone else's refined work) would suit me well enough.

Re:This is outrageous

[KGIII]

No, your employer does those things WITH your permission. You give them permission to do so by continuing to work there. Do not do so. That is your right, no - obligation, to yourself and others. Move on and stop being abused. The problem is not the system, the problem is the people who operate in it and the people who continue to allow the abuses. Also, when you work for other people you do not own the property you create. If you work at a restaurant you do not own the meal you made - they do and they then sell it to a customer. This is true with intellectual property as well. You sold your work, and all the rights, to them by getting paid a salary. You have other options and if you use them, and are good enough, you can do all sorts of things to ensure you keep the rights to your work. I encourage you to do so.

Re:This is outrageous

[KGIII]

I pirate a lot and I have the money to afford to purchase anything I want (within reason). I pirate not because I am cheap but because there is no method simple enough to warrant using. I guess you could say I am cheap with my time and labor if you wanted to extrapolate. I would happily pay, however, if there were a nice simple site to log in and use my credit card (once, in a reasonably safe manner) and have access to media in an unencumbered format.

I do not even mind if they put serial numbers hidden in the media, it does not restrict my activities, to track who then distributed content illegally. It would be nice, not a requirement, to have a variety of formats and qualities available as well. If they combine movies and music I will not pay less for it - I will pay more for it (opposite what is expected) because it is easier to access.

I should also note that I am in favor of reasonable intellectual property protections being enforced by governments in an equal and unbiased manner. I haven't any problems with the idea of copyright, trademark, or patents. I accept the risk and the moral consequences of my actions and I view my own actions as petty theft because I am depriving the creators of income or, more intangible, income potential. I do not lose any sleep over it.

Re: This is outrageous

[KGIII]

You know, you can lobby too... Lobbying *can* be corruption. However, you can lobby and your representative should be in a position to listen to opinions from their constituents and from representatives of those constituents. The political system works but we are too lazy to actually do anything within that system and, instead, allow ourselves to be run aground instead of righting the ship with the available mechanisms.

It is, after all, easier to paste pixels on a screen for reenforcement in our echo chamber than it is to actually leave the house and get educated as to how to make changes within the political mechanizations.

Re: This is outrageous

[Anonymous Coward]

Punishments like this for practically victimless crimes remove respect for government. It's proof law makers are bought and sold by corporations.

Maybe UK should bring back the death penalty - could be used for those who sing happy birthday without license.

Re:This is outrageous

[Anonymous Coward]

Texan here. If you want to find out how real ownership can be, try to forcibly take ownership of my house or contents thereof without any sort of legal writ of possession. You'll find yourself on the receiving end of a bullet. Thus you will find that it is only that law prevents a constant "who's better with the fist/club/spear/arrow/sword/knife/gun" fight. That is what the law and society provide. Ownership otherwise is simply who has the power to enforce ownership.

Re:This is outrageous

[mark-t]

Hell, some places, like Alexandria during the days of the famous library,...

You are, I assume, aware that the days of the Alexandria library copying all works that entered the city were well over a thousand years before the printing press was even developed, let alone copyright created. Also, creators who did not want their works copied could prevent Alexandria from copying them by simply not going into the city... employing self-censorship as a means of copy control, which has always existed.

Copyright (by which I mean largely the form that it exists today and not as a collusion contract created by publishers) had an intended purpose that was to maximize the enrichment to society that can be obtained by the society having access to diverse kinds of creative works, and offering the creators of those works some means of controlling their works for at least a limited time at least gave many of them an incentive to not resort to self-censorship as their main form of such control.

As a side point on the matter of controlling works for a limited duration, I am compelled to add that I do strongly believe that copyright durations are far too long today, and should be shortened drastically, by no less than a factor of 2, maybe even more, and with very minimal, if any opportunities for extension.

Re:This is outrageous

[Mantrid42]

I'm a writer who works in the entertainment industry, though not currently as a writer. I am, however, in line for a writing position, provided our show does well. I think there's a lot of animosity on /. toward those of us who may be tech-minded nerds that followed a liberal arts path. Really, we're not all that different from the truly talented programmers, engineers, and security experts. We're all trying to make good products that people want/need, while adhering to industry accepted standards.

Re:This is outrageous

[Mantrid42]

I mean no offense, but there's no way in hell you could raise enough money through crowdfunding or patronage to sustain, let alone launch, a 22 episode season of a TV show.

Re:This is outrageous

[cpt kangarooski]

You are, I assume, aware that the days of the Alexandria library copying all works that entered the city were well over a thousand years before the printing press was even developed, let alone copyright created.

You were the one who claimed that most would-be pirates were discouraged from doing it prior to the invention of the printing press. Guess what? The high cost of making copies (and the relative lack of literate people to share them with, assuming that the author himself was even literate) discouraged authors from writing things down too.

Also, creators who did not want their works copied could prevent Alexandria from copying them by simply not going into the city

Wrong. You're conflating authors with their works. The only sure way an author could prevent Alexandrians from copying their works was to not create works in the first place.

If they created works, even if they were not written down, nothing stopped someone else from writing it down. (For example, Socrates never wrote anything; what we know of him comes primarily from the writings of his student, Plato; Another example is from the days of Elizabethan theater, when printers would have people dictate the scripts to plays, sometimes actors who had memorized the lines, sometimes just people with good memories who had been in the audience)

If works were created, written down, and shared with anyone, there was absolutely nothing that could keep the scrolls from getting copied or moved. Consider Virgil, who wrote fanfic (The Aneid) based on the epic poems of Homer (The Illiad and The Odyssey), but wanted all the copies burned; this was ignored, and the world is better off for it.

Fundamentally, it's the same issue with secrets, or any other information. The only way to control the spread of it is to either convince other people to respect your wishes (which they may or may not do according to their own self interest, and other factors), or to never tell anyone.

I don't think we can credit copyright with the increase in the number of works in existence in recent history, as compared with ages past. The real credit is probably owed to increases in literacy, improved artificial lighting, the development of printing (as well as improved paper and ink to support it), greater leisure time available due to a variety of technological and social advances, increases in the internal stability of much of the world (hard to sell books when bandits rob every wagon, or war ravages the country), etc. Copyright can be nice, but it gets way more credit than it deserves.

Copyright (by which I mean largely the form that it exists today and not as a collusion contract created by publishers) had an intended purpose that was to maximize the enrichment to society that can be obtained by the society having access to diverse kinds of creative works, and offering the creators of those works some means of controlling their works for at least a limited time at least gave many of them an incentive to not resort to self-censorship as their main form of such control.

Authors really just don't engage in self-censorship as a means of control. Copyright, from an author's point of view, is a way to recoup their investment. If they can't do that, they have to have other jobs that take time away from creating. Potentially, those jobs take away all their time from creating, so they don't create. It's rare as hell to find someone who is interested in creating works, has the financial means to do so without having to worry about the cost (and opportunity cost), yet refuses because they're a control freak. I'm confident that the sorts of authors you've identified are so rare as to not be worth concerning ourselves with.

As for the purpose of modern, authorial copyright (as opposed to the old stationers' copyright), you're almost entirely right: I'd only say that mere access is not enough. Rather, copyright is intended to provide an overall benefit to society

Re: This is outrageous

[Anonymous Coward]

Someone making millions of pounds off of copyright infringement would be doing so only because of the active participation of many, many people who give him money in exchange for his services. If you want to apply that to your mass-murderer strawman, you would have to posit that the murderer had the active aid of a very large group of people. At that point, you have an insurrection or civil war on your hands, not a lone murderer. In that case, yes, you do have a wholly different problem on your hands, one with which a law against murder cannot effectively deal: it is a larger social issue than a simple crime, and the governing authority needs to address the underlying cause of the civil unrest or lose its ability to rule.

What is lost in the copyright infringement law is the scope of the civic will to disobey the law. The defendant does not act alone but participates in an economy of vast proportions with many fellow actors, yet he is charged alone as if the crime were his alone. This is iniquitous, as is the degree of punishment (on which others here have said much already). The proper response to widespread contravention of a law is decriminalization, because there cannot be much harm done if society continues to function despite the widespread violation of one of its laws.

Re:This is outrageous

[Dan541]

Which is why the UK government also wants to ban the use of VPNs.

Re: This is outrageous

[Anonymous Coward]

I already live like that, and for exactly those reasons. I've simply ceased caring what 'creative' types do except when dealing with very small scale stuff. Otherwise I know there's a billionaire behind the other stuff and I won't give them my money or anything else. I don't pirate stuff either: it simply doesn't exist for me.

Re: This is outrageous

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, but the process is patented.

Re:This is outrageous

[Anonymous Coward]

Hi, creative person here.

Why would you want to live like that?

Because I'm not interested in getting harrassed and threatened with jail just because I bought something and am not supposed to use it. In the UK it has just been ruled illegal to buy music in any form and convert it to MP3 for hearing on your personal device. If you want to hear a CD you bought when jogging, you have to use a CD walkman or risk jail time.

When visiting a movie, I am warned that any sort of recording will put me into jail. I probably must never talk about anything I saw or risk getting sued in future. DVDs are coded with region codes to make sure I won't be playing them anywhere where I am not supposed to play them. Playing back any DVD on my GNU/Linux system (which uses a library to break the region code encryption) is supposed to be a felony.

Forget it. If you don't want my business, you won't get it. Once you are willing to treat your customers with respect, we might talk again.

Re:This is outrageous

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

I agree with just about everything there.

I'm not in any way trying to defend the copyright maximalism we see from some quarters today. For example, I think it's crazy that based on a legal technicality the UK government has lost the case mentioned in TFS and the reasonable and widely supported private copying exception introduced only recently has effectively been un-introduced again. And of course the push for ever-longer copyright durations and particularly for applying them retrospectively is also crazy (unless you recorded a few hit songs or own the rights to popular fictional rodents from many years ago and you want to profit off those things indefinitely instead of creating new work -- in other words, unless your goal is to avoid doing exactly what copyright is supposed to incentivise, creating and sharing new works).

I do think some form of restriction on not-for-profit copying may still be necessary. After all, sharing everything arbitrarily on the Internet could still hit the market for legitimate sales, and if you legalise this sort of sharing completely then you're saying to those who do follow the law at the moment -- who are the ones actually providing any revenue into the system -- that it's OK to stop doing that.

But I think the case should be made for how restrictive any such law needs to be and why, and I think there's a big difference between banning putting the latest blockbuster on BitTorrent for the whole world to see and banning things like format shifting to move an existing CD collection for which the rightsholders were already paid onto an MP3 player, or copying software for which the rightsholders were already paid from one PC to another because the hard drive in the first one failed.

My current thinking, for what it's worth, is that private copying exceptions based on the number of individuals rather than the number of copies are probably a sensible starting point. That basic principle could probably combined with some sort of household sharing provision, and maybe some provision for transferring the rights of permanent use from one individual to another in a reasonably permanent way, to codify what most people would consider reasonable sharing without legitimising multiplication and mass distribution contrary to the basic idea of copyright or legalising for-profit ripping.

I certainly would agree that professional, profit-oriented copyright infringement ought to be prevented, but I would not go so far as to say that it would ever be appropriate to put someone in jail for as much as ten years over it; it's just not that important.

I tend to agree there as well. I looked up the figures for some other financial offences for another post here yesterday, and IIRC the most category that could attract a custodial sentence had a range of 4-7 years and only started to apply at something like £500,000 of damage. It seems to me that treating professional-level copyright infringement more like fraud than theft would be reasonable, and having penalties roughly in line with existing fraud or financial misreporting offences of the same scale would then be reasonable.

A better solution would be to reform copyright so that there's less of a point in engaging in professional, profit-oriented infringement, rather than the current strategy which is to simply make it high risk, high reward.

There's an interesting ethical question here, because it's probably fair to say that the people who have benefited most financially from large-scale on-line copyright infringement aren't always the individual infringers. Sometimes it's the people operating services that facilitate the infringement but then profit in some way, for example through the advertising they carry, or through charging for ripped materials.

Certainly these modern services and more efficient communications channels are the reason that copyright infringement has exploded from the days when a few kids might share mix tapes in the playgroun

Re:This is outrageous

[mark-t]

You were the one who claimed that most would-be pirates were discouraged from doing it prior to the invention of the printing press. Guess what? The high cost of making copies (and the relative lack of literate people to share them with, assuming that the author himself was even literate) discouraged authors from writing things down too.

True.... which is why most creative works that had any chance of distribution were patronized by wealthy people.

