Imagine BitTorrent Group Sysop Speaks Out as He Heads to Prison
torrentfreak.com
torrentfreak.com
“... he mentions that in his opinion the case should have been a civil one, and he doesn’t see why copyright infringement is a federal offense."
Can anyone elaborate why is it a Federal crime, like say kidnapping or bankrobbing?
I can totally understand why it is a federal crime - copyright has to be enforced across the country. It'd be rather senseless to enforce copyrights by states.
Now, the real issue of course is as what he said: Why is this a crime? Shouldn't this be a civil issue, to be settled between the two parties? This is the part about copyright enforcement laws I don't get: how is it a crime?
I kinda understand at least one reason why it's not that simple. In high profile cases like this, you could have hundreds of copyright holders wanting action. Coordinating all those people could be impossible, and thus legitimate cases would fall flat on their faces just for lack of cooperation.
http://www.copyright.gov/title17/92chap5.html#506
Specifically: "(C) by the distribution of a work being prepared for commercial distribution, by making it available on a computer network accessible to members of the public, if such person knew or should have known that the work was intended for commercial distribution."
The law was originally written with printed material in mind. In those days, it's obvious that someone going to the trouble of setting up a printing press to duplicate a book or pamphlet was infringing copyright on a "commercial scale" -- which is where you cross the line from civil to criminal liability.
Digital media has been a grey area. RIAA/MPAA sits on one extreme, and the "information wants to be free" crowd is on the other. Today, I think that there is a consensus that a private citizen downloading a copy of a copyrighted work isn't a crime in most cases.
The grey area is around distribution. Is somebody seeding a torrent committing a crime? Most people would think no, if they think yes, not to the extent that it is worth prosecuting. Is someone sourcing and distributing unlicensed material at a reasonably high scale, branding it with a distintive mark (IMAGINE) committing a crime? The Feds think so.
If someone is redistributing information without a license in a not-for-profit manner, what is more important. Retribution and punishment, or victim compensation to the individual who produced the information?
Digital media, or someone printing out a pamphlet. Does the technology really matter when deciding what the goal of the law is? To me, it sound obvious that non-profit redistribution of information without a license is at most a civil law crime. That has nothing to do with "information wants to be free", and all to do with common sense in regard to the fundamental design of laws.
It depends on your point of view. If I paid a sports league millions of dollars for the right to broadcast a game, and you decided that you would take my broadcast and re-broadcast it for free, you are damaging me to the tune of millions of dollars -- dollars that you cannot possibly repay.
Technology is key here, because it lowered the barriers to reproducing content. Printing a pamphlet in 1850 was a big deal -- you needed a printing press and specialized workers. Today, you need 5 minutes and a $50 printer. Same story with vinyl records, or projector film.
At the end of the day, the answer lies somewhere in the middle. If I were King, I'd say that copyright holders are entitled to fair compensation, but in return for that compensation, society is entitled to have things enter the public domain in a reasonable period of time as well.
Also a single person rebroadcasting is probably only making a handful of copies. You can't say that they are personally damaging you for all those millions of dollars. Unless you want to exonerate everyone else in the swarm.
Because the golden rule is that the one who has the gold makes the rule?
Seriously now: it's when I see crazy stuff like that that I'm happy to live in Europe. Even if not everything is clean here: especially with all the ones who have the gold trying to lobby hard and use insiders to push crazy EU laws in.
Another really serious issue is that "TV on demand" can often be really sucky: I'm using a TV+Internet provider that sells movie but the offering is really lame. I mean: it's terribly lame. As a result I'm sometimes asking friends who are into piracy to give me copy of some movies I'd be fully willing to pay 4 or 5 Euros for (the typical price at which my provider sells me the movie).
Going to the DVD store to rent a DVD? I used to that and pay for my movies. But these stores they're dying one after the other (due to the competition of both "tv on demand" and piracy).
So for some movies I "need" to pirate them if I want to see them, which is sad.
Punishment seems hard to get right.
That's why some advocate focusing on rehabilitation instead of punishment. I'm not really sure if I agree, rehabilitation sounds bit too close to brainwashing and clockwork orange in my mind.
When you file for bankruptcy, you are usually required to take some classes on managing your finances. This is a rehabilitation of sorts, but I wouldn't call it 'brainwashing.'
Sounds quite a bit slowly than actively trying to reform them.
Some people seem to have the idea that reforming criminals is just a bunch of 'bleeding hearts' going into the prisons and singing 'kumbaya' with the prisoners, then releasing them as 'reformed.'
This might make sense for murder, but for most lesser crimes it's problematic. If someone is in the habit of getting in bar fights every few times he goes out drinking, would we be justified or even well-served to put him in jail until we're sure he would never go out drinking again? That could be decades!
It goes without saying that this idea is extremely problematic with respect to "crimes" against fictitious "property" like we have here.
Sounds like something extremely likely to have the "voters" self-select in a way that biases the results. You can easily imagine e.g. prison companies exhorting all their employees to vote in favor of excessive sentences for the things in danger of having their excessive sentences reduced or eliminated, with the argument that if it happens they'll lose their jobs.
But more than that, it seems pretty obvious in general which crimes have excessive penalties: It's the non-violent not-for-profit ones with felony penalties. I'm sure you can think of specific exceptions (e.g. "not-for-profit" state-level espionage), but in general it's a very good heuristic.
In particular, the "assume profit from volume" characteristic of some of these laws is a major failure that needs to go. With the drug laws the limits are set sufficiently low that you have recreational users who just buy/have a lot at once entirely for personal use being prosecuted as distributors, and with copyright the number of copies made is so far abstracted from the actual harm to the copyright holder and is so hard to accurately measure that making it the deciding element in criminal law is a blunt instrument at best and to be less kind is exactly the sort of thing that can lead to the felony prosecution of someone like Aaron Swartz. If the government wants to prosecute someone for engaging in a for-profit activity, they should have to actually prove that you made a profit from it.
I might add that the continuous allegations of bribery and corruptness does not really help his case.
I wonder if he would had made any money from this, a better lawyer would had better represented him in court, and thus serve a lesser sentence. That is, even while facing more serious charges.
That might be a good reason for funding state-provided attorneys. It's a terrible reason for making it a crime.
Having for-profit copyright infringement be a misdemeanor is not without reason. But it should have to be for-profit, i.e. actual money is proved to go into their pockets, not assumed to be for-profit based on circumstantial nonsense, and the penalty should be very low for first time offenders and no more than a year in any case.
There is no flaw in this logic. </sarcasm>
This is the second post I've come across which equates the move from Civil Law to Criminal Law with some sort of logistics. I.e. "It's difficult for people to sue, therefore it should be a criminal offense." I can't understand why people aren't taking into account the change in punishment.
People don't go to jail in Civil Law, but they do in Criminal Law. Why should the punishment increase just for logistical reasons?
If there's will there's a way. If there's money to be made, there's will for it. After all, if we throw enough money at it there's enough will.
Some people rely their income on things like copyright. They have kids to raise, house to pay and so on. It would totally suck for them to be cut from the income.
The whole setting is just sad though.