Are they crimes? Certainly. But because they're widespread, generally unenforced, mostly "victimless", people are outraged that they'd have such high penalties. If you applied that judgment fairly you'd probably bankrupt 3/4s of America, if not more, which would be bad. Any law that you don't want enforced in the general case is a bad law that's going to generate outrage when it is enforced.
Cory Doctorow puts it best in explaining why he Creative Commons licences his books:
> Most people who download the book don't end up buying it, but they wouldn't have bought it in any event, so I haven't lost any sales, I've just won an audience.
http://www.forbes.com/2006/11/30/cory-doctorow-copyright-tec...
Someone is harming the music industry, but it's not the listeners. It's the RIAA.
Most downloaders I know of are more collectors and explorers than anything else. By making numerous copies of artistic works, some of them very obscure, they could as well be providing a valuable data preservation service for future generations.
Just imagine if a generation manages to completely DRM works of art just to discover they lost their keys and the programs required to reconstruct those works... Without proper context, they will look like random noise to future archeologists.
I agree artists deserve adequate rewards for their works. Perhaps a compromise should be reached. It seems copyright has been abused and extended far too much, to a point where it creates more harm than good.
I understand that tort by definition is compensation for injury, but if that injury as defined by the law does not actually harm a party, it fits my definition of "victimless".
Statutory damages for copyright infringement have historically been in lieu of actual damages when such were hard to prove, and IIRC earlier versions of the copyright act explicitly said that statutory awards are not to be construed as punitive. It's hard to argue that these awards are anything but punitive.
As for the distribution issue, unless there are actual damages I still don't think the copyright owner is a victim.
That's like saying that you are a victim if someone walks across your property without permission. They may not be legally able to do that (in the US), but if the act does not affect you in any way, you can not justifiably claim to be a victim.
People are outraged by this for a perfectly good reason. The penalty seems too large for the deed. This is not simply a case of those-entitled-kids thinking that they deserve to be able to steal music for free; this is a reasonable response where someone is being bankrupted for the moral equivalent of speeding.
People had almost exactly the same complaints about sentencing during the Sun Devil era of computer security; hackers were just exploring, hadn't intended any harm, and surely hadn't cost millions in damages. Public opinion settled in the other direction.
It seems much more likely to me that it provokes outrage to penalize highly because it's widespread and laws against it are mostly unenforced. And if that's the case, the analogy with computer hacking is invalid, because only a tiny minority of Americans would even know how to crack a computer.
Other widespread, generally unpenalized acts-for-which-you-might-be-penalized-by-the-courts (hereafter "acts")[1] provoke outrage when they are enforced with heavy penalties, Other easy-to-commit acts are heavily penalized and provoke no outrage. Therefore, it seems to me your analogy is suspect.
1) Better than "deeds"? You threw scare quotes on that word for some reason. I'd rather just call them crimes, but I don't want to provoke an argument over the word.
1. Get out of the house
2. Remove an actual product from a physical store, so the loss will be physically noticed
3. Defeat the RFID tags on the merchandise (most stuff worth shoplifting is tagged)
4. Walk past the store greeters without looking suspicious (something an average mostly-honest person would struggle with)
And we all know public opinion is never wrong.
It's really easy to share copyrighted files. It's easier, in fact, than downloading them. Both are so easy people overconsume. They download more music than they will ever hear - music they would never buy if they had to incur the cost.
More interestingly, how do plaintifs prove the sharer allowed the copy of the whole file? It's easy to imagine any downloader got the files from a number of different sources, each effectively sharing a tiny part of the file.
Thinking about it... Couldn't the protocols not advertise the parts of the file the sharer has, but, instead, receive a list of wanted parts from the downloader and respond with some, but perhaps not every, part of the file? What would happen to these lawsuits if nobody ever shared the whole file with anyone?
This relates to an idea I had: create a "fair use" file sharing network, by posting carefully-chosen 10 to 30 second "review" clips of songs on various web sites, then distribute a tool (script, program, whatever) that can locate the pieces and reassemble them.
For that to work what you would need is an annotation protocol reviewers would adhere to (hash, start-end) that could allow a downloader to locate the missing pieces. The locator tool would also have to be designed in such a way not to ruin the fair-use defense too.
This is not a trivial problem and, I must add, we are talking about a tool designed to violate copyright laws and to get away with it.