Oh, and the library of Alexandria had money to pay its workers to make copies as well, so that's why it worked. Relatively speaking though, such patronized copying facilities were rare enough that they did not practically pose any threat to the initial creator's exclususivity.

Authors really just don't engage in self-censorship as a means of control.

Why not? Publishers do it all the time.... Region control on DVD's and DRM are perfect current examples of self-censorship... although not necessarily placed there by the creator personally, the publisher was still authorized by the creator to make copies of the work, so the creator would certainly be a willing participant to having such restrictions, even if they did not put them there themselves. Of course, the incentive behind publication in such cases has more to do with monetary reward than anything else, and I don't actually advocate such incentives as being worthwhile in the first place.

But outside of that, do you seriously think that all created works are published? Do you think that everyone who makes a creative work even *wants* to always publish it? Costs for creating works that one does not intend to publish is not necessarily high... and may often be something that is just a natural outpouring of that person's creativity, rather than a specific endeavor that is undertaken by the person to specifically create a particular work, so the matter of time investment in creating the work is immaterial. The simple fact that they have created the work at all is sufficient incentive for them to create it. This happens ALL the time... probably millions of times every single day, in fact.

And of course, such self-censorship is extraordinarily effective as a copy-control mechanism, because after all, how anyone copy the work if they don't know it even exists, or if they did, because they just don't have access to it? But the problem with this is that self-censorship does not offer any benefit to society... society cannot be enriched by a creative work that it does not have access to, so copyright gives such a creator the means to control their interests while still publishing (and thereby ideally helping to enrich society through an availability of diverse creative works).

Copyright, from an author's point of view, is a way to recoup their investment.

If that were true, there would be no point to explicitly putting things under something along the lines of a creative commons copyright license where the intent is to give away the work for free. What investment can one possibly recoup with that? Such copyright distribution mechanisms still differ significantly from public domain because they generally still have provisions in place on the purpose or how it is copied, such as allowing free copies for educational use or personal study only, or allowing free copies as long as the existing copyright notice and attributions are kept intact.

Copyright is, and has always been, about control... no more and no less than literally control over the "right to copy". The argument I am suggesting, however, is that allowing the creators to possess such control for a limited time even while they distribute the work is ultimately beneficial, since it gives those creators an incentive to publish (and ideally enrich society in so doing) where they may have otherwise utilized self-censorship as their preferred means of copy control, and society would not have be

Re:This is outrageous

[Anonymous Coward]

"Copyright and other intellectual-property laws have always been about protecting the income of the content owner"

No they haven't, Copyright arose some time in the 18th Century in an attempt to prevent debasement of quality by those who made unauthorised copies - particularly in respect of sheet music. Among others, Haedel invoked it to protect himself from sloppily pirated scores of his works that contained errors and changes. So copyright was initially about the integrity of the work per se - quality control legislation. It is only in the age of the almighty buck that everything comes down to 'revenue'.

However we all know that 'money makes the world go round', and in this case it also makes laws. The most ludicrous instance is the renewed illegality of media conversion of works we've already bought, and which in many cases may no longer be available on modern media. I have a large collection of '78s, vinyl and audio cassettes, pretty much all of which never made it even to CD, so after a brief respite of common sense I'm once again in the position of standing by while these valuable and desirable recordings decay as I listen to them or alternatively not playing them at all in order to preserve them. Both ways I lose and nobody gains. Sounds a bit Pythonesque - particularly the 'this sketch is getting too silly..." (I hope I haven't breached copyright by writing that).

Re: This is outrageous

[Anonymous Coward]

Surely the maximum sentence should be fitting for the one using a huge farm to grow drugs.

That would be a completely separate crime, but copyright "infringement" is all about making the rich even richer. That is all this is. This is class warfare.

Re:This is outrageous

[doccus]

Here they have no maximum sentences. Only minimum ones. Re:that court ruling supposedly "once again making it illegal" to rip cds, actually, the judge stated that they SHOULD have introduced a compensation scheme. That can only exist if it is legal to do. You cannot legally sanction criminal behavior, and a compensation scheme while ripping was illegal would do just that.

Re:This is outrageous

[Anonymous Coward]

I remember the mob guys back in the 60s who made thousands of counterfeit 8 tracks and sold them cheap. They were the ugliest things you ever did see. These guys also wouldf counterfeit LPs that usually looked more like the real thing, but they were still ripoffs. Any "Large scale copyright infringment" operation is no longer simply copyright infringment but a counterfeiting operation. THe only other possibilities are Bootlegs which rarely have released material, although some do if they're ma "completist set". Thankfully silver boots don't get a heavy focus by the Keystone Kops, although they definitely are watched. Particularly hendrix boots. I'm sure that the biggest money losers for the induistry aren't individual people who would never in a million years buy a Twerky Cyrus CD but will download a copy for free, but the big outfits that bribe the CD manufacturer to press a half million overruns after closing (an offer they can't refuse?), or simply counterfeit a million. It's incredibly easy to make an exact copy of any CD if you have a CD press and a decent printing press.

Re:This is outrageous

[stoatwblr]

"Thus there's no place for actual creative people in this "industry" now. It's only for rentier who want to establish another aristocratic class."

Rent-seekers moved into the music and movie industries almost as soon as they were created.

What's happened since then is that they've become more blatent and more brazen about what they do and having exhausted all possible income streams from artists and buyers(*), faced with widespread consumer resistance, they are now doing everything they can to scare people into paying for product.

The real effect is more likely to be faced with a choice of paying for something they might have listened to but wouldn't pay for, most consumers will simply shrug their shoulders and walk away. The cartels will use the inevitable plummetting sales as further justification for claims that mass piracy must be taking place and push for even more draconian laws.

(*)recording sales were already declining when CDs came along, bubbled for a while as people rebuilt their libraries in new format and were already falling away again before fileswapping mp3s was common

Re:This is outrageous

[stoatwblr]

"Stop giving them any more wealth. Don't buy..."

This is happening in spades. Numbers are in constant decline.

Media companies try to paint this decline as proof that there is mass piracy going on, rather than admit they're not producing prodict that people want to buy - and the US + UK governments are falling for it, passing laws to prop up these companies, in the same way they tried to prop up their car industries rather than admit they were simply not producing what customers wanted.

Re:This is outrageous

[stoatwblr]

If you feel so strongly about it, then perhaps you should change job.

As you said, you'd continue creating. If they keep stealing your content then perhaps you can be the first private individual to get a company officer jailed for copyright violations.

Re:This is outrageous

[hackwrench]

I'm not sure what the right question is that I am trying to ask, but it has something to do with sorting out what has had an influence on you and what is your own unique work.
Then there is the problem of a variation of the Chinese room argument where you got something you didn't understand at first, but then later it or elements of it showed up in your work.
Then there's the situation where "creative" people can't or won't inform outsiders how they do what they do.
It seems to me this might be why the Blurred Lines judgment went against the people who came up with Blurred Lines.

Re:This is outrageous

[stoatwblr]

"These penalties are the ones aimed at criminal copyright infringement. "

Which means whatever those prosecuting want it to mean.

The most blatant and widespread copyright violations are perpetuated by media companies against individuals in any case. Good luck getting a company officer jailed as a result.

Re:This is outrageous

[stoatwblr]

" But professional copyright infringement, where you're actively ripping off works for substantial profit, can be a criminal matter, punishable in criminal courts with fines and jail time. "

I look forward to seeing various music company executives in the dock. The well-documented systemic copyright abuse perpetrated by these companies against individuals, as well as standover tactics against "creatives" essentially forcing them to hand over their entire intellectual property portfolios with no or negligible recompense vastly dwarfs any other kind of copyright infringement that exists.

The reality, despite whatever you may _think_ it is, is that these laws are vastly disproportionate and mostly used by media companies to justify hiring City of London Police to go and kick in doors at the other end of the country in a blaze of publicity, with newspapers or TV illegally invited along - with charges quietly dropped a few days later when the Crown Prosecution Service points out the raids weren't legal, the charges won't stick and the recipient of the dawn raid probably has justification for substantial claims against the COLP and the companies which hired them, if he can afford a lawyer.

Re:This is outrageous

[stoatwblr]

"For that matter, the continued dominance of middleman organisations like movie studios, book publishers and record labels is arguably the biggest problem with the creative industries right now. "

It is those middlemen who are the ones lobbying for these laws. They freely rip off everyone in sight and feel themselves to be above the law.

The _entire_ Hollywood movie industry is worth less than Microsoft even in its diminished state. It's an idle fantasy, but one of the the things companies like Google could do to kill the relentless litigation is simply _buy_ the companies involved with money found down the back of the sofa.

Re: This is outrageous

[Anonymous Coward]

The man who raped me only got 2

Re: This is outrageous

[Anonymous Coward]

That's right. If people were lining up to be murdered by some psychopath it indicates something is seriously wrong with society.

Look at almost any successful dictator throughout history and they got support because the people who supported them were in dysfunction from the status quo. This also applies to terrorism and isil.

Re:This is outrageous

[niftymitch]

These jail terms are higher than an armed assault theft, or murder...
All this indicates excessive lobbying or even corruption.

It is not just the jail term -- the ugly part is: " proposed measures are mainly targeted at the distributors of pirated content".
Mainly I am against legislation that is mainly targeted to one poorly specified class of offenders. The abusers are ready
and waiting in the wings.

By way of bad law example the Asset forfeiture or asset seizure laws in the US was mainly intended to gather
up the ill gotten gains of drug lords domestic and international. To this end the requirement for a conviction
was not written in the law and now we are seeing cities, towns, states and federal agencies squabbling over
the piles of assets that are extracted.

A copyright violation might be a foolish student with a difficult to pronounce foreign name
that appeared to submit a ghost written paper as his or her own.

Bad laws are just bad.

Re:This is outrageous

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

Well, don't keep us in suspense, link to your source about the dawn raid by CoLP!

Re:This is outrageous

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

Which means whatever those prosecuting want it to mean.

Not really. It means what the enumerated cases in the relevant statutes specifically say it means. (And they do say; I posted links elsewhere in this discussion.)

Re:This is outrageous

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

As you say, one can dream.

More realistically, it's questionable how much benefit those middleman agencies really add these days. Technology increasingly allows individuals to do production jobs for themselves that used to require specialist skills. The Internet allows for cheap and easy distribution of many kinds of work to almost anywhere in the world, and for the collection of payment in return. If you do need specialist skills to complement your own creative work, there are freelancers offering numerous services, from the various kinds of editing if you're a writer to creating graphic assets for your new computer game.

As more and more creative people realise that they gain less and less benefit from the intermediaries, I like to think that the creative industries as a whole will shift towards the creative folks themselves collaborating to combine complementary skills to produce good work and then selling it independently and keeping the lion's share of the revenues for themselves. Promoters, hosting services, payment services and the like should be hired by the creative people steering the boat, not the other way around.

Re:This is outrageous

[bzipitidoo]

Star Trek: Renegades appears to be exactly that, a crowdfunded TV series. It's nowhere close to 22 episodes, may not ever reach that milestone, but it appears to be a fantastic success for a first try. In any case, advertising was the mainstay of TV revenues, before the advent of cable in the 1980s.

Re:This is outrageous

[stoatwblr]

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2...

Just one example amongst many. No charges were ever pressed.

Re:This is outrageous

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

Sorry, I must have missed the part about the dawn raid there. And the part about kicking in of doors. And the part about the media being illegally invited along. And any reference at all to how the actions in that article were in any way related to the laws we're talking about here.

Perhaps it's all true and it's just the quality of the source you cited, with El Reg being so favourably regarded in such matters that the need for any actually verifiable details is eliminated, but personally I prefer to have a bit more than that to go on before forming my opinions.

Re:This is outrageous

[ihtoit]

Seriously. You get less for fucking babies.

Re:This is outrageous

[ihtoit]

fuck off, Jamie Bulger's murderers were out after 8.

Re:This is outrageous

[ihtoit]

I was thinking more along the lines of Phase II or Continues, both fan-financed (the former pretty much entirely paid for by the producer out of his own pocket for the first season, they now have a faithful reproduction of the entire Desilu sound stage including some original parts such as the GNDN corridor panels). Continues has James Doohan's son, Chris, reprising his father's role as Scotty (and he totally looks like him!), while Phase II boasts guest stars from all over Trek including Nichelle Nichols, Garrett Wang, George Takei, Walter Koenig, Cirroc Lofton, the late great Grace Lee Whitney, Ethan Phillips... and guest directors including Tim Russ (who also directed Renegades).

(disclosure: I am a huge fan of the Phase II and Continues projects)

Re:This is outrageous

[ihtoit]

don't even go there, I'm still thirty years from mandatory retirement but I'll never see a pension since Gordon Brown fucked off with the pot.

