The US Senate today passed a bill to create an 'Intellectual Property Enforcement Coordinator' who will be tasked with launching anti-piracy initiatives, plus a seperate FBI unit to deal with copyright theft.
The War on Piracy is following in the footsteps of such crusades as the War on Drugs, the War on Terror and the War in Iraq, and promises to be about as successful.
Pirates targeted
The Enforcement of Intellectual Property Rights Act gives authorities sweeping powers to confiscate computers and other equipment used to illegally copy copyrighted material, increases the financial penalties for getting caught and boosts funding for federal and local anti-piracy operations.
One of the Act's more extreme provisions - allowing the Justice Department to sue individuals on behalf of copyright holders - was removed at the insistence of the White House.
The new copyright czar role requires Senate confirmation and will then report directly to the President and Congress.
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tdc
September 27th 2008
1. I am probably going to be in the minority when I write that I recognize the need for this type of new legislation.
The news story as related on TechRadar strikes hard when it brings up the power to confiscate computers. The story is less convincing that there is something amiss when it brings up the increased financial penalties -- on this latter point, it has to be remembered that penalties occur after a verdict of guilty, and that these are crimes we're talking about.
The gradual evolution of stricter laws can be traced to just how soft the penalties were for even wholesale, profit-oriented piracy even a few decades ago. Take a look at a case which reached the Supreme Court which pitted BMI against CBS: http://chart.copyrightdata.com/c15A.html#s307. This describes much of the background the music industry had faced. For a long time, the only penalties were treble damages (meaning: triple), as measured by the Congressionally-set rate of around 3 cents per track per copy. A pirate had to make thousands of copies of numerous songs before there was enough potential damage to make it pay the legal fees to sue; individuals were known to be infringers but there wasn't enough to make it worth collecting from them. Sometimes it seemed to the music industry that the individuals making home-made copies knew this too.
The rise of sharing sites -- visited by people who never have met one another, could never have loaned each other the same hard copies (which is legal), and with multiple copies being made which are then played simultaneously (something not possible with physical copies owned by individuals) led to needs for such copying to be addressed. Napster was a case in point, and when Grokster tried to go further in the courts than Napster did, Grokster found out that even the Supreme Court wouldn't rule in their favor. (See the summary at http://chart.copyrightdata.com/c13D.html#s032.) The Groksters are still out there, still doing blatantly illegal copying, so the new enforcement is going to happen. Don't be surprised.
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