UK Bill Introduces 10 Year Prison Sentence for Online Pirates (torrentfreak.com) 167
An anonymous reader writes: The UK Government's Digital Economy Bill, which is set to revamp current copyright legislation, has been introduced in Parliament. One of the most controversial changes is the increased maximum sentences for online copyright infringement. Despite public protest, the bill increased the maximum prison term five-fold, from two to ten years. Before implementing the changes the Government launched a public consultation, asking for comments and advice from the public. But, even though the vast majority of the responses urged the authorities not to up the prison term, lawmakers decided otherwise. As a result, a new draft of the Digital Economy bill published this week extends the current prison term from two to ten years (PDF). The relevant part amends the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, and simply replaces the word two with ten. Copyright holders have lobbied for this update for a long time. According to them, harsher penalties are needed to deter people from committing large-scale copyright infringement, something the Government agrees with.
It's inevitable (Score:5, Insightful)
Now if they're impose the same criminal penalties for interfering with fair use, we'd be all set.
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I'll bet he's been allowed to touch an actual bobbie without being arrested. Unlike some.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org] ??
or
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org] ??
I am sure you are legally allowed to touch boobies, but the question is will the booby allow you to touch it?
Re:It's inevitable (Score:5, Insightful)
The Real Piracy is the wholesale stealing of our government by the rich, powerful elites, who conspire to get away with crimes others are rotting in jail for.
Re: It's inevitable (Score:1)
Saw a sticker today that said "gun control" but had gun crossed out and "politician" written in above. We need to treat politicians like the very real threat to our liberties that they continue to be.
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You mean like this: "U.S. prisons play pirated movies to inmates" https://torrentfreak.com/u-s-p... [torrentfreak.com] ?
Re:It's inevitable (Score:5, Funny)
Stealing? How dare you impugn our character with such malign slander. We bought and paid for them!
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Hey, at least we plebs know where we stand. So crimes, in descending order or importance are:
- Making a politician look stupid ... ...
- Preventing a corporation from maximising their profits
- Ridicule of any government organisation
- crimes against rich people
-
-
- property crimes ( rich people only)
- murder (poor people only)
- rape (poor people only)
(sorry, property crimes again poor people don't count at all)
It's good to know ones place in society.
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The last attempt at reforming copyright law here a little while back actually did try to extend our equivalent of fair use. Rather ironically, given the response to the Leave vote and fear of losing protections offered by the EU, that part was promptly struck down again because of European rules.
The way to fight this . . . (Score:1)
. . . make sure that some establishment-types gets caught for this. A little detective work, and you'll find a MP with some music copied from a friend, or a "dubious" version of word.
Do this work, turn them in. See the law change after a few "good boys" get their sentences. . .
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Until someone else comes along and claims your original work as their copyrighted content, yeah that never happens.
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The best way to avoid the fair use problem is to create your own original content
Unless you lived in total isolation your entire life, the probability of that happening is nil
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Unless you lived in total isolation your entire life, the probability of that happening is nil
Let's consider two examples from YouTube. One person spends 30 minute talking about a movie with a still shot of the publicly released movie poster in the background. Another person spends 15 minutes talking the same move while showing 15 minutes of the movie taken from another video. Who has original content and who is getting slapped with a fair use violation?
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Both of your examples are examples of fair use in the US. However, both of your examples would cause a DMCA notice despite being clear cases of fair use.
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Both of your examples are examples of fair use in the US.
That's not correct. Fair use is using the least amount of someone else's content to make a point in your own content. Using a still shot of a movie poster is acceptable fair use. Using 15 minutes of someone else's video in a 30-minute video is not acceptable fair use. Using three minutes or less would be acceptable fair use.
However, both of your examples would cause a DMCA notice despite being clear cases of fair use.
Both videos are subject to a DMCA take down notice. The movie poster video will most likely win an appeal. The extended video clip video won't even get that far.
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I don't care about copyright
Spoken like a true millennial.
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In it's present state copyright is theft.
I'll remember that the next time I file a DMCA takedown request.
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DMCA is evil. Are you evil too?
Nope. Just protecting my copyrights.
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No, he's just an asshole.
That's true. What does my work experience in IT support have to do with this thread?
Re:It's inevitable (Score:5, Insightful)
The best way to avoid the fair use problem is to create your own original content rather than building off of someone else's copyrighted content and claiming it as your original.
Too bad that would eliminate many of the best creative works ever created, nearly all great artists built on previous works.
The entire Disney empire was built on someone else's stories. And they are doing everything they can to keep someone else from doing the same.