Hurrah for judicial activism

[Zak3056]

It's awesome that a judge apparently created a new crime because he deicided that the legislature was wrong.

Re:Hurrah for judicial activism

[Anonymous Coward]

Taking away some of the copyright protection from the copyright owners of existing works was obviously not legally possible without compensation. What they should do is create new copyright terms only on new works, i.e. allow format-shifting for anything created after the new law is enacted. Instead of taking something away that they already have, this would be giving them less, and therefore would not require compensation.

Re:Hurrah for judicial activism

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

Taking away some of the copyright protection from the copyright owners of existing works was obviously not legally possible without compensation.

There's nothing obvious about that at all.

For one thing, a significant amount of the copyrights those owners enjoy today were only granted retrospectively, and so demonstrably did not act as the economic incentive that copyright is supposed to be when the works were actually created. Moreover, the retrospective grant of exclusive rights removed freedoms that everyone else had to use those works in other ways without any form of compensation. So any argument on general principles about how laws with retrospective effects are a bad idea is already flawed in this context.

For another thing, this sort of case is basically only possible because of some very shady international agreements, and it's putting national democratic government up against those less than democratic alternatives to see who wins. This isn't some fundamental issue of abusing human rights, at least not against the copyright holders. It's an economic question, where those with more economic power have been taking advantage of their influence to distort the effects of laws far beyond their original significance. The whole point of having a legislature is to adjust the laws when this sort of thing happens, in order to keep them reasonable and fair and in the general interests of society.

Re:Hurrah for judicial activism

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, OP failed to mention that it was a High Court case against the goverment, not a criminal case.

Re:Hurrah for judicial activism

[jedidiah]

That's just nonsense. Once I own something, the person that sold it to me should have no say in how I use it. That's just depriving me of MY personal property RIGHTS. As long as I don't distribute anything, I should be free and clear based on the current laws.

No. The courts are creating new rights for corporations that didn't really ever exist.

Re:Hurrah for judicial activism

[AmiMoJo]

Not really, he just ruled that the new law was flawed and thus the rules defaulted back to the old ones.

Re:Hurrah for judicial activism

[KGIII]

There is a part of the problem. You do not own what you think you own, at least that is what it is looking like from what you wrote.

You do not own a movie that you have. You own the media and a limited license to use it. You never own it. If you owned it you could tell other people what they could do with it.

You do not own your operating system. You have a license to use it. This includes the variety of Linux you have - ownership is neither implied nor granted. (Unless you made it yourself, of course, and did so without the use of anyone else's property. I suppose that is possible.)

You own your car. You can copy that and use it though you can not sell it, gift it, or make any (even extrapolated) money from it as it likely contains patented technologies.

You own your clothing. You can freely copy that so long as it is not patented. You can not make direct copies and sell them.

You probably own your cell phone but you do not own the software that runs on it unless you wrote it without reusing any code from another author. You have a limited use agreement with the software authors unless they have granted you unlimited use and that is rather unlikely. Chances are you can not copy the software and resell it without some restrictions.

You own far less than you seem to think. You do own limited licenses to use certain products like software, music, and movies.

Re:Hurrah for judicial activism

[MrL0G1C]

I agree, the idea that artists should be 'compensated' when it is the law that granted copyright in the first place shows the judge is either an idiot or he is corrupt.

  It should be noted that judges have get-aways in luxurious accommodation with and al kinds of pampering paid for by the copyright industries, no doubt this judge had his fill.

Insanity

[JustAnotherOldGuy]

10 years? You can rape and/or kill someone and not get that much time. Pure insanity.

Re:Insanity

[Anonymous Coward]

By illegally pirating you are RAPING the artist, the producer and the executives involved in the production of the work.
10 years is not enough -- it should be a mandatory LIFE SENTENCE!!!

Re:Insanity

[bill_mcgonigle]

10 years? You can rape and/or kill someone and not get that much time. Pure insanity.

But that's only one disposable serf - we're talking *corporate profits* here. Perhaps millions of dollars.

Privatize the gains, socialize the risks - that's the true nature of governmental systems.

Copyright itself is obsolete

[xenog]

I certainly hope the UK does not go down this road. It is like making manufacturing refrigerators illegal because it leaves ice sellers out of a job. This is retrograde. The industry should just start to accept that the Internet means copying things, and that is good. Ten years in jail for putting a film online? The UK is copying the bad things from the USA.

Re:Copyright itself is obsolete

[Anonymous Coward]

Ice sellers, whip makers and buggy makers never had the kind of wealth and political influence the media industry has. If you want to get elected, you need money. Big money. And this money cannot come from small pockets. Moreover, you can't be elected without traditional media, anyone who has tried to run using an internet platform only found out pretty quickly that it's simply no match for TV. With the coming balkanization and castration of the net, it's safe to say it will never rival the old media. The industry doesn't have to accept what it can change by simply lobbying enough.

Re:Copyright itself is obsolete

[Anonymous Coward]

Ten years in jail for putting a film online? The UK is copying the bad things from the USA.

In the US, the maximum days spent in prison for copyright infringement is zero.

Re:Copyright itself is obsolete

[harvey the nerd]

The US still has guns. Lots of guns.

Re:Copyright itself is obsolete

[xenog]

When I say it copies the bad things from the USA, I mean the general tendency to punish very harshly in what may seem to be complete disregard for the human nature of the punished person, very often for non-violent offenses, or other antisocial behaviour that is more easily tolerated in other developed nations.

Nonetheless, I stand corrected, and copyright infringement, although not punished with prison, still commands very large fees, and the media industry has been known to prosecute even 12-year-old girl. I still find it stupefying that they insisted on a settlement instead of dropping the case immediately after they found out who was responsible for the “offense”.

By comparision

[Anonymous Coward]

These are all UK crimes with 10 year penalties:

Burglary with intent to inflict GBH on a person or do unlawful damage to a building or anything in it (non-dwelling)
Possession of firearm with intent to cause fear of violence
Possessing or distributing prohibited weapon or ammunition (5 year minimum sentence)
Riot
Making threats to kill
Administering poison etc. so as to endanger life
Cruelty to persons under 16
Indecent assault
Engaging in sexual activity in the presence of a child
Causing a child to watch a sexual act
Meeting child following sexual grooming
Indecency with children under 14
Taking, having etc. indecent photographs of children
Committing offence with intent to commit sexual offence
Trespass with intent to commit sexual offence
Burglary with intent to commit rape (non-dwelling)
Assault with intent to commit buggery
Causing a person to engage in sexual activity without consent
Engaging in sexual activity in the presence of a person with a mental disorder impeding choice
Causing a person with a mental disorder impeding choice to watch a sexual act
Engaging in sexual activity in the presence, procured by inducement, threat or deception, of a person with a mental disorder
Care workers: sexual activity with a person with a mental disorder
Care workers: inciting person with mental disorder to engage in sexual act

I'm sure we can all agree that these are comparable to someone sharing a song.

Re:By comparision

[Anonymous Coward]

"Assault with intent to commit buggery"

Huh, and here I thought that "buggery" was just UK slang for anal sex, and not an actual term described in the legal code.

Re:By comparision

[Harold Halloway]

It was until not too long ago, completely illegal. You could not bugger anyone, for whatever reason, without risking the full wrath of the law. It was first codified in the Buggery Act of 1533.

Re:By comparision

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

I'm sure we can all agree that these are comparable to someone sharing a song.

You make a good emotional appeal, but the reality is that someone just casually sharing a song isn't likely to be subject to these penalties at all. Even TFA mentions this, and this is only an early stage proposal, far from becoming an actual law.

What we're really talking about here is something like an organised criminal gang that systematically identifies people who might be coerced into giving up pre-release copies of major movies, then distributes those pre-release movies for substantial profit at the expense of the studio (and, indirectly, everyone who gets paid to work on movies).

Leaving aside existing penalties for other types of copyright infringement, a reasonable comparison might be large-scale, systematic professional fraud or false accounting, where CPS guidelines indicate 4-7 years for a custodial sentence. So while a 10 year maximum as reportedly proposed here seems on the high side, it's not a vast discrepancy from existing financial offences of a similar magnitude.

Re:By comparision

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, it's a waste of porn. Why would you want to show porn to some mong spazz windowlicker?

Re:By comparision

[BlueStrat]

I'm sure we can all agree that these are comparable to someone sharing a song.

You make a good emotional appeal, but the reality is that someone just casually sharing a song isn't likely to be subject to these penalties at all.

Unless you annoy someone in power, hold 'dangerous' or 'inconvenient' political/ideological/religious views, or for whatever reason the government wants to destroy some individual.

History teaches us that whenever government enacts a law for which they claim "it will never be used for 'X'" you can be assured that's precisely what it will be used for eventually.

Those who refuse to learn from history are doomed to repeat it.

Strat

Re:By comparision

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

Nice strawman, but this is not a situation with vague wording that is amenable to creative interpretation later on. The distinction between civil and criminal copyright infringement is relatively clear and unambiguous in the UK, and nothing I've seen anyone say or propose in relation to this discussion suggests that this will change.

Re:By comparision

[BlueStrat]

Nice strawman, but this is not a situation with vague wording that is amenable to creative interpretation later on. The distinction between civil and criminal copyright infringement is relatively clear and unambiguous in the UK, and nothing I've seen anyone say or propose in relation to this discussion suggests that this will change.

As I said, people who believe assurances of government over the clear track record of history are doomed to repeat that history. That is no straw man, that is historical fact.

Nothing you have said diminishes this. It does not matter how "clear" the law appears. Words will be redefined and reinterpreted to suit government's goals, as history has shown us again and again.

You sticking your fingers in your ears and going "lalalala I can't hear you" and "straw man! straw man!" does not change the clear track record of history on this matter.

Strat

Re:By comparision

[Anonymous Coward]

if singing 'happy birthday to you' is a crime in America i am sure whistling songs without the approved license to whistle tunes, with monetary compensation based on the number of listeners regardless of if they were listening or not is sure to arrive, aggravate, and use smartphones to monitor said unapproved whistling.

Re:By comparision

[AmiMoJo]

While you are correct, it won't stop the City of London Police threatening search engine operators with 10 years if they don't hand over their domains.

Re:By comparision

[Anonymous Coward]

It's a crime to show porn to a retard?

Oh, please, yes.
That would outlaw the entire Internet.

Re:By comparision

[Bruce Perens]

You make a good emotional appeal, but the reality is that someone just casually sharing a song isn't likely to be subject to these penalties at all.

That's sort of like saying the penalty against burglary would only be used against someone who steals the Crown Jewels.

If the law specifies a minimum offense at all, you can be sure that anyone reaching that minimum is at risk. We've had very many documented civil copyright trolls going after otherwise un-notable individuals, and thus abuse of criminal law is certain.

Re:By comparision

[Calydor]

I hate when I can't tell if a comment is serious or tongue-in-cheek humor without looking up the legal history of other nations.

Re: By comparision

[Anonymous Coward]

It's how you were conceived.

Re:By comparision

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

Then why bother debating laws at all? If there is no point discussing the words on the page because anyone with enough power can just ignore them, and the checks and balances are inadequate to safeguarding us against that abuse, we might as well all go pick up out pitchforks and march on Downing Street tomorrow. Fortunately, we are a long way from reaching that stage. If we weren't, the government wouldn't have just lost the very case we're talking about because their position was defeated in court.

Re:By comparision

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

There are all kinds of things about the City of London that should have had a light shined on them a long time ago so we can decide whether we still want to allow them in our society. If you think CoLP behaving dubiously in this context is scary, consider that to this day they retain a special position with regard to Parliament, which for reasons beyond my comprehension has not been terminated despite there being no law that requires it. Then again, we also still allow people to vote on our laws because of their religion or who their parents several generations removed once were, so apparently we have a long way to go.

Re:By comparision

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

If the law specifies a minimum offense at all, you can be sure that anyone reaching that minimum is at risk.

Perhaps, but the relevant statutes enumerate quite specifically when copyright infringement becomes a criminal matter. Moreover, whether to impose any custodial sentence at all would fall to the courts, which tend to take an extremely dim view of anyone trying to influence their judgements on such matters extra-judicially beyond the creation of the relevant statute law in the first place.

I'm pretty heavily pro-civil liberties and pro-copyright reform in these debates, but it doesn't really advance the debate in a useful way to argue an unrealistically pessimistic position without regard to the realities of how such a law would be interpreted in court even if a case were brought. The law has allowed for two-year sentences for this kind of on-line infringement for some time, and for the ten-year penalty for real world infringement of the same nature, but it's extremely rare for criminal copyright prosecutions to even happen in the first place, never mind for the maximum penalties to be handed down by a court.

