NZ Copyright Tribunal Fines First File-Sharer 102
An anonymous reader writes with news that the first successful case was brought before the copyright tribunal under NZ's three strikes law. From the article: "The first music pirate stung under new file-sharing laws has been fined $616 but 'didn't realise' the actions were illegal. The Recording Industry Association of New Zealand (RIANZ) — which represents music studios — took an unnamed offender to the Copyright Tribunal last year for sharing songs on the Internet — a track by Barbadian pop-star Rihanna on two occasions and the other by Nashville band Hot Chelle Rae. In a decision released today, the tribunal found in RIANZ's favor and ordered the offender ... to pay a penalty $616.57."
Torrent Freak has a slightly different perspective: a lack of evidence and pushback from the tribunal resulted in much smaller fines than the RIANZ wanted.
It was just $6.37 for the actual infringement (Score:5, Interesting)
An amusingly reasonable finding from the tribunal:
So, with guilt under current law established, the Tribunal set about the task of a financial punishment. According to regulations, in a downloading case the cost of the infringed products must be considered. Man Down is available of iTunes for $2.39 (US$2.00) and Tonight Tonight at $1.79 (US$1.50). ...
With this in mind the Tribunal said it would order the subscriber to pay RIANZ double the iTunes price of Man Down (2 x $2.39) and the same for Tonight Tonight (2 x $1.79) – a total of $6.57 (US$5.49). This aspect of the Tribunal’s decision will be a huge disappointment for RIANZ.
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oops, misread my own quote. It was $6.57 (NZ), or $5.49 (US).
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Re:It was just $6.37 for the actual infringement (Score:5, Insightful)
The whole thing is pretty reasonable.
- $6.57 to cover the cost of the tracks
- $50 to cover RIANZ's costs of sending the notices (and presumably other administrative costs)
- $200 to cover the cost of bringing it before the copyright body
- $360 ($120 per infringement) as a deterrant. The only actual punitive cost.
Seems to me to be a perfect balance between high enough to deter people and low enough not to bankrupt people over an activity in which no one could be injured, no property can be destroyed, no one is harassed and economic damage is negligible.
Re:It was just $6.37 for the actual infringement (Score:4, Insightful)
I would guess that if you stole, say, $6 worth of products from a store and got caught, they would charge you something similar, so yes it appears reasonable (unlike the "more than the earth is worth" fines that have been bandied about in other countries).
- Cost of the product (though whether you experienced "permanent deprivation" of that cost is dubious, I'd award it you anyway so that people who pirate $1000 pieces of software are $1000 times as fined as someone who pirated a $1 piece of software).
- Plus administrative fees.
- Plus legal costs once a denial has taken place in front of a tribunal and you're still found guilty.
- Plus a punitive damage for actually doing the naughty thing in the first place.
Seems to be the first SENSIBLE ruling in terms of copyright on the Internet in years, in fact.
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You're totally missing the point.
The store analogy is wrong. The store paid 4$ for the product, they would have sold it for 6$, paying off the merchandise and getting a profit of 2$. Copying the songs costs nothing. NOTHING
Do you know how people that intentionally pirate things think? Just like the WTO and Antigua did.
The RIAA people charge you for music, that costs NOTHING for them to duplicate, and music that's so old, the artists died of old age.
They don't respect people, why should the people respect th
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No. Wrong. It's infringing, not stealing.
And yes, true property has to be physical. "Imaginary property" is a terrible term that confuses things and encourages application of "age of scarcity"/pre-information age to things it shouldn't apply to, leading to inefficient artificial social and economic structures (ultimately doomed to failure anyway) to support them. It is wrong to treat things like music, art in the same method as commodities where quantity matters. Because the quantity of something does
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In this case it's cutting off your nose to spite your face. Said customer will never buy music again and friends of the customer will likely also ramp down their buying. Pissing off your customers only ever loses you customers. The more public the fines the more the effort will grow to cheat the system.
