The “Warning language specifying current penalties” section of the “FBI Anti-Piracy Warning Seal” page includes “The unauthorized reproduction or distribution of a copyrighted work is illegal. Criminal copyright infringement is investigated by federal law enforcement agencies and is punishable by up to five years in prison and a fine of $250,000.”
While false copyright infringement claims are less frequent than actual copyright infringement cases, why does a false claim only have a $2500 fine? False claims of specific crime should carry the penalties had the actual crime occurred.
The most likely explanation is that the organizations that want to make widespread copyright claims, some of which will prove to be false, influenced the drafting of the laws.
The false claim penalty was probably set many decades ago and never updated while the copyright infringement penalty was probably updated much more recently.
I don’t know whether the penalty for false copyright claims is too high or too law, but this is a patently ridiculous statement. No, a false accusation shouldn’t automatically have the same penalty as the violation itself. That’s insane.
Kadmos1, it seems like your threads are building up a pattern. You seem to resent it when people have or enforce intellectual property rights. Is that a correct impression?
I wonder what’s the genesis of this. Do you imagine that you will never create intellectual property or have a job that depends on it? More and more, our economy is good at creating intellectual property.
IP rights are the basis for a high percentage of lucrative, interesting, rewarding, and productive work.
That’s a fair impression. I want to be 1 of those people who can prove to Congress that certain copyright practices are unconstitutional and that this warrants impeachment, even for a SCOTUS judge. A consequence would be those execs at Disney lose the copyright to the original versions of the works that would have had a mere 56 years under the 1909 Copyright Act. Being a copyright minimalist, my theoretical works would be released under the Creative Commons.
For the 1st point, if a person commits a crime, whatever they are to be charged with that is proportionate to that offense, they should be given that charge. Similarly, a false claim that someone did the crime should mean the lying party gets charged with perjury in conjunction with the penalties for the actual crime. I don’t know if any other crimes are treated as such, boffking.
Hopefully, one of these days that I create another intellectual property rant thread, there will be several people agreeing with my points. To do that, I have to make the even more thought out.
Hopefully, one of these days that I create another intellectual property rant thread, there will be several people agreeing with my points. To do that, I have to make points be even more thought out. In addition, I would have to bring up examples of where, in my eyes, copyright practices were unconstitutional and I had found web articles by experts who share such views. For it to bee remedied, there be testimony before Congress and even SCOTUS. It would come down to telling a SCOTUS judge “Congress has agreed with the evidence I showed them that this copyright practice violates the Constitution in both spirit and letter. The only way to fix that is to strike it out of the Constitution. Failure to do so would mean you did an action that would be worthy of impeachment should Congress agree to it.”
I am also writing this in response to getting a false copyright claim last summer for a movie I uploaded onto YT 2 years ago this month. The original movie is public domain. However, it being a silent film it’s hard to know if the version I downloaded is the original or a derivative version that is copyrightable.
It seems you don’t really understand the constitution, or the concept of judicial independence.
If my advice meant anything to you, I would suggest that you might be better off putting your pre-determined conclusion on the shelf and really trying to understand law, constitutional law, and intellectual property before taking arbitrary stances like “copyright minimalist.”
Currently what you are doing is starting with your “minimalist” dogma and making wild statements that really reflect only your ignorance of many things.
I would advise that you wait until you have created something of value, the product of years of developing your skill and art, your years and sweat and labor, before you make commitments like this.
Yeah, that’s really not what all this—this message board, fighting ignorance, living life, etc.—is all about.
Your goal should be to learn things before you formulate ideologies about them, not the other way around.
Acsenray, say I did spend 5 years studying those laws you mentioned and it was in college. What things do you think I would need to know before my claim that such copyright practices being unconstitutional carry any weight? Wanting to prove both SCOTUS and Congress wrong on this is a feat unto itself.
No, it’s not insane at all for a knowingly false claim to have the same penalties as the actual infringement. What’s insane is how much they overcharge for infringement in the first place. $2500 is usually on the high side of what the infringement actually cost these companies, but they sue for a whole lot more. (The idea is to set an example, but has that stopped anyone? Seems not, given what I continue to easily find online.)
I also think the hostility is getting to be a bit much. Yes, he made a crappy post about Tarzan. But it’s not as if thinking copyright lasts too long is an unusual position. And now he’s not even addressing that, but another potential bit of unfairness in the system.
And, for goodness sake, asking someone to go take a legal course to be able to discuss a topic? Wut? Ther’es nothing to understand here. Copyright is too long. You do not need to know anything about the law to realize this. You just need the fact that it extends after the person who actually did the work is dead. How is that encouraging the dead person to make more work?
Equal penalty seems a very neat idea, and discouraging to frivolous lawsuits.
Except where the penalty for the accused is Capital — although even more discouraging of false accusations.
Saying that the current copyright term is too long and should be shortened for X, Y, and Z reasons is a debatable point.
Saying that it is patently unconstitutional and that any judge or legislator who disagrees must be subject to impeachment is not anywhere near the same thing.
And I didn’t say he needs to become a fully qualified lawyer. I said he lacks even a basic understanding of what he is talking about regarding the constitution and the law.
And I said that that if his true goal is actually to become less ignorant and make rational policy arguments then he needs to start somewhere other than with the conclusion that the copyright term is patently unconstitutional and that any judge or legislator who disagrees must be subject to impeachment.
So, it’s way more than a dumb post about Tarzan. It’s about charging into the world as an anti-IP radical when you really don’t even have a basic grasp of the concepts at hand.
If you want to change IP law, you’re never going to get anywhere by arguing that the current law is unconstitutional, and that the congresspeople who voted for the law should be impeached, and all the Supreme Court justices who didn’t strike down the unconstitutional law should be impeached.
That’s ridiculous.
If you want to argue that the current IP system is should be changed, then argue for why it should be changed. Then convince a lot of people, who will vote for a congress that will change the law.
You’re never going to find a secret cheat code whereby everyone suddenly discovers that your preferred system was actually the law all along. You’re going to have to get the law changed, which means figuring out a way to convince lots and lots of people that the law should be changed. Not figuring out ways to convince people that the current laws don’t really exist.
Just that if you want to change copyright law, that’s the only way forward. Hoping that the Supreme Court will come to their senses and declare our current system unconstitutional is not going to happen.
So if you want to change the law, you’re going to have to do it the old fashioned way, by pulling up to the steps of the Capital building with dump trucks full of money.
All I can say is if he spent half as much time practicing writing as he does complaining that he can’t copy Tarzan and pretend he created him he might have something marketable by now.