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Arrrh, matey! In honor of Walt Disney, it's copy like a pirate day!
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The entire Disney empire was built on someone else's stories. And they are doing everything they can to keep someone else from doing the same.
Say a thing five times and a must be true --- or maybe not.
In 2013 Philip Pullman published a new English translation of 50 classic tales from the Brothers Grimm. In 450 pages. You won't find Disney's "Snow White" in there or Humperdinck's "Hansel and Gretel." Not in any recognizable form. Not if you are being honest about the thing.
ImDB lists about 200 film. musical comedy and television productions based on "Cinderella." Disney owns the rights to maybe four of them.
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Re: It's inevitable (Score:2)
Are you an idiot? Or being sarcastic? -- I hope so. The Snow White story has been around for hundreds of years. Google it.
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Today's new cultural content should be based on works from the 50s, or from the 80s, or from the 2000s - but it isn't because nobody wants to go to prison for 10 years.
Instead we are doomed to just keep mindlessly gulping up new variations of what they had back in the 1800s. You can't build on top of Disney's stories because is verboten. You can't build on Rowling. You can't even build on Tolkien. Your only legal choice is eternal stagnation.
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You can't even build on Tolkien.
Sure you can. As long as your work is substantially different from Tolkien. For example: The Belgariad by David Eddings, The Sword of Shannara by Terry Brooks, and The Wheel of Time by Robert Jordan.
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"Substantially different" isn't building on, it's being inspired by. The beauty of Cinderella is that everyone could tell their own Cinderella and explore different variations of the story without having to independently invent an entire backstory and setting for it. That lowers the barrier of entry so much anyone can do it, and you get a huge forest of different expressions from which you can pick the few gems and discard the rest. But we can't do this anymore. Instead we are force fed Peter Jackson fanfic
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ImDB lists about 200 film. musical comedy and television productions based on "Cinderella." Disney owns the rights to maybe four of them.
You can still write a story or make a movie about Dracula, Frankenstein or Wolf Man based on the public domain stories. What you can't do is based your characters on the iconic Universal monster movies, as Universal has a copyright for what the characters looked in the movie. Movies featuring these monsters go out of their way to avoid looking exactly like the Universal monsters. Universal is making a new set of monster movies to extend the copyright for another century.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Univer [wikipedia.org]
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Technically, you can make a story that looks very much like a Disney story, but with your own video, dialog, characters and names. You could even make your own Cinderella if you wanted, as long as you didn't use the Disney characters.
What is original content? (Score:4, Interesting)
In 1998, Ray Repp sued Andrew Lloyd Webber for plagiarism, based on the similarities between Phantom of the Opera and an earlier work by Repp. Instead, the court found similarities between Repp's work and an even earlier piece by Lloyd Webber.
There are only 12 semi-tones in Western scales. How can anything be original?
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There are only 12 semi-tones in Western scales. How can anything be original?
There are only 10 digits in decimal representations of numbers. How can any number be unique? That statement seems nonsensical.
To put it another way, suppose the most recognizable element of music is the melody (as court rulings generally use to determine copyright infringement), and suppose just an average first phrase of 15 notes. That's enough (12^15) for every human who has ever lived to compose thousands and thousands of unique melodies. If the main constraint is 12 notes, there are a LOT of possi
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George Harrison got sued over 3 notes. The case wound on so long that by the time there was a ruling, he owned copyright on both works anyway.
So apparently the standard is based on the number of 3 note combinations available. Worse, simple transpositions are likely to sound very similar to most ears.
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Statement: The size of the scale has little to do with it. (It presumably being whether something is original)
To that, I add the following restriction: A composition is only considered a "real" composition if people will listen to it.
Counter-statement: Non-Western scales have more notes in their scales.
Arguments you made:
Argument 1: Music is built on recognizable patterns and our brains have a real knack for matching similar motives eve
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...To put it another way, suppose the most recognizable element of music is the melody (as court rulings generally use to determine copyright infringement), and suppose just an average first phrase of 15 notes. That's enough (12^15) for every human who has ever lived to compose thousands and thousands of unique melodies. If the main constraint is 12 notes, there are a LOT of possibilities for "originality."
cmon... don't be so naive. It's not measured by absolute uniqueness, otherwise you can change one note, one pixel, one frame, one character in a line of code... Because that would allow arbitrary and intentionally minimaly modified versions of other artists work to not be covered by copyright infringement laws. That's why in court these types of cases are always evaluated on some arbitrary "similarity" basis, it's pure opinion, creativity just isn't objective enough to fit neatly into the constraints of the
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And would we ever have heard of Shakespeare had he not done the same?