Re:By comparision

[BlueStrat]

Then why bother debating laws at all?

What we *should* be debating is how much tar, feathers, and hanging-rope we need for those in power who pass and use laws in such manner.

Strat

Re:By comparision

[Anonymous Coward]

Then why bother debating laws at all? If there is no point discussing the words on the page because anyone with enough power can just ignore them,
|and the checks and balances are inadequate to safeguarding us against that abuse, we might as well all go pick up out pitchforks and march on Downing Street tomorrow.

Now you're getting it.

Re: By comparision

[Anonymous Coward]

Well played, mong-lover. I bet you had to think the whole day before asking a norm to find a retort.

Re:By comparision

[DiEx-15]

These are all UK crimes with 10 year penalties: Burglary with intent to inflict GBH on a person or do unlawful damage to a building or anything in it (non-dwelling) Possession of firearm with intent to cause fear of violence Possessing or distributing prohibited weapon or ammunition (5 year minimum sentence) Riot Making threats to kill Administering poison etc. so as to endanger life Cruelty to persons under 16 Indecent assault Engaging in sexual activity in the presence of a child Causing a child to watch a sexual act Meeting child following sexual grooming Indecency with children under 14 Taking, having etc. indecent photographs of children Committing offence with intent to commit sexual offence Trespass with intent to commit sexual offence Burglary with intent to commit rape (non-dwelling) Assault with intent to commit buggery Causing a person to engage in sexual activity without consent Engaging in sexual activity in the presence of a person with a mental disorder impeding choice Causing a person with a mental disorder impeding choice to watch a sexual act Engaging in sexual activity in the presence, procured by inducement, threat or deception, of a person with a mental disorder Care workers: sexual activity with a person with a mental disorder Care workers: inciting person with mental disorder to engage in sexual act I'm sure we can all agree that these are comparable to someone sharing a song.

According to the RIAA: YES.

Re:By comparision

[ihtoit]

buggery was decriminalised back in 1993(?) when the age of consent was reduced to 16 (it was 18 for hetero couples and 21 for homosexuals).

Re:By comparision

[ihtoit]

Parliament is the result of the agreement reached which directly resulted in the drafting and point-of-the-sword ratification of Magna Carta, by which agreement the People governed themselves by way of a council of elected commoners (House of Commons) who decided laws with a group of hereditary barons (the House of Lords) as the check with the Monarchy to ensure that laws passed did not tend treasonous (as they have done since 1911, yet another point-of-sword agreement which merely ensured the continuation of the United Kingdom as a Constitutional Monarchy rather than a violent revolution into a Republic). Since 1999 the Hereditary Peers in the House of Lords have been abolished, hence the final check against treasonous Laws being passed has been removed - handily, the capital crime of treason has also been abolished.

Re:By comparision

[ihtoit]

FYI: in the UK the RIAA equivalent would be the BPI (British Phonographic Institute) and the PRS (Performing Rights Society). The PRS are the ones who go round extorting £300 "fees" out of shop owners who like to listen to commercial radio in the back office and it just happens to drift through to the public area. BPI are the ones who chase six year olds who share the latest Miley Cyrus video on Facebook. :)

Goods news for Serco, G4S et al

[Harold Halloway]

That's a relief. What with all those spare cells in UK prisons I was worried that some prisons might have to close down.

Re:Goods news for Serco, G4S et al

[Anonymous Coward]

The UK has 40 million empty cells?

Re:Goods news for Serco, G4S et al

[Harold Halloway]

I was being sarcastic. UK prisons are somewhat overcrowded, badly-run and in many cases, decrepit.

Re:Goods news for Serco, G4S et al

[Anonymous Coward]

I wonder if US private prison corporations are starting to get the ear of the local politicos in that region.

Things like the RIPA act where a judge asks someone 20-30 times for their password, then throw them a life sentence (each "no" being another four years in the clink.)

England is about to make the same retarded (and yes, I say the "R" word) mistakes the US did with Prohibition and the War on Drugs:

First, with penalties so high, people will start fighting back. 10 years for murder versus 10 years for a copyright violation. The local cops may not have a gun in their face... but Brits are clever enough to do booby traps and swear by their cutlery.

Second, people will start covering their asses. All PCs? Encrypted. Block VPNs and use Great Firewall tactics to attack encryption? P2P trades will be replaced by encrypted VPNs and physical dead-drops where the files placed on the MicroUSB drive are all GPG encrypted. People will be buying PCs that never see the Internet.

This will make police work against real cases (child porn) a lot harder.

Third, if the UK makes -possession- of stuff illegal, the enforcement costs alone will be tremendous. Look at how much the US spends on catching a hippie with a joint, and the black market with gangs around it. Of course, pirated IP isn't on the same level, it it will mean more criminal activity to deal with skirting around the law. It doesn't take much to have a removable hard disk with a TrueCrypt hidden container on it.

Fourth, look at the child pornographers, which are hunted down like dogs in every civilized country around the globe. There are laws to put them behind bars for geologic eras, but they still get away. They won't turn their diaper sniper buds in, since no prosecutor wants to be known for cutting a deal. What will happen when IP infringement crimes are prosecuted the same, the clued people will not be arrested. It will be exactly how the RIAA did things. Vacuum up some clueless teen or, some grandmother with an open Wi-Fi link, and crucify them in the courts. The real pirates will use the same measures as the child predators and not get caught. Heavy IP law penalties cannot be enforced, other than the "low hanging fruit" method.

Fifth, it builds contempt for the legal system. Europe had a period of time where just being unemployed was an offense that would put someone in jail, much less actually owing debt (debtor's prisons.) We all saw how making the death penalty for virtually all crimes turned out a few centuries ago. As of now, the UK already has an insurgent element who wants to knock down Big Ben, and adding Draconian IP laws only means there are more disaffected people who will join those movements.

Re: Goods news for Serco, G4S et al

[Anonymous Coward]

Dream on. There won't be any revolt. Ever. People don't move unless they can't get any food on the table. And even then it serves no purpose any more.

Corrupt or retarded

[Anonymous Coward]

OK, can anyone find any credible explanation that indicates incompetence on the behalf of politicians here? All I can see is malice.

Re:Corrupt or retarded

[Anonymous Coward]

How so? They're representing the music industry pretty much exactly to its wishes. Representing was what the job was all about, wasn't it?

Re:Corrupt or retarded

[dhaen]

In this rare instance the government did the right thing. They introduced a new law clarifying that personal use was ok. It was a recent court case brought by the Musicians' Union and industry representatives that caused a judge to repeal it.

Looks like I'll have to uninstall iTunes immediately...

Excellent!

[nnull]

Glad the crime fits the punishment. Finally we treat copyright infringement worse than murderers and rapists!

Re:Excellent!

[Anonymous Coward]

Heck, if you film the murder and rape and give it to some upload-and-prosecute racket operating under such laws, you'll be richer at the end of your prison term than someone getting compensation for wrongful imprisonment.

Probably you'll be able to afford an angel dust lawyer for getting the wrongful imprisonment compensation on top, anyway.

About the latter news story...

[Anonymous Coward]

As someone who lives in the UK, I think more people need to be aware of Jury nullification.

For those of you who don't know what it is, if you're ever on a trial for a victimless crime (for example, this) and the evidence clearly indicates that the person is guilty of a "crime," but you find the law unjust or wrongly applied, you can disagree with it when making your vote.

This is because you cannot be punished for the vote you make as a juror. This is why the entire concept of jury nullification exists to begin with.

Juries have more power than Judges, Magistrates and the prosecution would like them to know about.

Re:About the latter news story...

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't worry, I'm sure they find a way to eliminate juries. Either that or they'll find a way to put BPI executives in the jury. ...or they'll find a way to replace judges with BPI executives.

Heck, over in America we have binding arbitration which means the companies can buy their favorite legal proceedings. Oddly enough they always buy the one that lets them get off scott-free for anything. The whole system has been bought out. You got money? You win, automatically.

Re:About the latter news story...

[trout007]

I'm not sure about the UK but in the U.S. juries are kept mostly in the dark by the judge.

I was on a jury where the judge was the same one on the Zimmerman trial. In this case it wasn't clear what happened because every witness contradicted each other. The defendant seemed to claim self defense as in she said the other woman tried to hit her so she punched her in the face which left a bruise. The other woman claimed out of the blue the other woman hit her with an 18 in wrench. The defense attorney never made the self defense case which led me to believe the judge prevented him from doing so.

Being a troll in general when we were in deliberation I sent a note to the judge asking for a copy of Florida's law in self defense.(that was Zimmerman's claim). She called us back in and read the same exact jury instructions she read before.

It took me a while to talk the other jurors out of Assault with a weapon (since no weapon was ever found). I could not get them to understand there was reasonable doubt that the defendant was using self defense since the lawyer never argued it. They kept saying the judge told us to follow these instructions.

Re:About the latter news story...

[Anonymous Coward]

>They kept saying the judge told us to follow these instructions.

Ah, the Nuremberg defense. That's really shitty reasoning on their part.

Re:About the latter news story...

[Anonymous Coward]

As someone who lives in the UK, I think more people need to be aware of Jury nullification.

For those of you who don't know what it is, if you're ever on a trial for a victimless crime (for example, this) and the evidence clearly indicates that the person is guilty of a "crime," but you find the law unjust or wrongly applied, you can disagree with it when making your vote.

This is because you cannot be punished for the vote you make as a juror. This is why the entire concept of jury nullification exists to begin with.

Juries have more power than Judges, Magistrates and the prosecution would like them to know about.

Seriously?

You live in the UK yet you'd put your future in the hands of the the random selection of arsehole sheep that you see every day in the street who'd be picked for jury service?

I hope you never see the inside of a court as a defendant for anything serious..

Re:About the latter news story...

[Anonymous Coward]

So your excuse for this overblown ruling is, that there would be a handfull of people taking their time off to be the jury at a trial of someone ripping his CDs, so he could listen to the music on his MP3 player?

Your law system hasn't improved much since "the olden days", has it?

Re:About the latter news story...

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm guessing you're one of those people who think we should blindly obey unjust laws regardless of if we agree with it or not?

Re: About the latter news story...

[Anonymous Coward]

It's not like we have any choice, do we?

Re: About the latter news story...

[Anonymous Coward]

So, by that admission, Alan Turning shouldn't have had sex with that other man.

Doesn't matter that attitudes have changed regarding homophilia over the last couple of years.

After all, law is law, right?

Re: About the latter news story...

[Anonymous Coward]

It always works. In order not to work, there must have been a war, your side must have lost - badly - and those who put you on trial are the victors. But in this case no defence will avail you if they have already decided your fate. Until then, utter compliance with the Authorities is the safest bet.

Re:About the latter news story...

[SuricouRaven]

Jury nullification is viewed with great distrust by the legal profession in the US because it has a sordid history - it was commonly used in the south during segregation as a way to literally get away with murder. If the victim were black and the perpetrator white, the jury would often nullify regardless of the evidence.

Re:About the latter news story...

[Anonymous Coward]

It's true that things can be used badly.

That said, I distrust a judge that wants to punish somebody for something victimless even more.

Re:About the latter news story...

[penguinoid]

Jury nullification is viewed with great distrust by the legal profession in the US because it has a sordid history - it was commonly used in the south during segregation as a way to literally get away with murder. If the victim were black and the perpetrator white, the jury would often nullify regardless of the evidence.

Food is viewed with great distrust by the legal profession in the US because it has a sordid history - it was commonly used in the south during segregation as a way to feed every single murderer who ever existed. If the victim were black and the perpetrator white, the perpetrator having eaten food was a prerequisite for the crime.

Re:About the latter news story...

[Anonymous Coward]

... victim were black and the perpetrator white ...

So jury nullification was used to enact mob rule. The problem being the jury was not composed of the defendant's peers: People who had the same economic and legal limitations as the defendant. This requires the judicial system to recognize racial discrimination. Which in turn, requires the judicial system to recognize itself as suffering from flawed execution. See 'To kill a mockingbird'.

Re:About the latter news story...

[trout007]

It was also used many times in the North when people were accused of harboring or helping fugitive slaves. The juries would refuse to convict.

Since we now have several million non-violent people rotting in prison maybe we should start using it again?

I think the real reason is the prison industrial complex doesn't like to be questioned. There is a lot of money at stake keeping those millions locked up.

Re: About the latter news story...

