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Comment by jacquesm | Hacker News Reader

Of course she should be given the benefit of the doubt too.

See, if you as an outsider want to make sure that all parties are held to the same standard then you should be willing to apply that standard to your worst enemy as well.

Note that I am not in any way defending Sony or their conduct, I just want the same standard that I'd like to apply to downloading music to apply to this instance of possible copyright violation.

Sony is a terrible company and they deserve to go down because of the way they've harassed private individuals, they've lobbied for ridiculous legislation and have done an enormous amount of wrong. And in spite of all that you should still be even handed in dealing with them.

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I agree that we should hold all parties to the same standard no matter who the party is, but commercial usage should add additional expectations from the defending party. Commercial use is commonly perceived as "worse" than if it's done for private/non-profit use.

But my initial comment was mostly to acknowledge that we do not give the benefit of doubt to private persons, but we do to commercial entities. The law should be equal, but had this been a discussion about someone who downloaded songs, there wouldn’t have been a single comment questioning the validity of the accusation.

> there wouldn’t have been a single comment questioning the validity of the accusation.

That just isn't true.

Thankfully, we do have hacker news as a good indicator. Lets use the case I refereed to: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4818159

Even the title say "pirate bay girl". Not a single comment ask if this was just a innocent mistake done by the girl. not a single comment address if either the father or the girl have read copyright law or was aware which sites are authorized sources and which aren't.

> there wouldn’t have been a single comment questioning the validity of the accusation.

did you mean something else? You could not of meant that.

Could not've.

...young Skywalker

I work in advertising for multi-national clients the size of Sony, and believe me, acquiring the rights to images is a hugely important step in any marketing campaign. Most likely Sony hired an outside firm to create them a logo, and that firm copied it instead. I have no doubt Sony will apologize and pay a standard fee plus some for its use. If you think a huge corporation like Sony, with billions of dollars of sales a year, is purposely looking to rip off a single $1000 logo and hoping nobody would notice, you don't understand big business.

What is the likely reaction going to be for the agency that was supposed to create this for Sony? Will they just be fired from doing work for Sony, or are there any clawback provisions for the firm submitting supposedly original work that wasn't?

After they were told of their mistake, did they stop with the infringement or did they continue selling their devices?

Its one thing to do a mistake, but its an other to continue because its cheaper to ignore copyright law than to do a complete stop in the production and selling of a product. At that point they are doing willingly infringing copyright law.

> See, if you as an outsider want to make sure that all parties are held to the same standard then you should be willing to apply that standard to your worst enemy as well.

That is a pretty difficult line to uphold when you can have no sway on said worst enemy and he's already been engaging in egregious behavior with no end in sight. Then isn't it just you being the sucker?

I don't think it's necessary to use the same standard in personal-use and commercial-use situations. The current law already makes such a distinction. That seems reasonable and consistent to me.

So, get back to us when the 9-year-old uses the pirated music to attract business to her lemonade stand.

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