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Legal Scholars Warn Against 10 Year Prison For Online Pirates
An anonymous reader writes: The UK Government wants to increase the maximum prison sentence for online copyright infringement from two years to ten. A number legal experts and activists are pushing back against the plan. One such group, The British and Irish Law, Education and Technology Association (BILETA) has concluded that changes to the current law are not needed. "legitimate means to tackle large-scale commercial scale online copyright infringement are already available and currently being used, and the suggested sentence of 10 years seems disproportionate," the group writes.
Pirates do not fear prison, because they know that their crime is so commonplace that their chance of being caught is very remote indeed. Why would the threat of a longer sentence change this?
Manslaughter... copyright infringement... they should both get about the same sentences, right? Nothing weird about that at all, is there? ~
Fear of longer prison sentences does not in any way affect the decision to commit a crime.
With regards to online piracy, the people involved generally do not consider it a crime and so do not consider the legal ramifications. It's kind of like if you went to North Korea, you won't be less inclined to give out a bible if they tell you it's 10 years than if they say 1 year in jail.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
Since when can you get ten years *prison* for a fucking civil issue?
It won't do much to stop copyright infringement but it will be just dandy for losing anyone the government doesn't like. Downloaded a movie from the pirate bay at any point in the last 10 years? A quick check on the internet surveillance database and it's bye bye to you.
United Kingdom: combining the worst parts of European-style Big Brother government and US-style corporatocracy since 1997.
That's because the legal scholars are all downloading episodes of Mr Robot and Game of Thrones from Kickass Torrents.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Many poeple find that spending a decade of human life imprisoned for a victimless crime is rather heavy handed. some decry it as "disproportionate" while others have remarked that its "just shy of lovecraftian in its malevolence." Im here to lend a bit of clarification and state for the record there is a very real victim in thje crime of piracy, and that victim comes with hand stitched Corinthian leather. Im talking of course about my Rolls Royce.
Piracy deprives my rolls of a clean garage. It means I cant afford to pay my motor butler a decent wage and in turn it means the handles will persistently be wracked with smudges and fingerprints. It means I'll have to settle into something called 'the drivers seat' which makes it difficult, if not impossible to fetch the Perrier '65 Brut from the chiller (which as we all know is in the back seat.) Yes good people, Piracy could even mean -- and I shudder to envision this -- that I am forced to austerity and must drive a Bentley instead. So please, wont you reconsider sending those who pirate mellow folk sensation Roger Whittaker to a decade or more of prison? Its only fair after all.
Good people go to bed earlier.
The real problem here is that there is actually a 2 year precedent. We shouldn't be arguing if this mandatory sentence shouldn't be changed (i.e be higher) but be lowered.
"Think of the Children!"
"Corporations are children too!"
Table-ized A.I.
its like the war on drugs demand more punishment for it thinking it will help all it does is make it worse. there literately asking to give someone 10 years for stealing 9$ avg cost of a movie ticket.
Well the jokes on them where there taxes go up as the state will have to pay the costs of jail / court / prison for all of the people who are being changed with copyright infringement.
What if they are privately run prisons? Those are very profitable and all the rage now.
That's quite a non sequitur. Laptops are physical, tangible, personal property. Digital "content", whatever its form, is immaterial, intangible, and the "crime" we're talking about here is not theft: the alleged owner(s) of the content are never at any time deprived of their use of it, nor are any of the other people "licensed" to use it deprived of that usage. That "denial of usage" is an essential characteristic of any action that might be described as theft. There is no theft taking place in these instances, only REPLICATION. There is no denial of anything except PREDICTED SPECULATIVE profit.
Sorry, bub. That is a civil matter, not a criminal one. Either you've been had by greedy manipulative people or you're one of the manipulators yourself.
I can add that the closest historical parallel to what is not being called piracy might be land squatting. It's not a perfect analog, but the best that comes to mind.
It's now cheaper, considering the jail time, to kick some RIAA goon's teeth in than to download one of their songs?
There are certain things you MIGHT want to ponder before you ask for a change of laws, dear copyright lawyers...
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
While I largely agree with your comments, I think there is some possible merit in region restrictions, in so far as they are used for price fixing that favours poorer regions. While a free market makes economic sense for rivalrous goods, it doesn't make sense for non-rivalrous goods.
According to Wikipedia, "over 50% of the world population lives on less than 2 US$/day" International inequality. In a free market, there'd be little incentive to price many copyright licenses affordably for these people--there'd be more money to be had by focussing on the upper end of the global market. But excluding these people does no-one any good.