[Anonymous Coward]

They have changed now. It's unwise to break a law now with the reasoning that things will change in a couple of decades.

Re:About the latter news story...

[Anonymous Coward]

It's also notorious for _good_ things too. Like how people weren't sent to jail for a life time for smuggling alcohol during prohibition. I don't want to put words in your mouth but please don't accidentally make Jury Nullification sound like a bad thing. It's a tool and like any other tool can be used for good or bad depending on the people using it.

Deterrent?

[Anonymous Coward]

The government said tougher sentences would act as a "significant deterrent".

Using that logic, if the UK really wants to totally eliminate copyright infringement, then obviously they need to make it a capital crime with the death penalty as punishment. Hell, just make all crimes punishable by death and pretty soon there won't be anymore crime except for a few heat-of-the-moment infractions or ones caused by negligence.

Re:Deterrent?

[Joe_Dragon]

just make all crimes punishable by death and pretty So you trun a traffic ticket in to a high speed Chase and likely an shoot out from someone that will do anything to get out of the death

Re:Deterrent?

[Anonymous Coward]

Given the huge coverage of the UK by CCTV, it wouldn't be necessary to engage in a high speed chase, just arrest the perpetrator when he arrives at his home. Also to cut down the administrative overhead on incarcerating people in prison facilities while they await their executions, the UK government will start mailing out suicide kits along with the official court verdict and summary order of execution. This allows the convicted criminal to take his own life in the privacy of his own home saving the UK judicial system millions of pounds per year. Plus, as a benefit to the remaining kin of the convicted criminal, the state will pick up the costs of body transportation and cremation. A nearly crime free society is a happy society. Just imagine it. For example there will be no more murders, no more rapes, no more bank fraud, no more toxic waste dumping, no more drug abuse, no more prostitution, no more parking violations and no more pirated songs. It'll be a paradise.

Re:Deterrent?

[Anonymous Coward]

Given the huge coverage of the UK by CCTV, it wouldn't be necessary to engage in a high speed chase, just arrest the perpetrator when he arrives at his home. Also to cut down the administrative overhead on incarcerating people in prison facilities while they await their executions, the UK government will start mailing out suicide kits along with the official court verdict and summary order of execution. This allows the convicted criminal to take his own life in the privacy of his own home saving the UK judicial system millions of pounds per year. Plus, as a benefit to the remaining kin of the convicted criminal, the state will pick up the costs of body transportation and cremation. A nearly crime free society is a happy society. Just imagine it. For example there will be no more murders, no more rapes, no more bank fraud, no more toxic waste dumping, no more drug abuse, no more prostitution, no more parking violations and no more pirated songs. It'll be a paradise.

I won't be visiting Merry Old England any time in the next 100 years with such death panels mandated for traffic offences.

Disclaimer: "Death panel" is mentioned solely in homage of the US politicians bizarre claims that Canada has medical treatment death panels determining whom gets healthcare and whom cannot receive healthcare.

Deterrent

[penguinoid]

Quintupling the jail sentence, I bet they expect the rates of piracy to drop to 1/5th their previous value. But deterrents don't really work like that.

We need to elect a better company

[Anonymous Coward]

The current companies at the head of the UK government are absolutely crazy, people need to stop voting for the local MAFIAA.

One has to wonder

[Opportunist]

What's going to grow quicker? Copyright extension periods or jail times for copying a song?

Fuck, 10 years copyright protection would already be too long, let alone 10 years in jail for a fucking song.

So, kids, learn and adept

[Opportunist]

From now on, if you want songs or games and you can't afford it, get a club, crack some skulls and grab a few wallets, then buy the songs you want with the money you just stole.

If you get caught, you'll be doing much less time.

Re:So, kids, learn and adept

[Howitzer86]

It's less complicated than that. Just steal the CD and you'll get less time, if any time at all.

Re:So, kids, learn and adept

[Anonymous Coward]

Not really. But good try. You would be better off just shoplifting.

http://yro.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=7707449&cid=50135875

Re:So, kids, learn and adept

[Anonymous Coward]

Or do the smart thing,

Just rip it from a computer that has it, and then strip the DRM out of it. Virtually no chance of being caught if done right, and even better, it comes with the Smart Cow guarantee.

Re:So, kids, learn and adept

[Opportunist]

Of course, but even beating a granny with a sack of doorknobs to rob her carries a lower sentence.

The absolute smart move would of course be to embezzle some government money. If everything fails you get a few months on probation. If you're lucky, a bailout on top of what you already nicked.

Re:So, kids, learn and adept

[Anonymous Coward]

Except one reason for pirating is you can't find an item to steal let alone even buy it. Ignoring prices, private trackers provide the best experience and selection out of all the pay services. It takes far more effort to do things the legal way assuming there is a legal way to do it. I don't understand why the media companies keep screwing themselves with poor functioning UIs, disappearing content, crazy pricing schemes (a simply scanned eBook costing more than hard cover edition), etc...

I generally believe people prefer to do the right thing when they can, but the media companies make it so difficult. Personally I don't enjoy support such corrupt companies and have slowly been spending less and less time consuming media.

Re:So, kids, learn and adept

[Anonymous Coward]

Wrong. You can steal as much as you want, you just can't SHARE it back with everyone else.

There's never been a case where someone's been arrested for downloading...it's always because they were sharing the content they downloaded after the fact.

Re:So, kids, learn and adept

[Anonymous Coward]

The trick is to blame the Greeks.

Re:So, kids, learn and adept

[Opportunist]

The Greeks if you're talking to Germans, Germany if you're talking to Greeks and the Banks when you're talking to anyone else.

The monied interest

[Ice Station Zebra]

want to make everything you do a crime if you aren't paying them money.

Re:The monied interest

[Vitriol Angst]

I'd think ten days in jail would be enough punishment. Has anyone gone through the court system who suggests "throw away the key" type punishments?

With ADD, I'd think the sentence is also 7 times longer than for normal humans.

But when we look at the influence of monied interests -- well, the Royals can't punish hard enough. When the economic royalists do get punished for crimes (if ever) it's a hand slap, or the blame it all on some subordinate, as if that person made decisions.

s/Infringement Jail //

[Anonymous Coward]

For a moment I thought the title was "UK Government Proposes 10-Year Copyright Term". Tears of joy were starting to build up but the process was abruptly stopped when I saw the correct title.

What about companies?

[bagofbeans]

So if the BBC or the WaPo uses a pic that they don't have rights to, who goes to jail?

I suspect that the copyright rights and penalties are diverging for companies and individuals.

Election results?!

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

The problem with your argument is that in systems where you get an election every few years and in that election you get one vote, there aren't even enough votes in an individual's entire lifetime to express a real view on all the issues that will affect them. Elections for national governments are typically won and lost based on a very small number of key issues at the time, maybe even just one.

Something like copyright infringement is never going to be that issue, unless they actually do start fining everyone who ever downloads something illegally or throwing large numbers of people in jail for sharing their mash-ups on YouTube. So any argument that an election result somehow gave the government a mandate for whatever policy it has in every last area is flawed at best.

Of course, this is all rather academic in this case, because the government did actually make a sensible change in the law, and this case was the government losing a case against that change in court.

Re:Election results?!

[SuricouRaven]

Both the US and UK use districting systems, which means that in many areas the outcome of the election is almost a foregone conclusion - if you live there, the chance of your vote actually affecting anything is so slim as to be for all practical purposes zero. It's only if you live in a borderline area - what the US calls a swing state, and the UK a marginal constituency - that your vote has any chance of mattering at all.

Re:Election results?!

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

That's not really true, though. Your vote will not make a difference if many more of your neighbours vote for another party than you do. That's because the collective weight of their votes is more than the weight of yours. You can argue that some alternative voting model would be a fairer system than the current first-past-the-post model we use, but given the model we have today, what you described is exactly how it's supposed to work.

If there were literally no possibility of those other people's votes changing at an election then the situation would be different. But no-one in this country is compelled to vote, nor to vote the same way as they did before. Like it or not, everyone gets to choose every time, and some of them are probably going to disagree with you.

Also, as someone who lives in a "marginal" constituency that has changed MP almost every election for my adult life and changed party several times and yet has seen majorities of many thousands at some of those elections, I don't really buy the theory of only marginals counting anyway.

Re:Election results?!

[KGIII]

Part of the problem is that you (generic you - you personally but you do seem the type) do not actually seem to be aware of how often you can vote. There are more than four year elections or, at most, bi-annual elections. You can vote at things like town meetings (if you have them), referendums, school boards, etc... You can go to hearings and voice your opinion. You can go to the senate and voice your opinions (within the constructed rules). You can petition... There are lots of things we can do but do not do. Instead we whine on the internet... We, as in I also do so.

Re: Election results?!

[Anonymous Coward]

Sorry, but it's true. I haven't been represented in Congress my entire life, for instance. I live in an area full of republicans who keep electing corporate tools to office. Why is that? Because the district in question is oddly shaped so as to produce that exact result. Therefore, my vote quite literally doesn't count and I am 'represented' by a stooge who does the exact opposite of what I want a representative to do, especially in matters of economics and national security.

That might be ok if my vote was for a marginal party or something, but in terms of popular votes the US is split almost down the middle right now, and yet our representation in Congress and state legislatures and governor's offices heavily favors the more corporate friendly of the two major parties. That isn't by accident: It's by districting fraud (gerrymandering).

You see this same fascist pattern in most developed countries these days. The UK isn't good, Australia is governed by a bat shit insane corporate toady, the neocons run Europe's economic policies, etc. Governments doing the opposite of what the people want is now the norm in developed countries.

Re: Election results?!

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

Oh, I agree that current electoral systems are very bad at representing what the people collectively want over time. The trouble is, as long as we choose our representatives one election and one relatively long term at a time, and as long as we have to vote for a single individual and not express distinct views on a range of issues, you can't fix that.

If you have a population split 60%/40% on party politics, when should the 40% get their turn? If that split truly reflected a 60%/40% on every issue affecting the population then arguably they shouldn't. Then you get into issues of whether some principles are important enough to need more than a simple majority to accept them, and thus constitutional law and supreme courts that can overrule the administration and other statute legislation of the day.

The trouble starts when everything isn't so uniform. You have a 60%/40% split on parties, but on one particular issue it's 40%/60% but the 40% win. With systems like first-past-the-post you have a further development of this idea, because you can have a party winning with only a relatively small share of the vote (or worse, some averaged version of that based on seats/districts) as long as it's larger than any other party's share. Then even if an issue is say 25%/75% because all of the other parties and their supporters oppose the government, the government can still have their way. That is what happens all too often today.

Re:Election results?!

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

Careful with those assumptions there, buddy. I'm a textbook floating voter -- I choose who to vote for at each election based on that election, not some preconceived notion of which party I should support and automatically voting for their candidate. I'm also politically active, and will engage with my representatives in substantial ways on issues I care about.

I'm also in the UK, and as you may be aware, not having more opportunities to vote or meaningfully express political views in other ways is a recurring problem here.

For example, we have numerous levels of indirection between who we vote for back home and what senior figures our government ultimately send to represent us and wield power at EU level or other international agreements, which is how you wind up with the legal technicalities that got the private copying exception overturned in the case mentioned in TFS. Today the MEPs we do elect at least somewhat directly have more power over such issues, but I think the technicalities being abused here predate that change, so there really was very little an average citizen could have done to significantly divert the storm in this particular case.

Re:Election results?!

[KGIII]

I was pretty careful to note that it was a generic you and not you personally. :)

I must also admit that I do not know a whole lot, probably more than most Americans however, about your political system. I do try to keep up to some extent. I had thought you guys got to vote at council meetings, town referendums, city council hearings, etc? If not then, well, I am not really sure what to tell you...

As for my own voting habits, I am actually proud to say that I seldom vote for the winning candidate. I tend to vote for the most closely in-tune with my needs representative. As my needs are generally about personal freedoms and a history of accurate representation I seldom vote for an incumbent. Because of this my vote is usually wasted, for lack of a better word, as I seldom vote for neither of the two major party candidates. (We, ostensibly, have two parties. They are, by my opinion, part and parcel of the same horse. The differences are in rhetoric and the practicality between them is the same.)

Anyhow, sorry if you took what I was saying to mean just you. It was meant to be more an "in addition" type post than one that attempted to engage you in anything remotely like an argument. I suspect my writing was inferior and that I was also smoking a wee bit of marijuana last night. In all honesty, I am again today. Strange, really... I do not typically smoke often or much.

Re:Election results?!

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

No worries. I wondered if the word "not" was missing somewhere in your previous post.