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ShakespeareCorp doesn't legislate for his plays to be kept in copyright every time they come close to entering the public domain.
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ShakespeareCorp doesn't legislate for his plays to be kept in copyright every time they come close to entering the public domain.
The copyright on the plays during that era was owned by the theater company. Shakespeare made his money from being a writer, an actor and a theater owner, which he later invested in land. Neither he nor his estate received any royalty income from his plays after his retirement and death.
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And would we ever have heard of Shakespeare had he not done the same?
The copyright for Shakespeare's plays were owned by the theater company. Book publishers routinely disregarded copyright by publishing stuff willy-nilly, including Shakespeare's love poems that were circulating privately among friends. We know about Shakespeare's plays today only because the remaining owners of the theater company published a folio in tribute after his death.
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uk prison system (Score:1)
this is the 1st step to usa style prisons for profit. pretty soon more things will happen and then bam, uk will be just like the usa. they already spy on their citizens, the more time that passes, the more the uk looks like the usa!
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You forgot the first step: it was independence day! This is the second step.
Re: uk prison system (Score:2, Insightful)
Copyright is the new marijuana for our prison system.
Just out of curiosity (Score:5, Insightful)
What's the maximum sentence for embezzling government money? What's the sentence for financial fraud that leaves thousands penniless? In other words, can you maybe name a few or a few dozen crimes that actually have victims that have lower sentences?
Mr. Fawkes? Could you rise from the grave and try again? I promise, nobody is going to stop you this time.
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What's the maximum sentence for embezzling government money? What's the sentence for financial fraud that leaves thousands penniless? In other words, can you maybe name a few or a few dozen crimes that actually have victims that have lower sentences?
What is the maximum penalty for someone murdering the movie industry executives that push for these laws?
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Not if you do it right. So many people die every day, and, as a coroner I knew once put it, if you put a candle on every grave of a murder victim that was ruled "natural causes", no graveyard would need artificial lighting.
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10 years in prison is undesirable sentence for online copyrighting.
I suppose if there was a penalty for copyrighting, we wouldn't have the music/film/book industries pushing for laws against copying copyrighted work as there would be no more copyrighted work.
Hint, copyrighting is the act of registering a copyright, which is something the media industry does every day.
Yes (Score:5, Insightful)
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Because this is obviously just as bad as threatening to kill someone or administering poison with intent to endanger life, which both have 10 year sentences in the UK...
It is if you want the UK to become the 51st state, which is what this bill is signaling in a sense. After losing the EU, the UK elite want access to large markets and this bill is an offering to the US. There is no other explanation for ignoring their population so thoroughly in the wake of brexit.
The word for today is 'Draconian" (Score:5, Insightful)
Look at capital punishment versus life imprisonment as a deterrent to murder, if you will... hardly any homicide in Louisiana, Missouri, and Mississippi. [deathpenaltyinfo.org]
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So the death penalty for copyright infringement. I'm sure that's where they're headed. After that the death penalty for offenders and anyone associated with them. Plus ten years sentenced to their crappy droll movies for not watching them.
They ridicule us.
For comparison (Score:3, Insightful)
what are the sentences for rape, violent beatings, the sort of thing that can ruin a person and make them dysfunctional for the rest of their lives? Are crimes of violence still comparable to the potential loss of speculated future profits of large corporations?
Re:For comparison (Score:5, Informative)
Five years maximum if you stab someone (without killing them): http://www.inbrief.co.uk/offen... [inbrief.co.uk]
Average prison sentence length for rape: 8 years: http://www.publications.parlia... [parliament.uk]
Better than hanging, I guess (Score:4, Funny)
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We're not pirates. We're privateers. The NSA takes the government's share.
asking for comments and advice from the public (Score:2)
For what purpose?
Re:asking for comments and advice from the public (Score:4, Insightful)
For what purpose?
To figure out who to gaol first.
The average rape sentence is 8 years (Score:5, Insightful)
source [parliament.uk]
Is this really worse than rape?
Re:The average rape sentence is 8 years (Score:5, Insightful)
Negatively affecting corporate profits is the highest of crimes. Countries do this with tax laws and money laundering laws.
Don't hurt the rich and powerful, just each other.
Ignoring 98% consensus (Score:5, Insightful)
When the government ignores consensus of 98% the population, this is not a democracy. If not corporatocracy, the government has at least been corrupted by large financial incentives or threat.
