Legal/Government

Another ludicrous bill in congress

Senators John Cornyn, R-Texas, and Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif. introduced the Artists' Rights and Theft Prevention Act to enable jail term sentences for people who offer to share movies before they are released:

The threat of a three-year prison term kicks in when anyone makes an illicit copy of a movie "available on a computer network accessible to members of the public," when the film "was intended for commercial distribution but had not been so distributed at the time." Once the film is commercially distributed, the felony penalties appear to no longer apply.

But, it gets even better:

Peter Jaszi, a professor at American University who teaches copyright law, said he is "deeply troubled" by the wording of the draft legislation, because it does not say any actual copyright infringement must take place--only that the file be available in a shared folder, Web site or FTP (File Transfer Protocol) site. "It says we don't care if anybody got any of these copies," Jaszi said. "We're going to conclude that at least 10 people did. It relieves the copyright owner of having to prove that any violation of their rights actually happened."

It would be illegal to place an unreleased movie onto a network where someone else can grab a copy. Never mind if someone got a copy -- you're going to jail. Hmmm. Innocent until proven guilty -- anyone remember that concept? Sounded good a couple of hundred years ago, but now that we have the movie industry we obviously have to give up certain freedoms in order to protect the revenue of the people who already have too much money.

Thankfully my yearly trip to visit free countries starts next week.

Posted by Mayhem at November 14, 2003 10:43 AM