It's true that we have several levels of representation in the UK. Broadly speaking we have local government (various levels of council or other elected local authority depending on where you are), national government (the main executive and legislature) and EU government (where MEPs are directly elected, though the other parts of EU governance are not). Typically representatives are elected to represent a specific area and a citizen living in that area is entitled to vote for their representatives at each of the corresponding elections. There are also a small number of specific positions that are directly elected, for example the police commissioners, though most of our regulatory or oversight authorities are appointed rather than directly elected.

In practice, most local authorities have relatively little power and really do deal with local issues, though if you live somewhere like London then arguably that isn't quite as true. On most issues, the real power is in Westminster with the national government, and to some extent with the devolved equivalents in Scotland etc.

Parliament is now elected on a fixed five-year term with a single MP representing each electoral constituency and selected via first-past-the-post forming the legislature. In practice, the executive and government ministers are then determined by who can gather the support of a majority of those MPs, so in effect even our Prime Minister is only indirected elected. As you can imagine, this has been controversial at times, particularly when the PM has changed between elections without the general public getting any say on the matter.

Since the Lisbon Treaty the members of the European Parliament that we elect regionally do also have some real power in terms of EU directives, which are ultimately supposed to be translated into national law in each member state. However, the EU has two other parts of its government that are not directly elected in the same way, and there is a long-standing political trick where a national government encourages policies it couldn't sell back home via these indirect European mechanisms and then pleads with its own electorate that it had no choice but to implement the resulting legislation, thus covering itself while still passing unpopular laws. This kind of trickery can also lead to more popular laws passed by the national government then being cancelled in court.

Re:Election results?!

[KGIII]

That pretty much matches what I have come to understand from following along at various new sites and the comments sections. It seems overly complex, counterintuitive, and potentially harmful if you ask me. This does not, of course, mean that the system used in my country is superior.

Re:Election results?!

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

I suppose the argument is that local councils are better able to understand the unique issues in their area and therefore make better judgements about minor details like planning consents or highway safety issues.

On the other hand, it also means there is a lot of buck-passing and finger-pointing. As far as I can tell, a significant amount of the so-called austerity measures we have imposed in this country have come from national government reducing its subsidy of local government, effectively leaving them with unfunded mandates. Then people complain about potholes damaging their cars, streetlights being turned off, reduced frequency of bin collections, and all these other relatively minor issues that are the local councils' responsibilities, even though the real cause of the changes was probably pushed down from on high.

The flip side of this is that sometimes local councils get creative with standardised national regulations, and we wind up with widely differing interpretations of, say, what an appropriate speed limit is for a road with certain characteristics. My personal opinion is that these sorts of decisions shouldn't be subjective anyway: once national government and the civil service have done the appropriate research and issued their guidance, local authorities should be required to follow it. But again, much finger-pointing but little real improvement are all too common outcomes when someone does fall foul of some local council agent's pet planning policy or the like.

Imagine the dystopian possibilities!

[Anonymous Coward]

Someone doesn't like you? They hack your computer and have you upload a copyrighted song to youtube. Youtube's automated copyright detection gets you, and the cops send you to prison.

Or you upload a video of your family singing happy birthday on Facebook. Boom! All your family is going to jail for ten years.

Re:Imagine the dystopian possibilities!

[Anonymous Coward]

To be fair, this is already sadly possible with photos and recorded footage of children in sexual situations.

So, it's nothing new.

"Dear" british citizens...

[Anonymous Coward]

You just voted for a mentally diseased, obese criminal who wants to ban encryption, make civil servants' strikes nearly impossible, transform student grants into loans, cut welfare for the poor, and now jail bittorrent users for 10 years. And he clearly said most of this during the electoral campaign.

Your voting choices prove that you are world class idiots and you deserve whatever disgrace you're going to go through. Enjoy corporate fascism.

The story on the BBC is bollocks..

[pigsycyberbully]

U.K. broadcasting is one of the most censored in the world they could even put China to shame. Orwell worked for the Ministry of Information during the war and used it as his inspiration for the Ministry of Truth in Nineteen Eighty-Four. Now for reality: committing murder in England will see you serving a five-year prison sentence. Possession of firearm with intent to cause fear of violence Firearms Act 1968s.16A 10 years. In reality a maximum of 3 years. The only country in the world who locks up more people than the United Kingdom is the United States. Most prisoners in the U.K. are thrown out of prison early because of a lack of prison space. Copyright infringement is considered a low priority crime. Holding cells in the U.K. are no longer lawful because of the Human Rights Act. Margaret Thatcher used holding cells which are police cells to lock people up for a year in a single holding cell in a police station. They were called emergency holding cells because of overcrowded prisons no longer being able to take any more prisoners. The story on the BBC is bollocks. The only thing you can believe about the BBC is the date on their website. It's a government owned broadcasting service controlled by government ministers who create a BBC Charter of agreements. You cannot even put on a stage performance in the U.K. without ministers approval. Nobody is going to get 10 years in prison in the U.K. for copyright infringement simply because they don't have enough prisons to put people in them for 10 years. Why do I bother you people don't understand anyway do you and if you do you don't really care do you.

Re:The story on the BBC is bollocks..

[ledow]

1) Your stats are bollocks.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

The UK is 100th based on incarceration rates. US is #2. Some tiny British colonies in the middle of nowhere are higher than the UK but nowhere near the US. Technically only the Seychelles is worse, but that's because the only fair measure is incarceration per population, and they have a tiny population.

2) "Most censored"? Bollocks. Please go look at some proper British broadcasting. We have shows that only exist to take the piss out of politicians, in doing so risk libel suits almost every time, and yet it's shown on prime time by the BBC themselves. The same shows that basically made a mockery of "super-injunctions" live on air for several entire episodes and regularly take the piss out of the BBC themselves. Fuck getting away with that in China or Korea or even the US.

3) Your "actual" imprisonment figures? Probably about right. But murder won't see you out in 5 at all. Nearer 10. Think half the prison sentence if you're a good boy, and murder carries higher prison sentences than firearms offences alone. However, don't forget that many "murder" charges are the same incident that results in a separate firerarms charge too. (P.S. It's called rehabilitation. A significant portion of US income comes from prison work, however. We don't have that shit. You're in prison to rehabilitate... if you don't, 10 years is 10 years. If you make the effort to, yes, you can be out in less if you keep your nose clean).

4) The UK does not allow firearms in private hands without a licence, so our firearms laws are MUCH stricter. Which results in significantly reduced instances of firearms offences and deaths.

5) Humans Rights Act / holding cells? Then sue if the cells are not lawful. Where's the legal definition of a holding cell is and where it's banned? It's not hard to find a lawyer willing to take on such cases. The fact that it's not really happened means it's bollocks.

6) Maggie Thatcher? Fucking really? I wasn't born on the day she came into power, yet I'm middle-aged. Give it fucking up already. You're talking about things over 35 years ago. Back then Jimmy Saville was hosting prime-time TV and Jim Davidson was still considered funny.

The rest? It's opinion and you're entitled to it. But making up bollocks that's one Google away from being revealed as a lie, and dragging out Maggie fucking Thatcher destroys your credibility, which is why no-one listens, cares or understands you.

The fucking US has more censored TV. They don't even show other Olympians winning when you they show the Olympics. They have more backwards firearms laws, and much worse incarceration conditions and rates, not to mention that shit going on at the moment with officers shooting beating people for no reason whatsoever.

If you think the UK is bad, please fuck off out of it (if you're in it).

Re:The story on the BBC is bollocks..

[Anonymous Coward]

4) The UK does not allow firearms in private hands without a licence, so our firearms laws are MUCH stricter. Which results in significantly reduced instances of firearms offences and deaths.

Non sequitur. You failed to establish that one follows another.

I wasn't born on the day she came into power, yet I'm middle-aged.

Give it a rest kid, middle age doesn't even start until 40-45 (depending on who you ask). Even if you took half of a rough estimate of life expectancy of 76, then middle age is at least 38. And don't forget that most life expectancy data includes child mortality, what you really want is adult life expectancy, which, surprise surprise is about 80.

So you've got to be 40 to ride this ride, or talk as much shit as you do.

-APK's goat

Stoopid

[Chewbacon]

Depriving people of money is not as heinous as depriving people of their lives, own personal security, and dignity. Do not treat it as such.

Re:Stoopid

[wonkey_monkey]

So, what? No prison terms at all for any financial crime?

Wait, I think that already happens...

Re:Stoopid

[tchdab1]

Not if the amount of money is tremendously large.

Re:Stoopid

[Chewbacon]

If someone downloads Hurt Locker and gets caught, then they should be out for the cost of the media, legal costs, and cost of the investigation. Nothing more. It should be a civil process and not a criminal one. I never understand how the courts decide how much money a music pirate deprived a record company of as that money was never generated in the first place by the private to be accounted for.

What about deterrents for violent crimes?

[Anonymous Coward]

You can rape a woman, violently beat someone and keep them from functioning normally ever after, and even kill someone, and get away with less than 10 years. What a fucking disgrace and outrage, that it all comes down to keeping the corporations from making a little less money than the shitloads they currently make.

Re:What about deterrents for violent crimes?

[wonkey_monkey]

You can also commit copyright infringement under this law and get away with less than 10 years. It's a maximum sentence, not a fixed one.

Copyright infringement

[Anonymous Coward]

Copyright infringement is a civil matter you fucking muppets.

World's highest incarceration rate

[ITRambo]

So in spite of having the most people in jail per capita compared to any other country, the assholes running the US government decide to go for another world's record. Copyright infringement is good for ten years? WTF? I used to be a proud American. Now, corporations run everything our leaders are worthless and make me sad when I think about how things have changed over the decades. Corruption and influence everywhere, state and federal levels. It may be legal lobbying but its immoral, unethical, and not in the best interest of the citizens. I want a ticket to mars. I hope the ship makes it. So long suckers.

Re:World's highest incarceration rate

[Anonymous Coward]

RTFS, will ya? It's the UK, not the US you tosser.

Re:World's highest incarceration rate

[p0p0]

Not saying Americans are hot-headed and ignorant or self-centered, but the summary clearly says "UK" several times.

Re:World's highest incarceration rate

[ArcadeMan]

Maybe ITRambo was thinking about the United States of Kanada.

Finally they are making sense!

[Anonymous Coward]

Copyright terms of 10 years are really a fabulous step in the right direction! Wait. Oh. Oh God. Jesus Christ.

Sooner will a camel fit through a needle's eye than a wealthy man get into heaven.

Infringement for Profit vs "for personal use"

[BoRegardless]

These are two entirely different aspects of the issue.

The other, other side. Corps stealing, too.

[Frobnicator]

The other side of it is the challenge in calculating how much financial damage is done to a copyright holder when unlicensed copies of their work are distributed and 'consumed'.

There are still other "other sides" of it. Most posters are focusing on when individuals infringe on corporate productions. Big groups steal images from small-time photographers and artists all the time, usually without consequence.

Clickbait sites are notorious for stealing images and are among the worst infringers. Does this mean when an image goes viral and is used in a corporate blog, or when a photo gets used in a clickbait site like buzzfeed, the government prosecutors will be going after the corporations for criminal copyright infringement?

Even mostly-reputable groups like Forbes is notorious for lifting images online without permission. Images from Wikipedia get cited as "From Wikipedia" without regard to the license or the actual photographer. Images get lifted from personal web sites with or without attribution, but rarely with permission. Will the editors at Forbes UK office be imprisoned for their copyright infringements?

Yeah, didn't think so.

Unless these same laws are used to prosecute corporations and corporate officers when they also commit the crimes, it's just a tool to beat down the common citizen.

Just a thought

[fyngyrz]

Perhaps the government -- ours, the UK, whomever -- ought not to consider over-punishing someone for a minor infraction in order to deter others.

It seems to me that this is the real flaw in the entire mindset at work here.

Does society want to deter people from breaking a law? Sure. And yes, I agree, individuals violating copyright on a "I copied this work to use for myself" level is antisocial (but less so than spitting on the sidewalk is -- IOW, "meh.")

But do we want impose draconian and absurd punishments on peaceful and almost entirely harmless people?

Fuck. No. Because that's obviously unfair and unreasonable -- and stupid.

I'll go even further: A reasonable punishment is making the infringer pay twice what it would have cost them to pursue the legitimate path. For instance, you copy a CD that retails for $19.95, you get fined $39.40 which goes to the injured party, plus court and enforcement costs. Etc. And then you get after enforcing it, so that copyright violation becomes a no-win situation. So it would hurt, but it wouldn't generally wreck your life, your family's life, and screw up anything else that depends on your input, presence, or support.