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When the government ignores consensus of 98% the population, this is not a democracy. If not corporatocracy, the government has at least been corrupted by large financial incentives or threat.
It's called oligarchy.
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A) We haven't left yet. We haven't begun to leave yet. All we did was have a vote on if we should.
B) Pretty much everyone I know is bloody angry at the result, the economy is tanking and most of the stuff that was promised by the leave campaign has evaporated and many who voted leave are now regretting it.
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A) Tell it to the population. A very vocal part (thankfully it looks like a minority) of the population are acting as if they already left.
B) Agree. But then my view is biased as most of the people I know are either young or work at our offices in London (the mood is pretty sombre here).
But this is neither here nor there. The funny point is still that people are now justifying the vote as a success of democracy kicking it against unelected bureaucrats instead of the mostly xenophobic panic vote that it was.
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Some thought we'd repatriate EU immigrants. We won't be, it has just been voted on by the government.
Some voted exit as a protest and didn't expect to win and now regret it
Within hours, certain areas of the country were demanding the government would make up the lost EU subsidies they'd just voted to lose
There are still plenty of p
Does this mean...? (Score:2)
Obligatory (Score:5, Funny)
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Get less time for shop lifting and there the proft (Score:3)
Get less time for shoplifting and there they have hard evidence.
Killing Michael Jackson: 2 years jail time... (Score:2)
Downloading his music? 10 years!
http://edition.cnn.com/2013/10... [cnn.com]
What more proof does anyone need (Score:3)
that politicians and lawmakers consider themselves beholden only to lobby groups and corporations:
"But, even though the vast majority of the responses urged the authorities not to up the prison term, lawmakers decided otherwise."
The electorate? Fuck'em. That's what governments say, and they're starting to say it more and more openly. Citizens around the world need leashes on their 'leaders' - and for at least the worst offenders, I'm NOT speaking figuratively.
Why not up it to 100? (Score:2)
If the goal is to deter why not up it to 200? What's the logic behind 10 or 25?
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Because ten years is the sentence for counterfeiting of physical goods. The industry lobbyists argued that the sentence should be the same for uploading a film as for selling a fake DVD.
Damn! (Score:2)
Cross off another country to move to if Trump wins.
Another Insultation in the UK (Score:3)
Re:A civil matter with a criminal punishment (Score:4, Informative)
I'm as sceptical as anyone about the abuse of penalties for IP-related behaviour, but you're way off on this objection. The laws in question were created to fight large-scale, commercial copyright infringement, that is how they've actually been used in practice, and it is extremely likely that those profiting from infringement in that way are effectively stealing real profits from the legitimate rightsholders since people were actually paying for copies of the works that they may well have assumed were lawful. The penalties are akin to those for fraud.
Re:A civil matter with a criminal punishment (Score:5, Insightful)
How many decades should companies like Disney hold copyright? These businesses hire artists to create intellectual property, but none of it would be possible without the centuries of human history and culture to build on.
There is a reasonable number of years for protection, and the reasonable number is probably not the current 120 years.
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How many decades should companies like Disney hold copyright?
Roughly the duration of the lifetime of the sun, plus 500million years. Can't be too careful.
History of copyright duration (Score:2, Informative)
in the US:
14 years (1790), 28 years (1831), life + 50 years (1908), 75 years (1976), life + 70 years or 95 years from publication or 120 years from creation (1998), 50 years for broadcasts (2008).
I am curious if the UK had similar increases in copyright duration. I am certain these increases reflect the nature of commercial lobbying and is not the will of the people.
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I'm not sure copyright durations in the UK are as long as the US under all circumstances, but they're still stupidly long in most cases. And yes, they have been significantly extended despite overwhelmingly opposed responses to official public consultations.
This is an area where the government remarkably frequently seems to find itself required to implement some unpopular law because of some treaty or other agreement within one of the relevant international bodies. (Establishing the influence of that same g
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Too lazy to look up the numbers but the USA followed GB/UK copyright terms until around the beginning of the 20th century. The first modern copyright law was the Statute of Anne in 1703 or so, long name something like An Act to Promote Learning... which was 14+14 with a grandfather clause, the need for registration and leaving a copy at Oxford or Cambridge IIRC.
What was interesting is that right from the beginning the Stationers (publishers of the day) were pushing for unlimited, "For the Authours" even tho
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I agree that current copyright durations are often absurdly long, but that's a separate issue. No-one is performing the kind of large-scale, commercial copyright infringement that would attract a custodial sentence under these laws with Mickey Mouse cartoons from nearly a century ago.
