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Jason Levine
Premium
join:2001-07-13
USA
| reply to Nightfall
Re: Bad Article, Poor Advice
I've long been a fan of having two separate penalty systems for copyright violations. Call them "Professional" and "Casual."
Professional Copyright Violators would be anyone who violates copyright for profit. And example would be those folks that get one CD, burn a hundred copies, and sell them on the street corner for $1 each. The penalties for Professional Copyright Violators would be the same as the current scheme calls for.
Casual Copyright Violators would be anyone who violates copyright without seeking profit. (If you violate copyright with profit in mind, but are unsuccessful at it, you still get classified as a Professional.) An example of this would be someone who shares out copyrighted music on a P2P network without the copyright holder's permission. The penalties for this would be much less. Let's say about three times the cost that buying the item would typically incur.
Using this system, a person caught sharing 1,000 songs on a P2P network would need to pay three times $0.99 (iTunes cost) for each song, or $2,970. (Ironically, I picked that number out of the blue and it wound up very close to the RIAA settlement figure.  It wasn't intentional!) At that amount, the guilty will still feel a financial hit ($3K is a big amount for most people) but the innocent won't feel so threatened that they just automatically roll over because it is easier and cheaper. | |
PDXPLT
join:2003-12-04
Banks, OR
| said by Jason Levine  :Professional Copyright Violators would be anyone who violates copyright for profit. And example would be those folks that get one CD, burn a hundred copies, and sell them on the street corner for $1 each.... Casual Copyright Violators would be anyone who violates copyright without seeking profit. ... An example of this would be someone who shares out copyrighted music on a P2P network without the copyright holder's permission. The penalties for this would be much less. Why should the penalties be much less? The potential damages to the copyright owner are far, far greater.
In your examples, the copyright owner, in the case of the "professional violator", only loses the potential revenue from 100 customers. In the case of the "casual violator", the violator has published the copyright owner's property for free, unlimited, worldwide distribution, via the internet, which means that the owner potentially loses his entire customer base. That's why the fines for this type of infringement are so high, and can even include criminal penalties now, in certain circumstances. | |
Jason Levine
Premium
join:2001-07-13
USA
| The penalties are worse because the professional violator is looking to get a quick buck off of someone else's copyrighted item (without the appropriate permission). My example cited 100 customers, but the professional violator likely wouldn't stop there. They would press thousands of copies and sell them on the street corner. These "lost sales" (I tend to hate that term) are sales of the entire CD. So even with my limited example, the 100 customers means a loss of $1,500 (given $15 per CD usually). (This ignores the fact that some of those $1 buyers wouldn't have bought the $15 legitimate version, but let's ignore that for now.)
Meanwhile, the casual violator might be someone made a thousand songs onto a P2P network, but it is hard to prove just how many people downloaded from them. Across those 1,000 songs, they might have had a single download or a dozen, or a hundred thousand. So absent any ability to determine how many songs were downloaded, I would err on the side of caution. Assume that each song was downloaded once (the one time that the RIAA downloaded the file to confirm that it was the right file) and assign penalties from there.
With P2P shared music, the competition isn't really the CD, but digital sales (iTunes, Napster, etc) which tend to run $0.99 each. Given that, and given the one share = one download assumption, the "lost sales" amount to $990. Therefore, it really isn't fair to charge $750 - $150,000 per violation, or $750,000 - $150,000,000 total. Tripling the "lost sales" figure provides an amount that will act as a disincentive to uploaders while not bankrupting ordinary people who don't understand the particulars of copyright law. (And there are a lot of those people out there.) | |
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