On copyright.

[luislsacc]

I'm making this thread for two reasons:

1 - Me likey cans of worms, so I'm opening a new one;
2 - I want to get a feel for what you guys think on a piece of legislation being pushed by the ruling party.


The law boils down to this - there will be a tax ( in the style of V.A.T., one time payment only), which places an increased amount of ( all values in euros) 15 cents per gigabyte of storage on smartphones, 2 cents on memory cards and such, and 5 euros for printers, with a max ceiling of 25 euros for any amount of storage ( 10 terabytes and 100 terabytes, would both pay 25). The money collected from this tax would then go on to a fund which would be distributed to copyright holders who saw their rights infringed.

There are a slew of legal problems with this, and if the law was passed as described here, anyone who felt like hiring a decent lawyer would have the law thrown out of use as it goes against many legal principles we've got. No, what I want to discuss is the merit of this idea, and copyright in general. I wouldn't agree with a law like this being passed unless it also involved legalizing (or de-penalizing) what's now considered copyright infringement, as if people are paying for it, they should get something in return. Especially considering that this type of tax needs a direct retribution from the State, and the right to continue buying things you were already buying before doesn't seem like enough to me.

Also, do you think copyright infringement should be punished penally. And if so, is the time proportional to the crime? In other words, should the person who pirated a movie spend the same amount of jail time as the one who beat someone else, and should they even co-exist in the same prison system?

Edit, I'll link an article on it here, in it's original portuguese, as english articles on the subject are several years old. May google translate help you.

[crayzz]

I like that they're trying, I guess. Copyright infringement is pretty rampant (not that I'm not guilty). I'm not even wholly against the tax: pennies on the dollar from everyone wouldn't hurt anyone, but it would give some recompense to those who saw their copyright infringed.

[Nepene]

I don't support punishment of copyright infringement. There's not much evidence that it actually does harm.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-21856720

It may actually help. I don't support jailing people because creator's feelings were hurt.

[Deepbluediver]

Copyright and patent infringement seem to go hand-in-hand, and for the most part I support the way they do it in the U.S., which is I believe a limit of 20 years for patents and 70 years (supposedly the lifespan of the creator) for copyrights.

Except that recently the patent office doesn't seem like it's able to keep up with advancing technology, particularly things like computer programming, and I thought I read they recently they offered a copyright extension on some comic-book superhero. So you've got patent-trolls suing and counter-suing everyone over the most inane stuff, and we seem to be circumventing the entire twilight/obsolescence of certain copyrights.

It may actually help. I don't support jailing people because creator's feelings were hurt.

Would you support harsher punishments if someone could prove significant financial or other harm because of it?

[luislsacc]

Would you support harsher punishments if someone could prove significant financial or other harm because of it?

This doesn't seem like a good metric to me. One of the essential things in being able to attribute someone guilt lies in their at least proximate cause. If Tim illegally downloads a song, the overall damage is incredibly small ( some would say none), now pair that with the website that allowed Tim to download the song and the amount of potential damage they have is much greater. However, both have pretty much done the same breach of fundamental principles behind copyright law - that someone's idea or product should not be appropriated without consent. Sure, the amount of damage they do is different, but the breach in principles is the same, and both should be corrected. The reasonable thing, to me, between sending Tim to jail for downloading an album or not sending anybody to jail for these types of offenses is the latter. Therefore the laws should be changed in order to dismiss the idea that copyright is a right strong enough to need penal protection.

Then there's the whole "widespread customary attitudes are a source of law" - I do not personally know more than 2 people who don't illegally download music/films/something, outside of people who don't actually know how to do it (senior citizens and the like). Heck, many teens teach their parents to do it, and none of these people view it as especially wrong - and when enough people don't believe something is wrong, the law should reflect that. I like the thought behind the suggested legislation because it already supports the idea that alright, everybody's doing it, we'll give you something back for it.

[yomikoma]

Copyright and patent infringement seem to go hand-in-hand, and for the most part I support the way they do it in the U.S., which is I believe a limit of 20 years for patents and 70 years (supposedly the lifespan of the creator) for copyrights.

Except that recently the patent office doesn't seem like it's able to keep up with advancing technology, particularly things like computer programming, and I thought I read they recently they offered a copyright extension on some comic-book superhero. So you've got patent-trolls suing and counter-suing everyone over the most inane stuff, and we seem to be circumventing the entire twilight/obsolescence of certain copyrights.

Originally copyright was as short as you say but large companies have managed to get it extended to "life of creator plus N" where N is whatever it needs to be to keep Mickey Mouse out of the public domain. These changes are of course retroactive so most of the 20th century may never come out of copyright.

(Patents are their own huge mess.)

[Nepene]

Would you support harsher punishments if someone could prove significant financial or other harm because of it?

More likely I would be rather confused at the mysterious contradictory sciences. Like if someone showed clear and good science that stab wounds improved physical health.

If all the science had shown that significant harm in the past, yes. Any punishments should be proportional to the harm of course.

[vvn]

The distribution of the money seems rife with potential trouble. Large companies with lobbyists would get their cut. What about the little guy? YouTube could change their usage rules, and claim a piece of that money. Are they paying proportional to illegal downloads? how will they track that? Much of the content consumed by the masses these days is also generated by the masses. Do you get paid per twitter follower x number of tweets?

Storage gets charged, but not streaming? Interesting.

It could change a lot of things. Sounds messy.