Nothing has been stolen. (Score:1)
No matter how much you wish people think it has. Everyone still has everything they had before this "offense" was committed. The copyright holders didn't lose any money because the person downloading the tracks probably would never have paid for them anyway.
Sooner or later this whole laughably outdated concept of copyright is going to be replaced by something less insane.
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In order to actually steal that right, you would have to substantially prevent the owner from freely exercising it.
If anyone out there could be said to be stealing a copyright, it would be ASCAP. They will demand fees even if you are playing an artist's song with his explicit permission. That is, they attempt to deny the artist the right to license his own work as he chooses.
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seeing as the he was charged double the going rate for the tracks as well as $120 per infringment it would appear there are two punitive costs.
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No, she shared the same song twice. The reason it looks like double is because we get ripped off on iTunes.
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The "per infringement" thing could end up really bad when people are sharing their whole music collection. I mean three songs seems rather tiny amount for the average act of piracy, most would probably at least share the whole album, if not the whole bands history.
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What if he had downloaded 10,000 songs?
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What if someone gets 10,000 speeding tickets? Should they get a bulk discount?
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They do in New Zealand as long as you don't pay them, and have no assets then yes.
http://www.stuff.co.nz/national/crime/3648818/More-fines-converted-into-community-work [stuff.co.nz]
The largest number of fines remitted by an individual in the past five years was 400 – totalling $40,000, remitted for 350 hours' community work in 2007.
that is $114 an hour after tax ($170 per hour before tax at 33%), not many people get paid that much.
had me until the punitive cost (Score:2)
I would agree with your thoughts up until the punitive costs.
$261.57 is plenty a deterrent for sharing 3 (!!) songs.
One could see how sharing a thousand songs would still end up costing a few thousand in fees without the last punitive part. And that seems harsh enough.
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Not only are the costs reasonable, but it makes me wonder how many other lawsuits will find their way to the courts now. Not sure how the courts work in New Zealand, but if they work on any type of precidence system, then this lawsuit set precidence that it is not going to be economically viable for the music and video industries to sue. Shoot, probably won't even cover a single lawyer's cost for a day.
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> Seems to me to be a perfect balance between high enough to deter people and low enough not to bankrupt people
Seems to me to be a perfect balance between the punishment and the price/inconvenience of using an offshore VPN ... but that was probably just coincidence because of the small number of infringements which were claimed.
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That's the idea behind a deterrent. If the fine is so low that people are willing to pay it and go on their merry way if they get caught, there's no point in it. The deterrent needs to be high enough to make people think twice before doing it and $120 per infringement, plus covering reasonable overhead costs is right about what it should be, otherwise why bother having copyright law at all?
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It also needs to function as a deterrent. If it is not effective at actually deterring people, it needs to be abolished.
In 18th century England, shoplifting was punishable by death. But there were always lots and lots of thieves, because it wasn't an effective deterrent.
I doubt that this thing in NZ will accomplish a whole lot other than to make people angry about copyright law, which is perhaps the opposite of what the proponents of the measure want. Personally, I think we're looking at a Tarkin's Grip sit
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That's the idea behind a deterrent. If the fine is so low that people are willing to pay it and go on their merry way if they get caught, there's no point in it. The deterrent needs to be high enough to make people think twice before doing it and $120 per infringement, plus covering reasonable overhead costs is right about what it should be, otherwise why bother having copyright law at all?
I think the argument is what you define as "per infringement".
It is just as easy to share a whole library as it is to share a single song. Does that mean each sharing of a song is a single act of infringement? If so, someone's kid could still create a life-destroying event quite quickly. (5,000 songs x $120, plus other fees.)
However, if that is a single act of infringement, it's $120 plus other fees, which would still be double the cost of all the songs according to this panel.
One is a stiff fee and one
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I see two ways to approach this.
1) By copyright. If each song is copyrighted individually, then each song counts as 1 infringement. If the album is copyrighted as a whole, then one infringement per album regardless of whether it's one song or the entire album.