A 10 year prison sentence is a $500K tax on society for the cost of incarceration then hundreds of thousands of dollars more in public assistance after the infringer gets out of jail and can't find a job to support himself.
The people pushing for these prosecutions have gotten around the civil case restrictions since day one. Accessing content that a person claims is protected can (and often does) result in charges for illegal wiretapping, criminal hacking, and and in the US about a half a dozen other federal charges. If you want an example, look at what Aaron Schwartz was getting charged with for copying books. His case would be a bit more than average since he installed a laptop in a library to do this, but not that far out of what you could be charged with for copying file.
The charges vary depending on who is pushing for charges.
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
Yes, I mean price gouging, except that, in practice, I don't think it would mean that those in richer regions would pay higher prices than they otherwise would. I'll illustrate this with a thought experiment (I haven't got real numbers, but it's my understanding that the income gap between richer and poorer countries is significant, so I think the situation would work out something like this):
Let us suppose copyright licenses are traded on a free market (globally equalising prices), that the richer 50% of the world can afford to pay 3 times what the poorer 50% of the world can, and that copyright licenses will be priced for maximum income. Making the price affordable to the poorer 50% means reaching 100% of the global market, but receiving the lower price for each sale. Making the price affordable only to the richer 50% means only reaching 50% of the global market, but receiving 3 times the price for each sale. The latter strategy receives 1.5 times more income than the former one. (As I said, not real numbers, but I think it would work out something like this.)
I'm no fan of copyright. I'd actually suspect the world might be better off without it, if I weren't concerned that would accelerate the shift to software as a service. The thing is, it's often not as simple as "X is right, so we should legislate X". For every action, there is an equal and opposite unintended consequence, or something.
Increased prison time won't do a thing, since when have any commercial executives gone to prison? This type of law is only meant to intimidate individuals.
Twinstiq, game news
You wouldn’t steal a car
You wouldn’t steal a handbag
You wouldn’t steal a television
You wouldn’t steal a movie
Downloading pirated films is stealing, stealing is against the law, PIRACY. IT’S A CRIME
To bring these inline with the new jail term:
You wouldn’t knife a person
You wouldn’t rape a child
You wouldn’t blow up a school bus
You wouldn’t steal a movie
Downloading pirated films is murder, murder is against the law, PIRACY. IT’S A CRIME
Which is why the MPAA's best weapon against piracy is Netflix. If the MPAA and other content owners allowed Netflix to put EVERYTHING on their systems, how many people would pirate versus watching via Netflix? And yet the content owners treat Netflix like it is an enemy to be shunned and starved of content. They've got a great weapon against piracy, but they're too afraid of it to wield it properly. Don't want Netflix to be too powerful? License the content to Amazon, Hulu, and other services also. But don't lock up your content and then act surprised when draconian anti-piracy laws don't bring down the piracy rate.
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
TEN years imprisonment for personal copyright infringement, what is actually a civil tort, when other actual crimes so often result in sentences less than that?
Well, no. Ten years prison for the worst possible cases of commercial and criminal copyright infringement. Let's say someone decides to start selling the complete Pink Floyd catalog without having any license to do so, and makes $20 million over the next years. To you think ten years in jail is too much for that? Absolutely not.
Instead of getting all excited about the headlines, you should read the actual text of the law and figure out what the suggested punishment for "personal copyright infringement" (say making a copy of a single CD and giving it to a friend, without payment) actually is.
You didn't read it either, did you?
"The current maximum of two years is not enough to deter infringers, lawmakers argue." That's what torrentfreak claims. If you look at the actual text of the consultation, that is not true.
What we have here is actually a consultation. If you have anything to say about it, you are free to write to the UK government. If you manage to write down your thoughts in a coherent manner, responding to the question asked and not to what you image is asked, and to argue your case, chances are that your opinion will be heard.
But the main reason is not the lack of deterence, it is the fact that physical copyright infringement (like commercially producing and selling fake Gucci handbags or Rolex watches) has a maximum penalty of ten years jail, and there is no good reason why commercially producing and selling illegal copies of software, videos, music or books shouldn't have the same maximum penalties.
Actually, it PROVES that the market has failed. Clearly, they can profitably sell media to those poorer regions for a small fraction of the price they demand from the richer regions. Put another way, the marginal cost of production is small enough to sell profitably in poorer regions for a fraction of the region 1 price.
If the market is functional, it will force the price to approach that marginal cost of production everywhere. Clearly, it hasn't done that.
A free market would mean manufacturers would be freely able to produce region free players and consumers would be welcome to re-import from regions where the price is low.
