Copyright Theft – Should the internet be monitored and the force of the law applied?

[Tea Party Patriot]

While I am relatively libertarian on issues of both economic and personal freedoms the issue of copyright theft is currently giving me cognitive dissonance because on one hand you have privacy issues and on the other you have theft of private property. The proliferation of sites now offering “free” downloads of movies and e-books is ever growing, now it is even gone past file sharing and what I would describe as “facilitator” sites are now being used to avoid prosecution and litigation.

My question is what is going to be the solution to solving the problem of copyright theft and when are suitable penalties going to be introduced. You may not think that downloading something for free from the internet is theft but if it is breaching the copyright of the person who created it you are stealing and are just as guilty as someone mugging a passerby for their wallet.

So I would ask is should the EU in conjunction with national governments create a database to which would be added known facilitator sites according as they are identified and that all content added to and downloaded from these sites would be monitored. It would not be difficult to legislate for and the penalties that I would personally apply to offenders would be as follows:

1. Anyone caught downloading copyrighted material should receive a criminal conviction that does not carry a custodial sentence.

2. In addition to point 1 a fine not less than €10,000 should also be applied and that 50% of this would be payable to the owner of the copyrighted work.

If enough of successful prosecutions were handed out people would quickly desist from this form of stealing. The current situation where companies and artists are trying to sue a private individual is farcical and we need a comprehensive policy in order to protect what is the hard work of the artists involved be they film makers, writers, musicians or photographers.

Note to Mods - This is in the Europe forum as opposed to Justice because I believe an initiative needs to be a European level for it to work.

[Ren84]

Noooooo. I've just finished downloading a 50 Gig torrent of TV shows! Where will I get free episodes of Family Guy, South Park and The Daily Show?

[Tea Party Patriot]

Noooooo. I've just finished downloading a 50 Gig torrent of TV shows! Where will I get free episodes of Family Guy, South Park and The Daily Show?

On sale at HMV, Xtravision or from legal paid for downloads.

[truthisfree]

AFAIK pretty much everything you have suggested has been tried and failed and not without a whole lot of the artists whose works were being pirated complaining loudly about people being fined heavily for it. There is a load of BS spun about how much piracy costs the Corporations, they were too slow off the mark to adopt new technology and are really no no longer needed for the artists to get their work out there.

[johnny365]

I download on a regular basis, the retail price of music is just obscene.

[KongMing]

The Pirat......Oh, wait.

To answer the OP, one of the problems currently facing copyright holders is that legitimate owners of their material find it too difficult to put said material on their devices.

For example, I really like Clint Eastwood spaghetti westerns. I had a decent VHS collection of them, now it has become a dvd collection. I have an iPod touch. I want to watch these films on my iPod, right. I have a Mac, so it should be no problem to pop them into the drive, send them over to iTunes and sync them to the auld iPod. Think again, it involves downloading a file/dvd converter to put them into a format recognized by the .......blah dee frickin' blah, blah.

It's just too feckin' easy to hop on to megaupload.com or some other site and get it right there and ready to go.

Not to mention that I bought the film twice, once on VHS and again on dvd.

[Tea Party Patriot]

AFAIK pretty much everything you have suggested has been tried and failed and not without a whole lot of the artists whose works were being pirated complaining loudly about people being fined heavily for it. There is a load of BS spun about how much piracy costs the Corporations, they were too slow off the mark to adopt new technology and are really no no longer needed for the artists to get their work out there.

Well one of the things that would come to mind is e-publishing a road a lot of writers are now taking, selling books cheaper but making far more income by cutting out the physical publisher. However the problem now is that books seem to be widely available on line through piracy and this is going to be very hard on writers. It is very easy to take a pirated book on line and convert it into a format for your e-reader.

[Lassie]

Open source all the way I love LINUX. Share build on and improve - thats the way things get better. We are interdependent. How many people does it require to get the shirt you are wearing onto your back? Cotton growers (if cotton), little creatures n the soil, harvest, spinning, weaving , dying, cutting, sewing, transporting , retailing on and on. Makers of lorries, machinery etc. Why not try and copy right all these processes? 'Oh no ive intellectual copyright on cutting or sewing a shirt or driving a car. '

[David Cochrane]

Note to Mods - This is in the Europe forum as opposed to Justice because I believe an initiative needs to be a European level for it to work.

No. It's a legal discussion, it goes in the Justice forum.

[Tea Party Patriot]

The Pirat......Oh, wait.

To answer the OP, one of the problems currently facing copyright holders is that legitimate owners of their material find it too difficult to put said material on their devices.

For example, I really like Clint Eastwood spaghetti westerns. I had a decent VHS collection of them, now it has become a dvd collection. I have an iPod touch. I want to watch these films on my iPod, right. I have a Mac, so it should be no problem to pop them into the drive, send them over to iTunes and sync them to the auld iPod. Think again, it involves downloading a file/dvd converter to put them into a format recognized by the .......blah dee frickin' blah, blah.

It's just too feckin' easy to hop on to megaupload.com or some other site and get it right there and ready to go.

Not to mention that I bought the film twice, once on VHS and again on dvd.

You have a very good point in the above and perhaps one of things that should be required of publishers in the future is that once the person buys the right to the material that the only further payment they should have to make is to cover the cost of putting it into the new format.