2) How it's sold. If the song is normally sold individually, then each song is one infringement. If the song is normally only available as part of an album, then any and all songs from that album should be grouped together. If the song is available as
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Those kinds of ideas don't fundamentally change anything. It's good that many people realize copyright has gotten out of hand, and make proposals like yours. But few take it to the logical conclusion, which is that copyright itself is a flawed idea, and needs radical change. I am disturbed by the number of comments here suggesting that the accused is indeed guilty and deserving of some kind of punishment, and that the fine wasn't very high, and is therefore acceptable.
Not so! Yes, technically, he viol
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Sounds a lot like your average parking fine. Quite reasonable considering that violation is in the same ballpark.
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It would be hard to imagine $120000 for parking fine, but not for your child sharing a 1000 songs. Imaginary property does no scale in the same fashion as real property.
What really concerns me is what the level of proof required to impose such a penalty is. They denied the 1 offense.
Torrent Freak has a slightly different perspective: a lack of evidence and pushback from the tribunal resulted in much smaller fines than the RIANZ wanted.
lack of evidence should result in no fine. Although that is torrent freak so they may have been sufficient evidence, of the last act, but why would you say you did 2 and not the third?
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You say incredibly low overall fine, I say an incredibly sane fine.
If I were to be fined, say, $1.5M for sharing a couple of albums on bittorrent, then that would do little to stop me doing it again. Sure, it would ruin my life, but after I declared bankruptcy, I'd probably be out doing it again, just to stick it to the man.
If I were on the other hand to be fined over $600 for sharing a couple of tracks, that's not something that's big enough to waste tens of thousands or more of lawyer time on appeals, nor
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Actually, you can't appeal tribunal decisions. It's final. You also can be represented by at best a solicitor, and that's only if a hearing is called (usually, our copyright tribunal decides based on paper submissions, no real-time argument. To top it off, the law instructs the tribunal to consider an accusation of infringement as evidence that infringement occurred. The burden is on you to prove that it didn't (and how do you prove a negative again?)
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I wish people wouldn't confuse "cost" with "price". The cost of a product is how much money it takes to manufacture one unit. The price of a product is how much it is sold for. Gross profit = price - cost.
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It depends on your perspective. From the seller's perspective, it's what you described. From the consumer's perspective, cost is the same as the price. It's pretty clear from the context they're referring to the cost to the consumer, which is the same as the price. You can argue that within a specific field, words have a very specific meaning, but the article is neither written by, nor targeted at, such a specific field.
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Depends on your countries laws. In Canada that's exactly how it works, hence downloading in Canada is legal. Uploading however is not. (You're allowed to get your content anywhere, legally, due to the blank media levy, however you still aren't allowed to give it to others)
Of course we've now completely gutted that by adding a "digital locks" provision, but that really just makes things even weirder. For example, I can no longer make a backup of my own legally aquired works as I'd have to break a digital loc
And thus, another nail to the coffin... (Score:2)
The MAFIAAs coffin, that is.
They simply do not understand that they with this are chipping away at the very foundation that supports their business; their customers. They might stay afloat for a while but sooner or later something is bound to crack in a big way. I feel sad for every person this happen to, but it's unavoidable.
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Absurd (Score:5, Insightful)
I was convicted the other year of property damage. You know, actually breaking shit. Total fine, including replacement for the property fucked up and court costs? Roughly the same as this lady has to pay for downloading three songs. That's really fucked up. I went out and deliberately and maliciously broke shit. I was caught and convicted. This lady (allegedly) downloaded three songs (one of them twice...).
So she could have gone and thrown a rock through the RIANZ front window and got off with less*. That says something about the fucked upness of this whole situation. Hell, she probably could have gone and punched the head of the RIANZ in the fucking face and got off with a smaller fine (though probably some community work as well).
* assumes the front window isn't a huge plate.
