Prison Time for Illegal Music Downloads.

Factual Questions
1

About five or ten years ago it was all the rage: downloading music for free off the internet. People did it alot. And they did it without a care in the world. “What are they going to do, arrest me?” they all thought. Now it is some years later, and the recording industry has long since cracked down on the practice. So people largely don’t do it anymore.

My question is simply this: Has anyone ever gone to prison for the simple downloading of music off the internet? Not posting or sharing the music (although for completeness, you can include that in your answer too). Simply downloading music off the internet.

The reason I ask is because I recently heard of a woman who was sued for a rather hefty sum, because she downloaded alot of music off the internet in her youth. But prison time for some? Hmm, I wonder…

Thank you in advance to all who reply:)

2

I don’t know of anyone. I don’t know why anyone would or even could be prosecuted to the point of imprisonment for downloading songs.

To me it isn’t that big of a deal.

3

You must hang out with some boring people. Music and video piracy accounts for a huge proportion of total bandwidth usage on the Internet.

4

Simple downloading isn’t criminal in a case like that.

http://www4.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/usc_sec_17_00000506----000-.html

There are a few other copyright crimes here, http://www4.law.cornell.edu/uscode/18/usc_sup_01_18_10_I_20_113.html but none of those involve simple downloading.

5

I have news for the OP: people still do it a lot. Do a blog search on Google for any album you can possibly think of, and I can just about guarantee you’ll find a download for it.

6

First off, a record company can’t initiate a criminal case agianst anyone. Only the government can charge somebody with a crime. Record companies sue people in civil cases. And you can’t be imprisoned as a result of a civil case. So the short answer is no.

But the longer answer is that the record companies have convinced the government to file criminal charges against some copyright violators. The FBI started Operation FastLink in 2004 against copyright violators. Some people have been convicted and sentenced to imprisonment but it appears they were all involved in uploading. Admittedly I didn’t go through all the individual cases so somebody may have been a token downloader. And while several people were sentenced to prison, I can’t confirm that anyone actually ended up going to prison after appeals and agreements were made.

I’ll also note that there is a counterwave moving through the court system against the record companies that’s arguing it’s illegal for them to file civil cases against people for violating criminal laws. The argument is that it’s the government’s job to enforce criminal law not private entities - if the government decides a crime isn’t worth prosecuting somebody else with a grudge shouldn’t be able to sue the “criminal” and penalize them with a disproportionate fine.

7

In general the music industry has found it’s better to cope with it than try to stomp it out. The problem stemmed from the music companies saw every download as income they are missing and this isn’t so. CDs long out of print and people wouldn’t download if it weren’t free represent a lot of what’s being downloaded.

I mean if I download a CD by Leslie Pearl that is long out of print that doesn’t result as a loss because the music company isn’t selling that. The artist isn’t out because they wouldn’t get royalites anyway. If I go to a used CD store and buy a used CD out of print, I get the music with no royalites going to the artist.

I’m not saying it’s not wrong and it’s definately against the law, but music companies are coming to realizing not ALL downloads represent a true loss to them.

8

I believe it’s legal to “download”, but not “upload”, in Canada. Correct me if I am wrong.
By “legal”, I mean “not illegal”…

I’m not sure I agree with this statement. There’s no direct, empirical way to prove this without a doubt, since lumped in this measurement could be all manner of youtube streaming and legitimate downloads, such as the hundreds or thousands of people downloading and torrenting Linux every day.

Short of utilising Deep Packet Inspection (which by itself is such a breach of privacy), I don’t think that’s provable.

sigh, and Canada’s already got DPI. What a country we live in.

9

You also pay a fee for all media like burnable cd’s to pay bands for music you don’t download illegally and burn to that cd.

10

Well I agree its not a perfect way to measure it but that the Internet traffic in Sweden dropped by between 30%-40% when the new piracy laws came in i think it’s a pretty good number to start with. See here and here

Also from a few years ago the, Steal this film part 2 mentions a drop of 30% of all European traffic when the pirate bay was taken by the Swedish police.

11

There have been a few cases in some odd countries of file sharers going to jail e.g. First sentencing for illegal file sharing in Czech Republic - AfterDawn