People do this not because they are evil, but because (a) they are cheap, (b) the abstraction that someone actually put some valuable time into the work is too abstract for them to grasp, and (c) it is actually easier than purchasing the work.

We can't fix (c) because technology. It's only getting easier. I suspect it's likely to continue doing so, too.

We can't fix (b) because people grasp their rationalizations like a life ring in a storm-tossed ocean regardless of how close the shore is. Even really smart people. I refer, of course, to the idiotic but seductive "information wants to be free" meme. Information is held in people's heads unless they want to take it out of their heads, and a tangible reward is an excellent motivator to encourage them to do so. Doesn't mean you can't make free stuff; it just means that we'd like to tangibly reward those who want to do these kinds of things as a life pursuit -- or even you, doing it as a hobby, if you'd like to exchange your work for some reward of a more factual nature than "makes me feel good" and/or the cliched and mostly worthless "5 minutes of fame", if that's how you'd like to roll.

But we can sure as hell leverage (a) reasonably -- which is a damn sight better than trying to scare people by the equivalent of beating the shite out of someone for simply looking at you wrong.

Fucking lawyers and bureaucrats. There are days when I think they all need to be made to go home. System needs a reset.

Re:Just a thought

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm an ex con... Let me make one thing very clear to ALL who read this - brainless members of the public who think deterrents actually work, even more brainless policy makers that think deterrents actually work... The ONLY true deterrent is the risk of getting caught!

Re: Just a thought

[Anonymous Coward]

You guys better fix whatever the Hell is wrong with your fucked up government before it spills over to our side of the pond. I suspect this may be a subtle form of terrorism. You might want to look into that possibility.

Re:Just a thought

[stoatwblr]

"For instance, you copy a CD that retails for $19.95, you get fined $39.40 which goes to the injured party"

When artists are writing newspaper stories pointing out that labels make money and artists end up with nothing more often in not, in major debt), who is the more injured party?

Why stop there?

[fredrated]

Capital punishment is a significant deterrent, with a guarantee of no repeats!

Re:Why stop there?

[Anonymous Coward]

How about drone attacks? Combine a weaponized drone with a Stingray and ContentId technology, and you can determine in real time neighborhoods with an illegal download quota not making it worth to let them survive. "Copyright enforcers took out a download training camp in Los Angeles with several highly ranked downloaders by means of a drone strike. This is another victory in our glorious fight for arts and science."

Life out of balance

[Ol Olsoc]

You get less time for manslaughter

Re:Life out of balance

[wonkey_monkey]

You can get less or you can get more (manslaughter can get you life). This 10 years is a maximum sentence.

It's a MAXIMUM of 10 years, just bear that in mind

[wonkey_monkey]

A lot of people seem to be flipping out over this without understanding that 10 years is the maximum sentence. 10 years for ripping a DVD? No, that's not going to happen. 10 years for flogging a few knock-off DVDs at the local street market? No, that's not going to happen either.

10 years for getting hold of studio-quality raw data and selling access to it for £5 each to thousands of people, which eventually floods the market and ruins a studio's sales? That might get you on your way.

What's the max sentence for copyright fraud?

[tchdab1]

And is that rising too?
I include unreasonable claims for copyright violation damages in my definition of copyright fraud (and I don't have a personal legal system) - your local definitions may vary.

Prison isn't for that...

[beelsebob]

Prison is meant to be reserved for separating people from society who are dangerous until they're not dangerous any more.

The correct sentence for copyright infringement (which does not demonstrate that the perpetrator is a danger to others), is to 1) pay back the person who was wronged (though that's a civil matter), and 2) a fine or community service of some sort.

Re:Prison isn't for that...

[Anonymous Coward]

I agree, but in practice might it still be profitable to infringe the copyrights and pay the fines?

Or does that only work if you're a big enough corporation?

Irrelevance...

[harvey the nerd]

The UK is legislating itself into irrelevance. People leave, people die prematurely on NHS when they get expensive, many people don't even bother to breed there anymore and they have to import incompatible replacements.

Thankfully my last UK ancestors left there over 100 years ago.

Re:Irrelevance...

[Winchy]

Yeah, this guy has done just terribly out of the NHS. I don't know which country your ancestors emigrated to, but I hope they were "compatible replacements" for the natives.

At Some Point

[Greyfox]

At some point there will be less legal penalty if you just murder anyone who accuses you of copyright infringement.

Re:It's a MAXIMUM of 10 years, just bear that in m

[Anonymous Coward]

In all the instances where things like that happen, sales were as expected or higher.

UK Government is run by Elite Jerks

[prefec2]

Cameron and his group of NHS saboteurs love to dismantle achievements of the area of enlightenment. Therefore, they love austerity and jailing people for nothing.

Media companies bribe for 10 year prison terms

[Revek]

Lets face it all of this crap comes from big media. They are using every tactic, even illegal ones to convince governments that the garbage they create is worth any price to protect. The average citizen of the western world doesn't give two cardinal shits about this. So who else is pushing for it?

Not that we needed more evidence,

[jenningsthecat]

but this makes it abundantly clear that we average cirtizens are well on our way to becoming serfs, with corporations as the feudal lords.

Re:It's a MAXIMUM of 10 years, just bear that in m

[Anonymous Coward]

"10 years for getting hold of studio-quality raw data and selling access to it for £5 each to thousands of people, which eventually floods the market and ruins a studio's sales? That might get you on your way."

I give it 5-10 years before you're proved wrong. Of course, by then the law will already be on the books and extremely difficult to impossible to get removed.

Re:It's a MAXIMUM of 10 years, just bear that in m

[Anonymous Coward]

... selling access to it for £5 each to thousands of people ...

The USA has a law covering this. It was, and is, used to demand tens of thousands of dollars from people who pirated for individual consumption only. This is where the UK IP lobby is really headed: Attacking individuals who can't defend against a civil suit.

Confused

[hackwrench]

People put "valuable time" into lots of things. Doesn't mean they should get paid for it. And with people throwing around concepts like "the universe creates itself", I'm not sure anyone has a workable meaningful definition of what create or design actually means.

Re:Confused

[fyngyrz]

Here's the thing: If you find the work they did valuable enough that you actually want to use it, and they only offer that work exchange it for a consideration, then either you pay them the consideration or decide not to use it after all, or everyone will know you are unable to navigate this most trivial of ethical mazes.

In addition, the way it's going now, you may end up with your life ruined. It just isn't worth it. They seem to be working very hard to make it ridiculously not worth it, and while I generally don't approve, every time someone tries to justify what they think they (don't) owe a creator by what they think of the creator's work or domain, I admit, the thought "I wish they'd drag that person into court" does run through my mind before I actually manage to work around to "no, even a dimwit doesn't deserve that."

As for "the universe creates itself", objective reality is right there, no need to toss glib, self-swallowing Igli-like* concepts around. Things work in a predictable, even somewhat reasonable, manner. Get with the program, or expect the program to pull an exception on your behalf and pre-emptively dump your registers due to abject computational failure.

One of the things that strikes me about this whole thing is that it almost certainly makes very little difference what the penalty for copyright infringement is, if you and yours simply don't do it. Radical idea, I know. But I've always been a rebel.

*** Igli: See "Glory Road," by Robert A. Heinlein. Well worth the time.

Re:Confused

[bzipitidoo]

I disagree that copying is antisocial. Copying is a natural right, and has a long history. It is only our current customs that push the idea that copying is harmful, and attempt to regulate it and restrict it by fiat. I agree that artists deserve some kind of compensation. Artists can be compensated in other ways. It is not necessary to try to clamp down on all copying for purposes of imposing a toll that ideally is used, in part, to pay artists. It's actually bad to restrict copying. Might as well argue that children should not receive the fruits of knowledge that our civilizations have produced over the millennia, without paying for the "privilege". Just because something is valuable doesn't mean it should be hoarded, and denied to the poor, most especially when the thing in question is not scarce, To allow, and worse, aid a few privileged, moralizing, greedy leeches to perpetuate a wholly artificial imposition of scarcity for what they claim is the good of artists and us all, but which claim is simply not true, is evil.

As to the other ways to compensate artists, there is patronage. Patronage has worked for centuries, and now, with modern technology we can do it so much better. We can crowdfund, which was impractical until very recently.

Re:Confused

[Anonymous Coward]

Here's the thing: If you find the work they did valuable enough that you actually want to use it, and they only offer that work exchange it for a consideration, then either you pay them the consideration or decide not to use it after all, or everyone will know you are unable to navigate this most trivial of ethical mazes.

Tell that to my employer, who considers my work useful, but doesn't consider it useful enough for me to be paid for all of it.

That is, I can be fired for going home after he stops paying me, but before I've completed the assigned work. My choice, according to him, is to resign.

I've contacted the authorities about this, laid a complaint, and they've done nothing.

Therefore, if someone does work that you consider valuable enough to actually use, but don't want to pay them for it, in order to get away with it you must be wealthy, otherwise jail.

Yes, they've actually breached copyright laws on the employer's instructions - he said "Let's just keep going until somebody notices."

Re:Confused

[fyngyrz]

Tell that to my employer

I tell it, or some version of it, to everyone. Feel free to pass it along though obviously consider your situation very carefully first.

Sorry about your situation. It's abusive.

Re:Confused

[fyngyrz]

It is only our current customs that push the idea that copying is harmful, and attempt to regulate it and restrict it by fiat.

I don't know where you are, but in the US, the constitution, the very document that authorizes the government, specifically opens the door to copyright or something with its essential functionality:

Article I, section 8, "Powers of Congress": To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries;

Exclusive rights. That's clear, right? "limited Times" is also clear, but note that it is completely open-ended, so they can do (and have done) whatever they want with the terms of exclusivity. I would completely agree that the present terms are too long, but I would not agree that congress was out of line to try these longer terms out.

So the "fiat" you refer to here is not very arbitrary, if that's how you meant it. If you just meant "by decree", yes, that's what laws are. This is, however, explicitly an authorized act (and I have to say, given the other things congress and the courts get up to, it's sort of a relief to actually be able to say that.)

You can offer public civil disobedience if you feel the approach congress took is wrong; that is a very hard path, however. Jail sucks. Fines suck (and huge fines suck more.) Court sucks. Lawyers suck like a 120 VAC vacuum cleaner powered with 220 vac. Having everyone with a stake in the current mindset turn against you sucks. But... there is great honor in it, IMHO.

You can publicly advocate for your views, explaining your position and trying to win a sufficient number of people and organizations over such that you can pressure congress directly (good luck... not personally tough, but task-wise, still tough.) I should mention just as an aside that your short exposition above has not convinced me at all, and I *really* don't like our current system, so seems like it needs work. Arguing "used to be this way" is bankrupt. You need to argue "should be this way, this is how we'd make it work, and this is why we should do it this way" and then make it happen. Also very tough. Lots of people with a finger in this pie, and they're all going to hate you with a passion -- won't be fun at all.

Sub-rosa violation of the terms under which our creatives operate simply damages the creatives and serves as a challenge to the legislators, and usually gets just the response we see here: such acts are treated even more harshly. That's not how to get things done, IMHO.

You have to change public opinion, and then you have to get it through the heads of the legislators that it has actually happened.

In the interim, I am convinced that we shouldn't be waging a war upon the incomes of the very creatives whose work product we would like to have access to.

As to the other ways to compensate artists, there is patronage. Patronage has worked for centuries, and now, with modern technology we can do it so much better. We can crowdfund, which was impractical until very recently.

Yes, well, get on that. I've written quite a bit of software -- some of it major -- and made it available for free. One large and featureful app is nearing 30,000 currently active users. Where's my check? I have Paypal "contribute" buttons, but the idea that I could actually make a living -- even a very low-profile living -- off the voluntary patronage of my users strikes me as more than a little hilarious. The fact is, people use; but they don't give back except in extremely rare cases. Of those active 30k users, 14 -- that's *fourteen* -- people have hit that paypal button. Of those, I have to say they were quite generous; the total of the donations to date is $475.00. I have spent thousands of hours on this application, and it is broadly acknowled

Re: Confused

[Anonymous Coward]

Well put, except the war on the incomes of the 'creatives' is actually being waged by the copyright industry. See: recording industry contracts and Hollywood accounting. Patents are worse, because if you have a job creating stuff many employers claim the rights that should go to you, especially if the invention was not at work and had nothing to do with your work--but they claim it anyway.

Better that these rent seeking totally uncreative entities be removed from our society than to continue these 'protections'.