Re:Absurd (Score:4, Funny)
"Hell, she probably could have gone and punched the head of the RIANZ in the fucking face and got off with a smaller fine (though probably some community work as well)."
Wait, so she'd get community work for doing community work?
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Wait, so she'd get community work for doing community work?
Sum total she should get back some community work done in excess.
Don't know exactly how that would work, I guess she'd be allowed some misdemeanors or get a few downloads.
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Or... y'know... maybe... and I know this is going to sound just totally crazy here, a person could just not do illegal stuff in the first place?
Okay, this person didn't know what they were doing was illegal. But, ignorance of the law is not an excuse to break it. It might be an excuse for a lesser judgement, however... but she certainly knows now, and, if ever caught again, the fine will probably be much worse.
Because note.... this is a *FINE*... not a settlement. When being fined for criminal activ
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To answer your three final questions: I don't make a habit of it. Never intentionally. And no. So to sum up, no.... I don't do illegal stuff all the time.
As for why she's getting fined for a crime there's no evidence she committed, she *admitted* to it....there's only one track that was even in dispute and that would have made only a difference of $2.19 in the judgement.
Personally, I don't think the fines are excessive at all... they are sufficient to leave a lasting impression that she will remember
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A) Possibly... Not something I make a practice of, however. Which was my only point. If I'm caught doing something illegal that I didn't know about, I don't expect to not have to pay the consequences, however.
B) the disputed incident would not have substantially altered the penalty, as I said above.
C) That's your opinion, and you're entitled to it. I don't share it, however.
D) You first.
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As for why she's getting fined for a crime there's no evidence she committed, she *admitted* to it....there's only one track that was even in dispute and that would have made only a difference of $2.19 in the judgement.
There were THREE separate and unique infringements she was accused of committing. She admitted the first. She abstained from answering about the second. She denied the third.
Just because you admit to one crime, it doesn't make you guilty of other independent crimes. It also doesn't matter
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Considering the nature of the crime, being guilty of one incident gives sufficient cause to consider the person guilty of the other two without proof to the contrary. It's like being caught lying.... once you are caught doing it once, it makes other things you've said which are related very unbelievable.
Like I said... don't deliberately do illegal shit in the first place and this wouldn't be an issue. If she had pleaded not guilty to all three, I'd have been a whole lot more supportive of her position
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Like I said... don't deliberately do illegal shit in the first place and this wouldn't be an issue. If she had pleaded not guilty to all three, I'd have been a whole lot more supportive of her position.
So what you are saying is that if she were more dishonest, you would be more supportive of her?
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The media companies got $6.57 in compensation for their loses... (Similarly, when I broke that shit, I paid around $150 to replace the damaged shit.) The rest was court (or in this case tribunal and other) costs, a fine (in this case $120*3).
Speeding tickets include a lot of administrative costs and shit on top of the fine for actually committing the offense, too. So what? I think most /.ers are just happy the fine wasn't in the tens of thousands of dollars. It's a reasonable punishment for what is, as several folks have pointed out, a crime.
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Well, considering being caught speeding three times in NZ would result in anywhere from $90 to $1890 (depending on how fast you go over the limit - it's a sliding scale from $30 for less than 10km/h over the limit to $630 for 50km/h over the limit) and if all three times were 20km/h or more over the limit would result in a 12 month license suspension, the fines are more severe for speeding.
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Or... y'know... maybe... and I know this is going to sound just totally crazy here, a person could just not do illegal stuff in the first place?
Sure. As soon as the laws are reasonable, proportional, and a reflection of the will of the people and not merely what they've been coerced into accepting by a system that values money and power more than fairness, logic, and actual societal benefit, then I'll stop doing illegal stuff.
As long as the law exists to protect the powerful, and not everyone equally, it'
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Broken or not, the former is infinitely preferable... and at least while we have it, there is still hope to make it better. Weakening it to the point that it no longer has any value to creators is not a way to accomplish that.
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Copyright itself is censorship. The alternative to copyright is to sell commodities that are scarce, like time, not those in infinite supply, like copies of works.
