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British Government Considers Tenfold Increase To Copyright Penalty
Posted by
ScuttleMonkey
on Fri Aug 15, 2008 01:03 PM
from the bigger-stick dept.
from the bigger-stick dept.
Out-Law is reporting that the British government is planning to increase the maximum fine that can be awarded for online copyright infringement tenfold. "The Government and the Intellectual Property Office (UK-IPO) are consulting on the plans, which would allow Magistrates' Courts in England and Wales to issue summary fines of £50,000 for online copyright infringement. The larger fine is proposed for commercial scale infringements, where the person involved profits from the infringement. The plan would implement another of the recommendations of the Gowers Review of Intellectual Property, the 2006 report by former Financial Times editor Andrew Gowers which has been the foundation of intellectual property policy since its publication."
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Why? (Score:3, Insightful)
not news. (Score:4, Insightful)
nobody here cares if you prosecute people who are making money off your patents/copyrights.
we only care that they stop prosecuting their customers.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Take a look at censorship:
Harmful for children becomes harmful for good citizens becomes harmful for you becomes harmful for the state.
Just because it starts out with something small doesn't mean that it won't keep growing.
Re: (Score:2)
It's perfectly acceptable to think that you should be able to control what your kids watch on tv, to some extent.
That's "censorship" but it's by no means extremist censorship.
In fact it's perfectly acceptable.
If you oppose this because you're afraid of what it could become, then you've lost touch with reality. There has to be a boundary line, a threshold that can't be crossed, and you have to be willing to accept that these copyright holders can't have people selling their property for profit.
If you aren't
Re:not news. (Score:5, Interesting)
I agree that penalties need to be significant enough to provide deterrence. In the U.S., there's a rule of thumb frequently used, which allows for triple damages in cases where, for example, simple negligence gives way to criminal levels of negligence. I think that is derived from English common law so the U.K. probably has similar principles in some areas of modern law.
But often, that idea means instead that the penalty becomes stiffer if the tort or crime is one that most of the time goes unpunished or uncorrected.
This can end up resulting in punishing more severely anyone breaking a law the public often disagrees with. If the public (or a big segment of it) actually doesn't want to turn in people committing crime X (i.e. drug use), then the additional penalties would get adjusted upwards to make up for that reluctance. The U.S. already has some penalties like this - for ex. the HOPE tax credit, which the taxpayer can't get if the student was ever convicted of a drug related felony, but could theoretically still claim if the student was convicted of rape, murder or even treason.
The fact that a large minority disagrees with a law, and might passively disregard it, should make the government think the law might be too harsh, rather than serve as an excuse to make it harsher.
Parent
Don't take it for the face value (Score:5, Insightful)
If you take society at face value, you assume that institutions and rules actually control this place.
In reality, values and economics and demographics do.
They can increase penalties all they want, but that's not addressing the economic role of piracy and the new demographic that sees it as normal.
In my view, record labels, software firms and book publishers all had it easy with record profits on super-popular hits, and so they ignored the rest as "niche topics."
Now that everyone can publish, the market is flooded with material, reducing its value. Labels and publishers need to compete more aggressively, not spend money lobbying for laws.
All IMHO.
Re:Don't take it for the face value (Score:5, Insightful)
On the other hand, the fact that for a few decades now a huge percentage of young people in various countries has considered smoking marijuana completely fine has not resulted in the total decriminalization of it. There may very well remain a disconnect between the attitudes of the people and the severity of the law in the "intellectual property" issue as well.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Exactly. They're losing the war, and are desperate. If you use the laws against those who bought them, especially in this area, enforcement will become prohibitively ever more expensive and impossible. You gotta copy the file to check to see that it's pirated. Nobody illegally copies more files than the copyright investigators of big media. If you applied the same evidence standards used by big media in their lawsuit campaigns against big media, they'll be instantly bankrupted many times over.
They'll find o
Funny acronym (Score:3, Funny)
UKIPO? Is that pronounced "uki-po"? I'd be embarrassed to work for them, even if the job itself wasn't a disgrace.
Interesting to see the dichotomy (Score:3, Interesting)
Why is it always the UK? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Antarctica?
Re:Why is it always the UK? (Score:4, Funny)
I could make you a list, but you be dismayed to find it full of countries that have already achieved outright fascism...
