Life in Prison Proposed for Some Copyright Pirates

I'm pulling information from a Web news story and when I'm done, you'll be amazed that it's not from The Onion:

-- The proposed Intellectual Property Protection Act of 2007 would make it a crime not just to download a pirated song, but to attempt to download a pirated song. What's more, the copyright doesn't have to be publicly registered, meaning that attempting to obtain a file that you don't even know is copyrighted could land you in prison.

(The Intellectual Property Protection Act of 2008 will undoubtedly expand on this to make it a crime to think about attempting to download a pirated song.)

-- The Department of Homeland Security will have a direct line to the Recording Industry Association of America, alerting the RIAA whenever someone tries to import pirated music. (By the way, the law seems to indicate that you could run afoul of this provision just by crossing from Canada into the U.S. with some pirated tracks on your hard drive.)

-- You could face life in the slammer if your use of counterfeit material "recklessly causes or attempts to cause death." (How could you kill someone with pirated files, you ask? You underestimate the life-sapping power of Chicago's Greatest Hits, downloaded from Kazaa and played loudly and continuously in your cube.)

The Department of Justice is lobbying for the legislation, which would also make it easier to get wiretaps to investigate suspected copyright violators and to seize the property of people found to be pirating material.

I don't mean to simply take cheap shots at the legislation. Intellectual property does mean something and has to be protected. And it is possible that someone could produce counterfeit medicine that could kill people.

On the other hand, nearly everyone I know has done something at one point or another that would put them on the wrong side of this law. Which means they'd all potentially be subject to wiretapping, property seizure and prison time. At some point, we as a society have to come to an agreement on what's fair and what isn't in the use of movies, music and other copyrighted material. I don't think proposing ever more draconian legislation will get us to that point.

Comments

So let me get this right, harsher punishment for pirated copyright material and yet no harsher punshiment of actual violent crimes?
Gee no wonder our society is going down the toilet.

backpack

May 15, 2007

10:23 PM PT

We appear to put more of our law enforcement time and effort into ruthleselly tracking down kids sharing music, then we put into tracking down drug smugglers, kidnappers, and robbers. What a profound misdirection of resources and priorities.
There is no stronger example of corporate America having a corrupting sway over the writing of laws in this country, then the music industry and "intellectual property" laws. Do these laws help real artists ? It seems to me that they protect more, the "fat cats" in Hollywood, at the cost of undermining the credibility behind the whole concept of intellectual property, as the "owning of a thought". The RIAA is the biggest threat that I know of - to the whole concept of intellectual property.

jwpete

May 16, 2007

3:12 AM PT