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Electronic Frontier Foundation DRM Government

EFF Warns Proposed Law Could Create 'Life-Altering' Copyright Lawsuits (forbes.com) 117

Forbes reports: In July, members of the federal Senate Judiciary Committee chose to move forward with a bill targeting copyright abuse with a more streamlined way to collect damages, but critics say that it could still allow big online players to push smaller ones around -- and even into bankruptcy.

Known as the Copyright Alternative in Small-Claims Enforcement (or CASE) Act, the bill was reintroduced in the House and Senate this spring by a roster of bipartisan lawmakers, with endorsements from such groups as the Copyright Alliance and the Graphic Artists' Guild. Under the bill, the U.S. Copyright Office would establish a new 'small claims-style' system for seeking damages, overseen by a three-person Copyright Claims Board. Owners of digital content who see that content used without permission would be able to file a claim for damages up to $15,000 for each work infringed, and $30,000 in total, if they registered their content with the Copyright Office, or half those amounts if they did not.

"Easy $5,000 copyright infringement tickets won't fix copyright law," argues the EFF, in an article shared by long-time Slashdot reader SonicSpike: The bill would supercharge a "copyright troll" industry dedicated to filing as many "small claims" on as many Internet users as possible in order to make money through the bill's statutory damages provisions. Every single person who uses the Internet and regularly interacts with copyrighted works (that's everyone) should contact their Senators to oppose this bill...

[I]f Congress passes this bill, the timely registration requirement will no longer be a requirement for no-proof statutory damages of up to $7,500 per work. In other words, nearly every photo, video, or bit of text on the Internet can suddenly carry a $7,500 price tag if uploaded, downloaded, or shared even if the actual harm from that copying is nil. For many Americans, where the median income is $57,652 per year, this $7,500 price tag for what has become regular Internet behavior would result in life-altering lawsuits from copyright trolls that will exploit this new law.

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EFF Warns Proposed Law Could Create 'Life-Altering' Copyright Lawsuits

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  • Too many lawyers (Score:5, Interesting)

    by rsilvergun ( 571051 ) on Saturday August 03, 2019 @03:42PM (#59035412)
    I was wondering when this was going to happen. The schools, starved of funding, turned to law students for a quick and easy buck. They've been graduating lawyers at a super rapid pace, far too quickly for the economy to absorb them. I've read stories of law grades, $100k+ in debt, working as legal aids for $15/hr.

    We're gonna see more of this. Lawyers will continue to turn our legal system into a weapon to extract cash from us. And no "tort reform" is not the answer. That'll protect big businesses, not consumers. We need to start voting pro consumer people into office. That means no more voting for politicians that take PAC money and it means showing up to your primary. It also means no more "values voting". We need to vote on issues, not feels.
    • Re:Too many lawyers (Score:5, Interesting)

      by UnknowingFool ( 672806 ) on Saturday August 03, 2019 @03:53PM (#59035460)
      Except that all the current instances of trolls demonstrate the exact opposite of what you’re describing. Copyright trolls like Prenda Law relied on the premise that people can’t afford legal representation and would have to take a deal. Almost all these trolls rely on filing hordes of suits en masse by a few lawyers. These new changes merely act to streamline the whole process. Currently many courts who see these large amounts of suits have pushed back and sometimes sanctioned the lawyers. The new system encourages this system instead of opposing it.
      • I don't see how the current batch of trolls demonstrate that. In the past trolls went after big corporations. There wasn't enough money to make it worth going after you and me. The reason they're going after you and me is that the big corps can only get sued so many times. There's not enough easy money class action lawsuits to go around.

        The new breed of trolls have been driven to find new sources of revenue by competition. It's the worst elements of the free market and government working together. Corru
        • by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

          The Prenda Law trolls just got sentenced 14 and 5 years each. Actual jail time for their abuses.

        • I don't see how the current batch of trolls demonstrate that. In the past trolls went after big corporations.

          Dude, have you been paying attention at all? Prenda Law [wikipedia.org]

          There wasn't enough money to make it worth going after you and me.

          The whole premise of Prenda Law was to go after thousands of ordinary people. Then they would offer settlements for thousands of dollars. The settlement amount is small enough that hiring a lawyer was way more than settling even if you completely innocent. Unless you had a lawyer friend or were a lawyer, the cost of litigation was much more than most people could pay. If you couldn't pay to settle or pay for a lawyer, you could get a default judgment.

    • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

      by phantomfive ( 622387 )

      I've read stories of law grades, $100k+ in debt, working as legal aids for $15/hr.

      Is it because they couldn't pass the bar?

    • by Anonymous Coward

      William Shakespeare has the ideal quote for how to deal with lawyers. They are actively killing civilization.

    • by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 03, 2019 @05:39PM (#59035892)

      They've been graduating lawyers at a super rapid pace, far too quickly for the economy to absorb them.... Lawyers will continue to turn our legal system into a weapon to extract cash from us.