They sure do like the free market when it allows them to get things made where labor is cheap, but they sure don't like it when it allows buyers to buy the product where prices are proportionally low.
We already do pay more, and have from the beginning.
"Liberty is so great a magician, endowed with so marvelous a power of productivity, that under the inspiration of this spirit alone, North America was able within less than a century to equal, and even surpass, the civilization of Europe."
- Mikhail Bakunin
10 years locked in a cage for sharing knowledge, enforced by the Government--who is supposed to serve the people--at the behest of oligarchs who want total control of information. Imagine what we could achieve in this century that not even Bakunin observed. I mean free culture is exploding but what most people are exposed to is unfortunately not that system.
Copyright infringement is a pretty serious crime as is the theft of creative or intellectual property. Many people put a lot of work into creating and designing such properties and for some it is at least partly their life bread. There should be serious penalties for such activities where theft of creative and intellectual property is involved, especially in cases where the stolen property is being used to generate a return for someone other than the original creator. Policing such laws though may prove difficult. For instance, what if person A works on and creates just such a property that garners a lot of interest. Meanwhile person B has been monitoring person A illegally through their creation process. So person B has access to the material that person A created and they go and publish something somewhere with that creation. Worse, they go somewhere and have a friend online with administrative access predate the publishing date just to help their friend out. For the property thief in this case, its an investment. If person A's property takes off, they then come along with a lawsuit and a scam to sue that person for a sum of money and possibly attempt to turn the tables on person A (make person A the guilty party for stealing person B's creation). That's the danger of illegal surveillance by the way especially in the hands of your neighbours or civilians. So in such a case, when person A released their work, person B might wait until it generated enough money to spring their scam on their victim. There are things like that happening in the world right now where very little is done about it even in a modern democracy. So if person A failed to make a case, person B would walk away with person A's creative rights, their money despite the fact that person A clearly created the property. Add a jail sentence to this and that would probably be a pretty serious blow to the world of creative rights. There are scammers doing that sort of thing right now, believe me. Scammers often target those of high success potential who are in poor living circumstances to conduct this sort of activity and because they operate in groups versus their victim, their victims have little protection. That's one problem with that law and unless they start investigating illegal surveillance conducted not by Police but civilians and often organized scammers, they're possibly going to be hurting more people than they help. Personally I sell my books and my software with a 25% donation to charities related to the plot or content of the book or software. Everything media wise that I put online to sell in that way will always have the same promise. That way there is incentive for the buyer to buy a legitimate copy and not a counterfeit copy because in a way, they'd be stealing from a charity. That's a bit different than stealing from a starving author/developer whose opinions a pirate might disagree with and therefore have motive to steal from them. It costs me a bit as the author and developer, but that partnership does two things. Books are words and some people regard words as being powerless compared to actions. By taking the proceeds from the sale of a book, and donating a quarter of the return (the most I could afford really because I'd have made it a bit more), those words suddenly have the power to affect real results in society based around the actual plot of my books. That's a big difference from having no effect at all and being just mere words. Words are powerful. Think of the documents of a declaration of war or conversely a declaration of peace and you'll know for certain because words can save lives for sure. Now if a pirate was to steal a book and attempted to counterfeit it and sell it themselves, they'd be stealing from that charity and nullifying that affect for the positive. Even spinning it around doesn't work because its that disgusting. So if they steal my creative property or if they steal the end product, either way they're stealing from the charities that I support and from my publisher, reseller and everyone else who depend
Yes, the market has failed, but that shouldn't be a suprise, because market failure is the whole point of copyright. By granting a monopoly on production, copyright intentionally allows copyright holders to charge well above the marginal cost of production, inducing market failure with the intent of providing incentive for development.
Cheaper sale of licences in poorer regions doesn't prove that it would be possible to sell at the same price in richer regions and remain profitable (although I wouldn't be surprised if this was the case anyway)--profitability depends on income exceeding not just the marginal cost of production but also the development costs. But this is besides the point. Whether it would be possible for companies to do it or not is irrelevant to whether they will. Companies won't do one thing that is profitable if they can do another thing that is more profitable.
My expectation is that, if prices were equalised, it would be more profitable to price for the richer market (given the extent of income inequality), and leave the poorer markets to suffer the wrath of sanctions following from Special 301 Reports.
Yes, they like whatever butters their bread in any given circumstance, but the irony here is that, having falsely convinced the public that intellectual works are a private good, they're being pillared for not adopting free market policies, which are actually antithetical to intellectual works, precisely because they are not a private good.