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The Little Mermaid is 28 years old and would have expired under some of the older copyright schemes. (admittedly under laws that predate Disney and motion pictures)
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Right, and perhaps that should still be the case today. However, this still seems like a separate issue to me. I don't see anyone going to jail for selling bootleg The Little Mermaid DVDs on a massive scale.
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5 notes in all keys on all instruments does seem overly broad.
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what about the same note 5 times in a row?
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Sounds like the start to Maria from West Side Story.
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Modern copyright was originally intended "for the Encouragement of Learning", not based on a supposed right to "intellectual property". Further, since much of the material being copied is entertainment, rather than encouraging learning, the law is essentially jailing people for the sake of public amusement.
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Modern copyright was originally intended "for the Encouragement of Learning", not based on a supposed right to "intellectual property".
Modern copyright is an economic tool. It is an incentive for people to create and share new works, to make those works as attractive as possible, and to distribute them as widely as possible.
I'm not sure how relevant any detailed wording remains if that wording comes from a time long ago, before any of the implications and capabilities of modern technology had even been conceived.
Further, since much of the material being copied is entertainment, rather than encouraging learning, the law is essentially jailing people for the sake of public amusement.
Clearly that public amusement has significant value, because people pay billions every year to enjoy it. Many people study and wo
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More or less. Copyright doesn't necessarily encourage the widest possible distribution though. That would require pricing that everyone can afford. Copyright encourages the most profitable pricing, which is that which maximises [unit price - cost of copying] x [how many people will pay]. That could well be above a p
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Copyright doesn't necessarily encourage the widest possible distribution though. That would require pricing that everyone can afford. Copyright encourages the most profitable pricing
Fair point. Copyright can't necessarily promote both the greatest quality and the greatest quantity at once, and in practice it promotes the greatest overall value, as measured by the money people are willing to pay for the copies.
My objection to most of your remaining argument is that it's subjective. You may think the world would be no worse without the big summer blockbusters, but millions of other people enjoy them. You may think smoking has negative value, but millions of other people enjoy it. You may
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That's right, copyright can't necessarily maximise quality and quantity, and the limitation on quantity is an entirely artificial one, imposed by copyright itself, not by the nature of what it produces. Your claim that copyright maximises value misses the caveat "insofar as copyr
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This system makes complete sense for "private goods", but far less sense for "public goods" (to use the terminology of economics). Few people would advocate this system for public defence...
So would you favour scrapping copyright and instead funding all creative works formerly supported by copyright through taxation and public funds instead, like the armed forces and policing and roads you mentioned?
How is the money then to be allocated? Who decides what works are worth and which ones to support, if it is not to be done through the people enjoying those works choosing where to spend their money?
By what measure? Value of output, or efficiency (value of output divided by resources consumed)? I don't think any other system has ever consumed so much resources, so copyright certainly ought to produce more.
By whichever measure you like.
No system before copyright has resulted in anything close to the quali
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I think the amount of resources directed to entertainment is excessive, so I wouldn't favour the same amount of resources being supplied via taxation. I'm not opposed to some resources going to a public broadcaster or grants for entertainment or something, but I'd prefer to see more resources expe
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Those are only the judgements that appear in official court records, not out of court settlements.
This is the UK, and we're talking about criminal law. What out of court settlements are you talking about?
We all know exactly how this law is actually being used: to threaten individuals who've downloaded films and TV shows with prison sentences unless they pay up.
We don't "all know" any such thing. In fact, I have never heard of a single case anything like what you describe, in this country and under this law.
Perhaps you're confusing this situation with the superficially similar but actually totally different situation in the US, where the everyone-pays legal system allows for a type of profitable barratry that wouldn't work here?
Let's not choke up the judicial and prison systems with people whose only offence has been not paying to watch films and TV, i.e. copyright infringement
That's not what this law does. T
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In practice that is never done, the law typically remains untested for a couple of years until people are used to it being there, then it is used to smash down on someone running a non-commercial torrent site.
You're still just making things up. This kind of large-scale copyright infringement has been a criminal offence in the UK for a long time, just with a lower maximum penalty of two years instead of ten, and that law hasn't been widely abused based on anything I've ever seen. And what is "running a non-commercial torrent site" anyway?
Anyway, now that it has passed to point where you are better off murdering anyone accusing you of copyright infringement things might change.
So you think a mandatory life sentence is less than a sentence imposed by a judge based on the specifics of a case but in any case no longer than ten years?