      Ouch. You're so wrong my brain hurts. Where to begin:

      1. Graduating law school does not make you a lawyer. You still have to pass the bar exam, and significant numbers of grads never do that. In CA the pass rate is about 40%.
      2. You don't graduate from law school knowing how to litigate. It takes years of training under experienced litigators to learn how to sue.
      3. Most lawyers never litigate anyway. They provide legal opinions, setup wills & trusts, draft and review contracts, or perform many other services which don't involve going to court.
      4. Like any other profession there's a steep hierarchy. All those surplus law grads who can't find work have as much influence on the practice of law as heroin addicts. No one in legal circles cares about their opinion. Especially Congress.
      5. Congress listens to influential and big money groups like the American Bar Association (controlled by highly accomplished lawyers), the Association of American Trial Lawyers (ditto), etc. Not to no-name law grads working at Starbucks. They have as much pull in Congress as yak herders.

      Your argument is equivalent to saying we're graduating too many kindergarten teachers and that's why class sizes at Harvard are rising. Just no. Those two things aren't even in the same stratosphere. Logic fail - abort, retry, ignore?

      • is getting ready to pass the bar, right?

        And there is a world of difference between a teacher and a lawyer. Teachers are powerless. If we were graduating too many teachers it would just mean lower pay for them (which is hard to imagine). Lawyers have been taught a skill that can easily be abused.

        I've known lawyers who's only "job" was suing major insurance companies. But as mentioned there's only so many of those lawsuits to go around. But the supply of lawyers with the _skills_ needed for those laws
      • by Anonymous Coward

        This shows a misunderstanding of the poster's position. I think their point is best illustrated by the extreme: "Imagine if everyone except one person, farmer Joe, were a lawyer". In this case, it is easy to see that farmer Joe would soon find himself the subject of litigation, because that's what some proportion of lawyers do, and there are too many for the system to reasonably support. By varying gray areas, there is some point at which we have the optimum number of lawyers. If there are too many, the

  • Well yeah.. That's the idea. We have to protect the internet from user input.

  • by Anonymous Coward

    The public doesn't respect copyright because the length has become so long nobody alive today will recieve the benefit of the public domain, nor can they proove concretely that a future generation will recieve that beneift; this system can't work until that is fixed, and it isn't meant to.

    It's meant to maximize profits for a cabal who thinks the public is so stupid and they are so gifted that they can take anything they want or who are betting technology will make them fully obsolete so they profit-maximizi

  • I copyright the letter E!

    • Joke's on you, I got the lowercase e!
      • I copyrighted the space character, the 0 bit, and the OFF pixel what, 2 decades ago. So *every time* you turn your monitor OFF -- you owe me money. Be glad that I'm letting you sample and become addicted to my wares before coming after you all.

        You're welcome.
  • Oligarchy (Score:5, Insightful)

    by NothingWasAvailable ( 2594547 ) on Saturday August 03, 2019 @04:29PM (#59035632)

    I think the word you're looking for is Oligarchy. As in "The United States is functionally an Oligarchy."

    If the small time players want to have laws favor them, they need to purchase their own representatives and senators. To paraphrase Lawrence Lessig, we have a system of legal and organized corruption. It's called campaign finance and political action committees. Corporations and the wealthy can spend unlimited funds to influence our political system.

    A $5000 per plate dinner isn't about supporting a candidate, it's about purchasing access to the candidate, so that you can tell them your point of view. The $100,000 you give to a Super PAC that supports that candidate hangs on their future support of things important to you.

  • People using content created by others against their will are leeches and do need to have something life-alteringly bad to happen to them.

    How is this controversial?

    • If only that was what this bill did.
    • Re: (Score:2, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward
      ....Says the asshole who has leeched content from Yakov Smirnoff for his sig.
  • The action link for contacting my senator is broken. It gets a Wayback machine version, but I'm not confident using the contact buttons in that. The main eff.org page is up. I'll keep poking, but if somebody finds the reason and or workaround please post.
    • Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)

      by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Saturday August 03, 2019 @10:23PM (#59036612)
      Comment removed based on user account deletion
      • Sadly good old Abe Lincoln saw this coming 150 years ago and nobody listened...Abraham Lincoln, Nov. 21 1864 "I see in the near future a crisis approaching; corporations have been enthroned and an era of corruption in high places will follow, and the money power of the country will endeavor to prolong its reign by working upon the prejudices of the people until all wealth is aggregated in a few hands and the Republic is destroyed."

        Actually, he didn't. See http://www.abrahamlincolnassoc... [abrahamlin...iation.org] pages 4-6.

      • by Deef ( 162646 )

        I have heard from actual people in senator's offices that report that many senators and representatives do, in fact, tally up constituent responses in support of/opposed to a bill (I was told that one letter is assumed to represent ten constituents, nine of whom agreed but didn't write a letter), and that this is used to guide decision making. Note that if these totals are somewhat close, the senator may go on his own initiative (or the initiative of whichever lobbyist is paying him most), but if the totals

  • But at the same time, I've sat and watched as every blog post I've ever made has been sucked up, copied, and re-copied, and have seen my photos blasted across for-profit major media without even so much as a simple byline.

    It's incredibly common.

    The Internet has ushered in an era of eternal middlemen ... I lost count of the number of "aggregators" now that jack my content on a daily basis. One again ... for profit.

    I'm very lucky that I don't depend on any of this stuff for my livelihood, because it's

  • How to get around this:
    Buy a book on how to draw a face as a cartoon.
    Practice.
    Publish your own funny political meme.
    Wait for nation to pass a no funny political art work law.
  • That link to the EFF gets you there, yet when you enter your info and click SUBMIT, you get another form with no relevant choices regarding Copyright law!
  • That's not Forbes. It's a blog site for Forbes contributors.

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