Yes, I think this is true to an extent. Wherever they can engage in price fixing (or believe they can) they will charge less to poorer countries so that they can receive something from these markets. If they suspect the lower-priced copies are likely to end up in the richer markets, though, it wouldn't make sense for them to do it, because it would risk undercutting the big money.
It would encourage them to initially price for the richer market, but as sales began to slump, they would be strongly encouraged to lower prices until finally, it was priced suitably for the poorest region. Any other policy would be leaving money on the table. Instead, with region restrictions, they effectively set a floor price in each region (and so further damage an already broken market).
They would be the first to complain if we 'region coded' labor.
But sales of media tend to ramp down over time. At some point, if they can't region code, it becomes more profitable to further lower the price in the richer regions in order to get many more sales elsewhere.
Similarly, the "Disney Vault" is a good argument to put a publish or perish clause in copyright law.
Okay, that's possibly not a bad argument, at least for entertainment. They wouldn't want to to decrease the price too quickly though, in case richer people delayed purchasing. So poorer people might end up waiting a while, which seems a bit unfair.
I wonder about other works besides entertainment though. Imagine the same system for patents: Price equalising patented medicines would essentially leave poorer people to die. (Actually, I'm not sure this hasn't been the case already.) Price equalising copyright licenses wouldn't be that extreme I guess (although with equipment increasingly software controlled there could be exceptions). However, for any works that serve a useful purpose, rather than just being an amusing way to waste time, it still seems rather unfair.
That said, I suspect copyright is incurably unfair anyway, so it's all a matter of degrees--whether it would be more or less unfair.
So poorer people might end up waiting a while, which seems a bit unfair.
The other regions already do wait 6 months to a year. Not just for DVDs, but for release in theaters.
I wonder about other works besides entertainment though. Imagine the same system for patents: Price equalising patented medicines would essentially leave poorer people to die. (Actually, I'm not sure this hasn't been the case already.)
Sadly, that is a daily reality. It is somewhat balanced by other countries (India for example) granting their pharmaceutical manufacturers permission to violate some patents on essential medications.
Of course, there are plenty of not so rich people here in the U.S. that go without medication as well. To the point that statistically, they will die years sooner than wealthier people. Growing numbers are forced to buy needed medication on the black market. (You know the gouging is extreme when the black market is CHEAPER).
Copyright does do a great deal of damage. That's why at the beginning, it was kept short. The longer it grows, the more damage it does.
Just noticed this post, sorry...
I'm not familiar with the details of how copyright operates globally (except that it's complicated and various), but I'm not too surprised by this. I do know that even in New Zealand (an OECD country) we've often had US TV programmes screened months after the US. My point is simply that we can't have price equalisation without those in poorer countries getting a bad deal (not to say that those in poorer countries don't get a bad deal already, not to say that the specifics of region restrictions are good as they are, just that price equalisation is not only not a solution, it actually precludes a solution).
I thought price equalisation might have been the case with pharmaceuticals. I vaguely recalled hearing about discussions on allowing some of the poorest countries access to essential medications, so I wasn't sure how much it still applied. Exceptions for essential medications for the poorest countries would avoid price equalisation to some extent, and IMHO would be good to some extent, but would draw some arbitrary hard lines. It would leave problems for countries that are quite poor, but not quite poor enough to qualify as "the poorest", and for medications that are considered quite important, but not quite important enough to qualify as "essential". Again, my point here is just that it's not possible to have price equalisation without those in poorer countries suffering (regardless of what the situation is now).
Again, I'm not familiar with the details, but I'm not surprised. With regards to copyright, we often pay a higher price in New Zealand than the US, despite (I believe) having a lower GDP per capita, and I wonder if this is due to a more unequal distribution of wealth. That said, even people who are quite poor in the US would be quite rich in, say, Ethiopia, so I think price equalisation between countries would create more unfairness than it would solve.
No disagreement there. The only serious attempt to calculate the economically optimal copyright term that I am aware of estimates about 15 years.
Pollock, Rufus (2009) Forever Minus a Day? Calculating Optimal Copyright Term.
Moreover, I'm not sure this analysis takes into account the difference between intrinsic and extrinsic worth. It seems to me that much of the worth of copyrighted works is extrinsic. IMHO, much of the value of MS Windows is due to the market share it has, not any particular technical merit, i.e. it's useful because it's popular, not because it's any good. Likewise it seems to me that at least some of the value of popular entertainment is due simply to its popularity--people watch, discuss, and make references to popular works in social groups, and sometimes actually form social groups around them, so access to these works is, to a greater or lesser extent, a requirement for participation in certain social interaction, and again, there is value in the work's popularity, regardless of the work's merit. This being the case, I'd expect the actual economically opt