Spain's new piracy penalty: Six years in jail
zdnet.com
zdnet.com
On the other hand, I personally see this as part of a policy of appeasement and am now waiting for some huge 'donations/low interest loans' to come out to Spain from the USA/MPAA/RIAA/etc.
I'm not Spanish but I have seen the culture of copying and sharing and using pirated software that exists in Spain. A penalty like this may shut down a file locker or two, or may even take down a few torrent sites, but it will do nothing to deter file sharing in general - what's more ridiculous is that the proposal clearly states that it's in line with the people's culture to generally share software/music/movies/games/etc.
Given that it's such a half assed effort it could only be a response to pressure from the US, a response tuned to not raise too many eyebrows in Spain but at the same time unlock some bonuses/favors from the US govt.
Ultimately I think this has come as subsequent pressure and a fallout from the whole Rojadirecta debacle a few years ago.[1] (those guys basically sued the US government for seizing their domain... AND WON[2]!)
1 - http://torrentfreak.com/tag/rojadirecta/
2 - http://torrentfreak.com/u-s-returns-seized-domains-to-stream...
Lets also eliminate the difference between infringement, and fraud. Next time apple sues someone that infringe on their swipe to unlock patent, they should add a fraud case to it. How dare those phones deceive users with Apple's gesture!
How is losing all your booty not a big enough deterrent ?
Edit: Also, I'd like to make a distinction here between copyright infringement and financial fraud. I don't think it's been proven yet that people are losing jobs and companies are becoming bankrupt because of large scale copyright infringement. That isn't the same as financial fraud. Personally, I'd like my tax dollars to go first to a jail that houses someone that poses immediate physical danger to me or someone else. Then a list of other things. And finally to those 'dangerous' young'uns from the pirate bay. They're pretty far down the list of evil doers.
If that's all you lose, it's not a deterrent at all. If the punishment for stealing is simply that I have to give back all that I got caught stealing, I would never not be stealing because there would be absolutely no risk that I would end up worse off than my present state.
If you do have money to begin with, taking it all away and imposing fines/wage garnishment as penalties are a major deterrent.
For someone with Madoff's connections, it wouldn't be hard to acquire a false identity and resume some kind of low-level fraud. Putting him in prison is the best way to protect the public IMO.
I personally think that prison sentences are just as valid for non-violent crime as violent crime anyway. It's a disincentive, it's aptly punitive in cases such as Madoff's, and it makes it harder for the offender to re-offend.
Criminal law exists to sanction actions that threaten society enough that the state is justified punish offenders ie murder or physical theft. Civil law by contrast exists to right wrongs between private parties ie suing for compensation.
Copyright violations strike me as a clear case for tort. It's a commercial, not a penal matter, but thanks to effective lobbying, the state has now become the MPAA's commercial lawyer.
I'd be the first to agree that draconian penalties for copyright infringement are inappropriate, but I don't think the above is a strong argument, partly because it assumes that whoever is being sued for copyright infringement actually has sufficient funds to make good on any harm they've done, and partly because it assumes that harm can be quantified to a standard a court will accept. Neither of those things is necessarily true, though substantial harm may come to the copyright holder who has been wronged all the same.
Civil law exists for exactly this reason, and has for hundreds of years. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_law_(common_law)#Purpose>
Whether or not it is effective or fair is a different matter. As you point out, there are often financial & power imbalances between parties. One would have to make a very different kind of argument that this justifies the state prosecuting on the wronged party's behalf rather than say, making tort more equitable.
Six years is still pretty fucking ridiculous. And I somehow doubt the newspapers will see any management go to jail for grabbing people's photos from Flickr.
Providing pirated content is against the law whether the downloaders were going to buy the music otherwise or not.
So I don't see how your requirement applies.
I've work for the government and their lawyers, in companies based on pirated software (from MS, from Adobe, etc).
Can we please start fighting piracy there ?
Then we should follow fighting piracy in the power positions.
We have a lot of that, and trust me, even on public evidence of the crime, they don't go a single year to jail.
Maybe when all that is clean, we should think on how we can waste our jails better...
Also they are saying "let he who is without sin cast the first stone." i.e. they make sure their own house is in order before passing judgment on anyone else. Get rid of all their own illegal software and only then are they in a position to charge others with the same crime after all, nobody is above the law.
... except those with enough money or information to bribe, blackmail or topple governments and assassinate other world figures with impunity.
- high unemployment = no money - entertainment needs + no money = piracy
And now they've come up with jail time. Awesome. I wouldn't like to be the spanish gov right now.
b) it's for the people operating/owning "link" sites that exist purely to profit from and facilitate piracy. These people gamble the income from millions or billions of monthly ad impressions are worth it, they don't deserve a free pass.
c) users of such sites are not being targeted, except by the site owners peddling mountains of spyware and affiliate scamware all over their sites
What happens if you have a legitimate publication and link to a source that happens to also have illegal material ? This opens a can of worms.
"At the site's peak in mid-2009 it generated up to £50,000 ($78,500) per month in advertising revenue, and was more popular than Facebook"
Anyone who wants to claim there is something actually materially bad there needs to provide evidence that some harm was done to the economy -- show that the public lost-out. That would be really quite interesting, because economic research seems to have had difficulty doing that so far.
File locker sites are not targeted. They're outside Spain anyway. The target are clearly the forums where people posts links to file lockers.
Do you think nobody cares about incidental linking? Just wait and see. What will happen when this law starts being applied? Obvious first move for these forums owners will be putting the sites out or spanish jurisdiction. People will also start to use other less specific forums to post links.
This measure will be useless, but legal monstrosities like "indirect profit" and other vague provisions will still poison the legal system.
This is just a dirty hack to placate US gov.
> a) it's a proposal
In English: The US has expressed its threats again.
In other words, six years in jail for telling people where they can download possibly infringing copies of copyrighted material? Wow, when you put it that way, it sounds ten times worse.
Most of these sites are actually warez search engines. This makes this law pretty toothless.
It says "owners of sites found to be making money [directly or indirectly!] from linking to pirated material will face prison sentences of up to six years and the closure of their site. ... users of these link-sharing sites will not be targeted under the new law"
This is even worse. Users who knowingly post links to infinging files would be a more appropriate target than the site owners. Under the new law, anyone who allows user posts will have to pre-moderate everything or prohibit users posting links?
The obvious problem with the law is much more basic: how can the site owner know whether there is or is not infringement at the other end of a link? Are site owners expected to somehow have a list of all copyrightable works and know the terms on which each of them is licensed to each recipient?
Placing the burden on the operator of the linking site creates a situation where no one will dare to make a link, because if it turns out to go to something infringing the linker will be subject to prosecution.
"the right to freely express and spread thoughts, ideas and opinions through words, in writing or by any other means of reproduction."
In the end a lot of this is done behind the scenes, EU spirit may be OK, but the signing is done by people and people can be threatened, bribed etc.
Although i kinda wish they did. They EU is not some lightweight when it comes to economic power.
However, I realize this is not the point, this is the start of a slippery slope. If they can curtail freedom of expression in this instance, what other instances will they think they can curtail it also? What does that lead to? Eventually all freedom of expression could be removed based on a single precedent - is this that precedent?
Further to this, if all freedom of expression is removed, what then? When people can't express themselves freely, is that cause for a riot? That depends largely on the culture of the country - so is Spain a country that's likely to riot if their freedom of expression is removed? Only those that grew up there and live there every day can answer that question.