Parent
Re:Why is it always the UK? (Score:4, Insightful)
no, we cannot find another country. this is NOT about the UK or US. or even the west. its a 'catchy virus' that all countries are not embracing ;(
take a lesson from brer rabbit (ie, from the BANNED film 'song of the south', by disney). you cannot run away from your troubles.
seriously, there is no where to run to - as soon as you try, THAT place will increase the anti-freedom crap that you are seeing in the UK (and we also more or less see here in the US).
Parent
Re: (Score:2)
First you have to name a country that is 'blithely gamboling towards outright fascism'. (Hint #1: "trampling of civil rights" != "fascism". Hint #2: you don't have a 'right' to violate someone else's legal rights in the first place.)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
No individual violation of civil liberties represents, in itself, fascism. They are bricks that together build up the walls of a police state. Complain when you see the bricklayer turn up, not when you are already trapped.
And you do have a right to fair punishment. Copyright laws are deliberately, maliciously and excessively punitive.
Those damn commoners. (Score:5, Insightful)
<satire style="Stephen Colbert" >
I mean, the nerve of those commoners - copying data without a whim of care towards the strict control of information. Taking good sales pounds from BMI and other sacred institutions. It's downright madness - thinking they could just download and copy what isn't rightfully theirs, and think they could get away with it.
I say, no more - they must be punished further - £500,000, no $5,000,000 per... bit of data copied. By god, they shall learn what it means to write data that isn't theirs.
Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm off to yell at squirrels for taking nuts from my trees - I do believe they now owe me twelve trillion fully grown oak trees - damn selfish squirrels, they will learn, oh yes, all of them will learn what it means to take my precious acorns - potential trees, all of them, stolen from me!
</satire>
Hmmm... (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm rather curious to see how much longer laws can be enacted that seem to be in direct contradiction to what is increasingly the norms of society.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Piracy is a norm, just as much as breaking the speed limit.
You may not like it, and it may not be a good thing -- we'd have less pollution and fewer fatal accidents if people didn't speed, after all -- but whether it's desirable or not has nothing to do with whether it's reached the point of being the effective status quo.
(While I work with Free Software, the games I play and t
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Having the law so divorced from reasonability that I could have statutory liability greater than the present sale value of my house for this act is frankly unconscionable.
You make good points, but I just want to reply to the above, because on this one I really do disagree with you. I would far rather have laws that permit a wide range of penalties if they are broken, and trust that a court with the facts of the specific case will decide an appropriate level in those particular circumstances, than have the legislation mandate a certain level of penalty based on whatever Parliament happened to consider at the time the law was written. If an unreasonable penalty were handed dow
Dear recording industry (Score:4, Insightful)
Watch out Seagate, Western Digital, Apple, ISPs (Score:3, Insightful)
Watch out Seagate, Western Digital, Apple, and any other company that "seeks profit" from the abuse of piracy.
Terabyte hard drives, CD/DVD burners, Broadband providers and portable music players all owe a good portion of their success to the business of "copyright infringement." They have all, at some point, advertised the fact that they are the tools for anyone who wants to download, store, and play digital media. And none of them really care where that media came from, so long as you fill them up and buy more of their hardware.
If anyone is making a profit off the business of piracy, it's the hardware manufacturers and the services that allow the infringing material to be transmitted or recorded. When will we see THEM up against the wall?
Re:Watch out Seagate, Western Digital, Apple, ISPs (Score:4, Interesting)
Indeed. In Spain it is assumed that consumers buy this stuff with piracy in mind and they make everyone pay just in case. Buy a new hard disk, pay 12 euros (plus tax, to add insult to the injury) that will go to the 'authors'.
Now, I won't claim that I bought my last Tb for my own pictures, home made movies, etc. But the following industries are getting nothing of my 12 euros: Porn, sports (I downloaded the last Wimbledon match for example), software...
I wonder what is going to happen when they demand a piece of the cake.
Parent
The Gowers Report is well worth reading (Score:5, Informative)
I highly recommend skimming through the Gowers Review of Intellectual Property [hm-treasury.gov.uk], the 2006 study on IP that seems to be the basis for this new law.
