Prison terms on tap for 'prerelease' pirates
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Prison terms on tap for 'prerelease' pirates
By Declan McCullagh
http://tinyurl.com/8vzmh
File-swappers who distribute a single copy of a prerelease movie on the
Internet can be imprisoned for up to three years, under a bill that's
slated to become the most dramatic expansion of online piracy penalties
in years.
The bill, approved by Congress on Tuesday, is written so broadly it
could make a federal felon of anyone who has even one copy of a film,
software program or music file in a shared folder and should have known
the copyrighted work had not been commercially released. Stiff fines of
up to $250,000 can also be levied. Penalties would apply regardless of
whether any downloading took place.
If signed into law, as expected, the bill would significantly lower the
bar for online copyright prosecutions. Current law sanctions criminal
penalties of up to three years in prison for "the reproduction or
distribution of 10 or more copies or phonorecords of one or more
copyrighted works, which have a total retail value of $2,500 or more."
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The bill could be used to target casual peer-to-peer users, although
the Justice Department to date has typically reserved criminal charges
for the most egregious cases.
Invoking a procedure used for noncontroversial legislation, the U.S.
House of Representatives on Tuesday overwhelmingly approved the
measure, called the Family Entertainment and Copyright Act. Because the
bill already has cleared the Senate, it now goes to President Bush for
his signature.
Enactment of these criminal penalties has been a top priority this year
for the entertainment industry, which has grown increasingly concerned
about the proliferation of copyrighted works on peer-to-peer networks
before their commercial release.
"This bill plugs a hole in existing law by allowing for easier and more
expeditious enforcement of prerelease piracy by both the government and
property owners," said Mitch Bainwol, chairman of the Recording
Industry Association of America. "We applaud Congress for taking this
step."
The bill's supporters in Congress won passage of the prison terms by
gluing them to an unrelated proposal to legalize technologies that
delete offensive content from a film. That proposal was designed to
address a lawsuit that Hollywood studios and the Directors Guild of
America filed against ClearPlay over a DVD player that filtered violent
and nude scenes. (ClearPlay had gained influential allies among family
groups such as the Parents Television Council and Focus on the Family.)
Peer-to-peer network operators criticized Congress' vote on Tuesday.
"It appears the entertainment industry has once again gotten Congress
to use taxpayer dollars to clean up their internal problems," said
Michael Weiss, chief executive of StreamCast Networks. Weiss, whose
company distributes the Morpheus client, says that many movies and
music files that find their way to the Internet early are provided by
insiders in the entertainment industry.
Adam Eisgrau, executive director of P2P United, a peer-to-peer software
industry association, said his group remains "concerned that the nature
of the punishment remains radically disproportionate to the technical
crime."
Added Peter Jaszi, a professor at American University who specializes
in copyright law: "I don't think this is an approach that is well
calculated to create respect for the system."
The criminal sanctions embedded in the Family Entertainment and
Copyright Act have been inching their way through Congress since late
2003. An earlier version was drafted in response to footage of "Star
Wars: Episode II," "Tomb Raider" and "The Hulk," reportedly surfacing
on peer-to-peer networks before their theatrical release. A few months
earlier, the major studios had halted their normal practice of sending
DVD "screeners" to Academy Award judges.
[snip]
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