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Holy yikes and thank goodness I'm Canadian.
Without cutting and pasting the whole article (!!WHICH WOULD BE COPYRIGHT VIOLATION!!) here are a couple of particularly freaky bits:
* Criminalize "attempting" to infringe copyright. "It is a general tenet of the criminal law that those who attempt to commit a crime but do not complete it are as morally culpable as those who succeed in doing so."
* Life imprisonment for using pirated software. Anyone using counterfeit products who "recklessly causes or attempts to cause death" can be imprisoned for life. During a conference call, Justice Department officials gave the example of a hospital using pirated software instead of paying for it.
I'm not sure which of the above two (and there's lots more stuff in there, believe me) disturbs me more -- but the gradual progression from actual crime* to theoretical crime is, well, freaky.
As somebody who produces things that I would like to make a living from, I have a small amount of sympathy for copyright holders. But the idea of sending a hospital staff to prison for life because some intern dropped a bootleg copy of PowerPoint on an institutional laptop** is both very, very frightening and very, very Dubya.
Even better: this is being saddled on Homeland Security, so you can rest assured that if some crazed militiaman is building a suitcase nuke to take out the AntiChrist hordes at the DTF, they will intercept him and -- no, hang on, sorry, they'll be tracking and jailing a 13-year-old for burning a copy of the new Bon Jovi CD for his kid sister.
I'm deeply uncomfortable with what might be considered "attempted" copyright infringement. Unlike attempted murder or attempted extortion, this is so floppy as to be practically unusable, and looks ripe for abuse by the feds every time they want to take a peek in some kid's hard drive or harass a reporter for digging away at a story. In Canada, for instance, police essentially harangued a reporter for not giving up a source in the Arar case, and that's something that pops to mind with no effort at all. This seems like permission to ride roughshod over the electronic privacy of any citizen for any reason at all ("your ISP has reported suspicious traffic. Give us your hard drives.")
In short, eek. Big eek.
*and YMMV on whether copyvio is a crime in the first place. It's a broad and brutal category that covers a wide range of actions.
**yes that is a shrieking over-the-top exaggeration, but the notion that piracy is killing any media industry is also largely baseless and overwrought, so what the heck. |
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