It would be much wiser to direct our efforts towards a more rational copyright system instead of trying to break the law.
Actually, I think a $150,000 judgment for stealing a single CD would be outrageous.
I can see where you're coming from, but it seems to me that you are justifying making an example of people via massive financial penalties for causing no actual harm, only theoretical harm. If I make an unauthorized copy of an MP3, what is the actual harm? In what sense can an unobservable event be said to have happened? At best you can argue that it's a quality of life crime - if everyone did it, there would be reduced incentive to create and hence a lower standard of living. But if that's the case, why aren't other quality of life crimes punished as harshly? Drunk driving or speeding in a residential zone massively increase the chances that you will kill someone, and yet the punishment is nowhere near as harsh.
Let's not assume this either. Maybe this would result in more people who actually want to create, rather than doing it for the money, entering the industry. It would also avoid the middlemen who just skim off the top and don't add a lot of value.
I recommend reading "The Pirate's Dilemma" which is available from $0.00 upwards at http://thepiratesdilemma.com/download-the-book
Edit: The difference between the high fashion brand and the low price retailer clothes are quality, perceived quality, recognition/brand, legitimacy and cost. Which is more or less the same difference as between a pirated copy and an original one.
I do get your point though. fashion and files are not the exact same thing, but are more related than one thinks. There's also other effects of the consumer being the distributor. Even 10 years ago there where no scalable method to distribute out-of-copyright works in a non-profit way, and therefor a lifetime of copyright made more sense.
(1) Hopefully has the same meaning in English, what I mean is that it's constructed and not a prerequisite for the act of creating things. Copyright law is cultural, not 'natural', as demonstrated by the pressure of US companies and government on other nations regarding copyright law.
Ultimately, it's still not the same thing as one is a physical object that cost actual money for actual materials to produce, and the other is simply a computer process that duplicates bits.
I apologize for starting this conversation. That being said, I haven't seen it on HN before (though I'm sure it has happened). I'd be curious to see where the readership lands on this issue.
The verdict amount, however, is ridiculous. But so far, it's just been debate. I'd love to see a study on how many actual copies of music are made through a given file share, and how many of the downloaders avoided a purchase they would've made otherwise.
So what is the claim of damages ultimately based on? In a case of theft, there is an objective loss that can be quantified and compensated; but in copyright infringement cases, it seems like publishers most often talk about unrealized revenues. Is it appropriate for the courts to award damages based on the plaintiff's predictions of the future?
What do you suppose Atari would have sued for if they discovered someone distributing unlicensed copies of the "ET" 2600 game back in the '80s - the same game they eventually buried thousands of unpurchased copies of in a landfill? Would they have based their damages claim on the same sales projections that made launching the game look like a good idea?
It's not a credible argument to argue that because the law is the law, it's right. For example:
"If a man strikes a pregnant woman, thereby causing her to miscarry and die, the assailant's daughter shall be put to death."
That's from the code of Hammurabi. According to your arguments, because the legal system of the time affirmed it, it must be right. I'd wager most people would assume you are clinically insane if you tried that argument.
Laws are attempts to codify what society thinks is right. But the attitudes of society shifts, and so do laws. This discussion is about whether society thinks the outcome of applying copyright law is just, not about whether those who interpret the law are doing so correctly.
Filesharers do no damage. Theft does damage, but filesharers create value.
The RIAA makes over-the-top claims about the evils of file sharing, but district and appellate court judges in the US are not uniformly shills of the RIAA, and none of them adhere to your logic.
You're way off. It's $46,900.
https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/...
I think there's cognitive dissonance here between the ease of committing torts on the Internet and the severity of the penalty.
If someone physically stole CDs out of a publisher's warehouse over a long period of time, the marginal cost of those CDs is so low that the damage would be roughly equivalent to what a filesharer does. But nobody would be up in arms about a six-figure judgement.
But on the Internet, we all know that the same tort is a couple clicks away, and that it's widely practiced. So there's outrage and surprise when the law works the same way against those filesharers.
I guess I see things a little differently because my career has been spent in close contact with other torts that, while far more damaging than file sharing, are often just as simple to commit. Nothing stops you from sharing files, and so you feel somewhat entitled to do so. But nothing stops you from crashing any number of important web applications, either.