It seems to be a truly balanced study, full of interesting insights and recommendations. Some bits I liked:
And I could go on with the remedies suggested by the study, but I'll stop here. If the world were to adopt the recommendations in this Study, I do think it would be a huge step forward.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Wow indeed. I guess the licensing on time travel is pretty damn expensive ;)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Recompense is fine (hey, I'm a capitalist, too). It's just saddens me that the market values collecting the payment for a song greater than it values the actual writing or performing of it. That just doesn't feel right to me.
Re:Ouch (Score:5, Interesting)
Parent
Re:Ouch (Score:4, Insightful)
Only if the person who owns the site, and the person who posted the copyrighted content are the same person I'd surmise.
Yeah, I totally trust the government to make that distinction.
Parent
Re:Ouch (Score:4, Interesting)
Spare us the FUD. These decisions will be made in a court, and in the lowest court at that. The government has no direct say in such cases; government ministers wouldn't even get out of bed to attend this sort of case.
And for the record, as someone who has actually seen a Magistrates' Court in action, they are IME sombre, serious places where the decisions are made carefully and with extreme care. It's a side effect of getting lay people to make the decision: they tend to consult their legal advisor frequently, but come from an outside perspective.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Well, no, I don't mean anything like that. Perhaps you noticed that this is a story about the UK?
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
So when are the government going to do something about the music industry and film industry cartels that are anti-consumer? Those kickbacks to politicians also working well in the UK.
Re:Ouch (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Ouch (Score:4, Interesting)
This law could also be used to generate more money for developers by suing people or companies violating the copyright of GPL'd software when they don't comply with the GPL requirements...
--jeffk++
Parent
Re:Ouch (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Re: (Score:2)
Bigstrat's law of bad laws. Useful for making bumper stickers against various laws. Unfortunately, poorly justified at the present time IE a bad law.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
But this is a law which definitely has some good uses, but only in a hypothetical future version has some bad uses?
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
The "slippery slope" argument is a fallacy as a matter of logic, not necessarily as a matter of empirical evidence.
If a government is known to create palatable laws as a way to introduce what would otherwise be less-palatable laws later, then there would be cause to believe that the slippery slope argument is valid in this case.
Empirical evidence trumps logic.
Re:Ouch (Score:5, Interesting)
Slippery slope is hardly a "fallacy" in a legal system built on it.
If they want to address profiteers then they should frame it in that
manner: the ill gotten gains. Although this ends up being "inconvenient".
They just want to punish without the burden of actually proving anything.
Beware of any escalation of copyright fines/damages not tied to actual
real damages or gains.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Oh, for goodness' sake, get some perspective.
The point of this law is to bring the penalties available to a court for commercial copyright infringement on-line to the same levels at those already available for off-line copyright infringement. It is closing a loophole. There is nothing to say that courts must arbitrarily hand out fines of 50k for infringement that did not deserve that level of penalty. There is nothing new in the scale of the maximum penalty, either.
Also, this is only the cap on what a Magis
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Profit does not necessitate a monetary return just that they have profit by minor copyright infringements. P2P. generally you must upload content to down load content, upload represents the major infringement and that in turn facilitates downloads at higher speeds, how the individual profits via the upload.
The will lie cheat and steal to maximise the profits, nothing more should be given to them in fact, some of the protections should be taken away or reduced.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Ouch (Score:5, Interesting)
Parent
Re: (Score:2)
Well, at least it's only going to punish people who are illegally profiting from another's work. I don't see any reason to hate this law yet.
Don't worry, in fairly short order "profiting" will be redefined so as to encompass "normal people" as well.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
-fold, a suffix added to a cardinal number signifying "multiplied by"
Re:Personal use (Score:4, Insightful)
Profit shouldn't have anything to do with copyright enforcement.
Nor does it have anything to do with compensation, or sales.
"They" shouldn't go after anybody for what is a civil law issue. It is not for the government to enforce. If you violate somebody's copyright, and they sue, that should be it.
What really needs to happen is that terms should be sane, criminalization should be undone, and penalties should be realistic and proportional.
Parent
Re: (Score:2)
"They" shouldn't go after anybody for what is a civil law issue. It is not for the government to enforce. If you violate somebody's copyright, and they sue, that should be it.
You do realize that it is the government that hands out and enforces those civil penalties right?
Re: (Score:2)
Hands out, yes. Enforces, not necessarily.
Re: (Score:2)
Enforces, not necessarily.
Your statement makes no sense. Civil penalties only have meaning because the government enforces them. If there is no government enforcement they have no force of law.