Remember also that at the time the Constitution was written they knew how to deal with corporations: They kept them on a tight leash, only let them do one thing and for a limited duration, and they would dissolve corporations that didn't act in the public interest. Funny how that bit of history doesn't get taught much.

Re: Confused

[Anonymous Coward]

You sound like a racist. Corporations are people too, you know.

Re: Confused

[Anonymous Coward]

They breached copyright? Then they might want to consider just how much of a fuckwad they want to be toward someone with Information that can lead to an infringement suit.

Or if you decide to keep working under such conditions until it's finished, and they keep treating you like shit the whole time, you can still take that info to the copyright holder after you are out... just out of spite.

Re:Confused

[Anonymous Coward]

Exclusive rights. That's clear, right? "limited Times" is also clear, but note that it is completely open-ended, so they can do (and have done) whatever they want with the terms of exclusivity. I would completely agree that the present terms are too long, but I would not agree that congress was out of line to try these longer terms out.

You've forgotten your history. The debate over accepting the Constitution was ferocious, it almost didn't pass, and in order to get it to pass promises were made be men (whose honor was trusted) that a Bill of Rights would be added, allowing anything in the pre-Bill of Rights text to be superseded as needed. Further, that Bill of Rights was made open-ended, since it was clear that any finite list of rights would be incomplete. That's why the USA has the 9th Amendment, with unspecified rights retained by the people, and part of the reason for the 10th Amendment, with unspecified rights reserved to the people.

Everything in the original Constitution is subject to being superseded by rights the people decide to assert under the 9th / 10th Amendments, including "exclusive rights" or the ability of Congress to interpret "limited times". If the people want the exclusive rights to apply for only, say, 5 minutes, as a consequence of some right they decide to assert, they have the right to do that, however unreasonable it may seem to those who make their living from the use or abuse of the current copyright or patent regimes.

Certainly one of the key rights that arises under the 9th Amendment is the right to ethical practice of law. This comes into play with respect to both patent and copyright, of course, but I'll limit consideration to the latter to stay on topic. Long copyright terms, particularly as they are currently implemented, work against this right, by cluttering up the legal system with lots of stuff that doesn't need to be there, thus creating a long term artificial demand for the services of legal professionals. As such, Congress does not have the sole right to determine what is a reasonable time for the duration of copyright.

Similarly, the right to ethical government comes into play under the 9th Amendment, limiting the authority of Congress in situations where one can reasonably suppose that unethical things led to particular legislation. Laws -- including those leading to criminal penalties enforceable by the courts -- can thus be entirely overturned, and all legal professionals -- especially judges -- are bound by their oaths to uphold the Bill of Rights to recognize and accept this. In effect, the Nuremberg Precedent applies to the legal profession, under the authority of the 9th Amendment, creating a responsibility to refuse to enforce illegal laws. It is nothing short of criminal conduct to do otherwise, and the judges, federal agents, police officers, and so forth engaged in such conduct are barred from receiving immunity or right to pardon under the 9th Amendment.

It might be reasonable to limit the "exclusive" nature of copyright to 5,10, or even 20 years. After that period of time, we could protect the interests of creators by having a law that says the authors of books and similar works are entitled to some share of the gross of any transaction where money changes hands, but free copying by the public for their own use is permitted. The duration of this rule would be for the life of the author (perhaps with some provision for heirs), and any contracts made to assign rights to third parties would revert back to the original author at the end of the initial period. This would be much more sensible than the current regime, and much more consistent with the right to ethical practice of law, since the long term effects would not affect the public in general, but only those engaged in commercial transactions (plus, perhaps, a few not-for-profit organizations). Similarly, since the primarily unethical influence in copyright related matters has historically from large corporations and lawyers lobbying Congress for long term extensions of copyright to their benefit (and seldom to the benefit of the actual authors of creative works), this would be more consistent with the right to ethical government.

Re:Confused

[stoatwblr]

"I agree that artists deserve some kind of compensation"

In the current environment, about 1 in 1 million artists do. The rest end up being burned and in debt.

Recording labels hate the Internet and the fact that it's forced them to bring their back-catalogs online. That's far less profitable than selling umpteen million copies of the latest formulaic pap, along with a few tried-and-true classics to pad out the shelves.

Re:Confused

[fyngyrz]

Your 9th amendment thesis is wrong. The 9th, in its entirety:

"The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people."

There's absolutely nothing in the 9th that says states can override federal law authorized by the constitution. Not a word, not a syllable.

As for your idea of modifying copyright, bravo. Sounds fabulous to me. Now make it happen. That is where the rubber meets the road (this is slashdot, cars must be brought to bear on the matter at some point or geek cred decays.)

Re:Confused

[davydagger]

And by "current" you mean since they invented the phrase "intellectual property" in the 1970s.

Re:Confused

[bzipitidoo]

I am in the US. Thomas Jefferson seriously doubted whether copyright was a good idea. He accepted it with reservations, and only for lack of or time to work out better ways to promote progress. "He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me."

Civil disobedience? I consider that a civic duty, actually. It is a powerful way to overturn bad laws. It worked for MLK, though he did spend some time in jail. If more people stood up for their rights, didn't accept the oppression and theft that many of powerful are always trying to impose through corruption, bribery, and general weakening of our social fabric, jail would be an empty threat. Aaron Swartz was protesting the use of copyright to steal and lock away research paid for by the public, and got caught up in another problem, the use of extreme law enforcement for purposes of extracting revenue from victims and powering the prison industrial complex, and scoring points for being tough on crime. Seems the pendulum is finally swinging back from "3 strikes" laws and mandatory minimum sentences, but it wasn't soon enough to save him. People are revolting against such things as these red light cameras. We were sold a bill of goods about their supposed safety benefits, but all along the real reason for the cameras was revenue. Don't get me wrong, red light cameras can make driving safer, if used responsibly. The problem is that it's too tempting for local authorities and their private camera operation contractors to cheat, by for instance shortening the yellow light even though that reduces safety to less than if no camera was present at all, to extract more revenue.

Get on that, you say? Indeed. I have thought about what would be needed. An important piece is proof of authorship, to make plagiarism difficult if not impossible. Free digital notaries could do that. Now, what would it take to set up a bunch of web sites to do digital notarizing? Shouldn't be too hard, just a technical matter, much like setting up any other web site such as Wikipedia, except this has to keep up with encryption research. I'd like to go even further and make digital signing more automatic. However, that is subject to maintaining privacy. Anyway, supposing we have systems for digitally notarizing works of art and science. Then we have the means to identify the correct people deserving of compensation. Any time money enters the picture, fraudsters jump in, seeking any and every way to cheat the system.

One patronage system we've had in place for years is higher education. It has however taken a beating in recent years, thanks to all this anti-intellectualism and budget cutting. Professors are expected to publish, can't just teach class, that's only half of what they're compensated for, research is the other half. But if higher education is being drowned in a bathtub, starved of cash by anti-government ideologues, it could get to the point where the system breaks down. Been heading that way in recent years.

Doctorow was right...

[Anonymous Coward]

Looks like Cory Doctorow's Pirate Cinema is coming more and more true...
http://craphound.com/pc/download/

Time to do away with all copyright law

[Anonymous Coward]

Since pretty much everyone gets all their content for free anymore, doing away with all copyright law appears to be the most reasonable solution to me.

Re:It's a MAXIMUM of 10 years, just bear that in m

[Dutch Gun]

The US went through a period where individual citizens were being targeted in RIAA lawsuits en masse and fined anywhere from several thousand to hundreds of thousands of dollars for distribution of copyright materials via file sharing programs. These laws were likely written with the intent of punishing those who commercially distributed illegal copyrighted materials, but were later turned on individuals. College students, housewives, single mothers, grandparents, disabled persons... didn't matter. Tens of thousands of individuals were sued in a five-year campaign deliberately designed to strike fear into the hears of people using file sharing programs.

Let's just say that some are not so trusting as you that this will *only* target criminal enterprises and not individuals.

Personal copies are local cloud downloads :D

[iTrawl]

I wonder how they'll even know I make copies for personal use. Privacy means they can't enforce that one unless I do something else that warrants them barging into my house and searching my things. And I would argue that I have a licence to the stuff _on_ the disc, not the disc itself.

I'd get a lawyer to argue that the copy is not a copy, but actually the original, since it's the content that I bought, and the "copy" is the content I bought, not something else, and see where it goes. I would argue that copying _my_ CD is akin to downloading MP3 tracks from Amazon, with the difference that the storage is in my CD drive rather than Amazon's. And I can keep as many copies of the Amazon MP3s as I like, as long as I don't give them to other people.

Speaking of cloudy MP3s: how does this affect autorip services from Apple and Amazon? Or do they have special terms that allow them to do that? Can I get my autoripped MP3s down legally then? Or are they illegal copies when I do that? (this might be answerable by reading the Ts&Cs of each service)

And if it's "fair compensation" they want, I'd argue that the "fair compensation" for private copies is "zero pounds and zero pence". I'd like to hear the counter-argument to that.

If they do win such an argument, I'd go to the other extreme: How much do they want if I play the CD through a splitter into multiple rooms? What if I stream it privately to my car? For removal of all doubt: it never hits another disc in the process. It's CD to speakers all the way (with digital encoding/decoding in order to transport the sound to my car, but that's just another "wire" in my opinion). That's depriving them of revenue too, isn't it?

What if the wire is like in BOFH: so long that the lag in it can be used to turn it into storage? :)

Just pointing out how crazy this can get.

Re:Personal copies are local cloud downloads :D

[KGIII]

Considering this is a law concerning criminal copyright infringement and has nothing to do with civil copyright infringement there is absolutely nothing to worry yourself about and your post was entirely wasted.

Depends on what we're talking about

[Karmashock]

Random dude that uploads something?... this is silly... but if we're talking about a serious piracy outfit that is pushing a lot of crap on a regular basis... it might be reasonable. That said, the internet is global so this will just push piracy to less regulated countries.

Re:It's a MAXIMUM of 10 years, just bear that in m

[KGIII]

How about you and I put $1000 USD in escrow and bet on this? Say, 10 years and my bet will be that nobody (not one single person) gets the 10 year penalty for civil copyright violation infractions in the whole of the United Kingdom. I will go higher than $1000 USD if you would prefer. We can use any reputable escrow management interface/site of your choosing. Withdrawing the stake early will result in a 75% loss of the staked amount with a maximum of $7500 USD loss. Case documentation must be provided and the definition of criminal or civil infractions will be determined by the UK jurisdiction representatives. Copyright will be defined per the legal definitions used in this specific act of legislation. All acts subject to the actual approval of said legislation with the time constraints being enacted immediately upon the activation of said legislation.

It is a chance for you to make a few dollars.

Something is wrong

[raal]

There is something wrong with this. This should not be a 10 year offense! I can't imagine how that will impact people that do violate the copyright and it will just clog up the jails for no good reason. I agree there should be some impact but the copyright length have gotten crazy.

If I buy something why should I not be able to do with it what I want? I don't want to buy it 4 more times just because its a different format of the same thing. I am happy to buy my content once and make it easy for me to do what I want with it on my devices.

The system is totally broken and just bolting more jail time is not going to fix it. Easy quick fixes generally don't work.

Crazy Idea

[Anonymous Coward]

I guess the UK does not have enough people in jail, so they want to add more! Crazy

Obligatory IT Crowd

[Anonymous Coward]

You wouldn't steal a policeman's helmet and go to the toilet in it... would you?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ALZZx1xmAzg

Across the board

[Anonymous Coward]

If it is high as a deterrent, then why not expand that.

I hate seeing garbage all over the place. Ten year sentence for littering. Not unreasonable when compared to what they are proposing. I would bet most litterbugs are repeat offenders as well.

Cigarette butts all over the place. Maybe make that 20 years! What makes it okay to putt out your butt on my property so I have to clean up after you!

Also:
The proposed measures are mainly targeted at the distributors of pirated content — the people creating copies of movies, sometimes before release, and uploading them to be downloaded by thousands upon thousands."

Does the law actually say who it is targeted at? If not, regardless of the intent, the law applies to all. Well, not the rich and powerful, but you know what I mean.

10 years for copyright infringement.

[Anonymous Coward]

This is an outrage, the man who raped me only got two :(

eat shit england.

[Anonymous Coward]

You heard us.

Putting more poeple in jail is always the answer

[Anonymous Coward]

Just look at the US

It's fun to imagine a DoS on this

[Shark]

I was thinking, what if 50 000 or 100 000 people all got caught for this on purpose? The prison system is already strained to its limit in most places.

kid law

[Anonymous Coward]

the law would work on a kid ripping one cd would get ten years
they are enough laws