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that are copyrighted are being actually published
All works are copyrighted by default.
That you aren't permitted to freely copy them doesn't change that
Yes, it does. There's nothing that requires free speech to be unique.
The alternative is for the creator to not publish at all (which is what no small number of people did before copyright, when they feared their works would simply be blatantly copied).
No, the alternative is for the creator to charge for his time which is scarce instead of copies which are no
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How would you propose that the creator charge for his time on works that anybody can copy freely? He would have to withhold the work, and *NOT* publish, until he was paid sufficiently.
Censorship.
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I didn't get that bit. Surly, she knew after the first strike? She was informed at the first occurrence, right? Or is there just some internal counter in somebody's system, which only sends out a letter once it hits 3?
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Even if you are ok with death penalty for every single crime, no matter how small it may be, I am certainly not.
the argument... (Score:2)
I guess the argument is that the file sharing is more financially damaging to the RIANZ customers than if you had literally smashed their window or broken shit in their office. May seem counterintuitive at first but makes sense.
statutory presumption!! (Score:3)
"but since there is a “statutory presumption” that each incidence of file-sharing alleged in an infringement notice constitutes an actual infringement of copyright,"
This is fucking scary that there is a statutory presumption at play here. I wonder what is required to submit an infringement notice, because it seems like a simple way to convert flimsy evidence into a crime.
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This is not true. Any copyright owner (or agent of one) has the right to send a notice, but it'll cost you $25 a pop to do so, plus $200 to bring them to the tribunal if they get hit three times.
The rights owner is also not allowed to know who the customer is unless a court orders it (not the tribunal, an actual court).
Readadability (Score:2)
readable: NZ Copyright-Tribunal Fines First File-Sharer
still readable: NZ Copyright-Tribunal Fines First File Sharer
Copyright could be a noun, adjective, or verb. Fines could be a noun or verb. My first impression was that New Zealand was copyrighting something. I'm not sure why headlines have to have each word capitalized--I'm not even going to read the summary.
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"Copyright tribunal"? (Score:2)
Kill it with fire!
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At least they had the guts to call it a "tribunal" which has the subconscious association of medieval witch-hunts, heretics being put on trial by The Church, etc.
Hopefully at one point they will catch the wrong guy that will rally the people against this... the Content Industry persecuting regular folks doing nothing more than "we" did with cassette tapes on the school yard.
I know there's a Pirate Party of NZ [pirateparty.org.nz] but that shouldn't stop anyone from contacting the "we already know who wins because they always wi
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Hopefully at one point they will catch the wrong guy that will rally the people against this...
At which point, hopefully, this abomination of human institutions called "copyright tribunal" will be... (*puts on glasses*) killed with fire.
Are you a Kiwi btw? I thoroughly enjoyed my stay in your country several years back. In & around Auckland. I'd go more often, if the trip didn't cost so much in terms of money and time.
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His nickname would tend to indicate he's Canadian.
For what it's worth though, the Copyright Tribunal actually exists for a completely different statutory purpose (defining mechanical royalty rates, granting authorisation to copy without rights holder consent, etc) and was "re-purposed" for this task.
And we call everything that isn't a Court a Tribunal. We have a Disputes Tribunal as well.
Prometheus (Score:5, Funny)
In fact, the Prometheus myth is uncannily applicable to the current IP situation:
(a) He didn't actually steal fire, but rather replicated it (causing no loss to its owners on Mt. Olympus).
(b) He benefited mankind by sharing it.
(c) He got a totally incommensurate punishment from the jealous "guardians" of this easily replicable thing.
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$616.57 (Score:1)
In America, that would have come to $616,570.00 and a few years in prison. I hate my country.
Conclusion: (Score:1)
She was fined an extra $360 for using uTorrent (Score:3, Informative)
The *first* file sharer? (Score:1)
How did they even track him/her down in order to fine them?
I guess it was via paper tape or something...