

UK’s proposed 10-year max jail term for file sharing - teh_klev
http://arstechnica.co.uk/tech-policy/2015/08/the-uks-proposed-10-year-max-jail-term-for-online-copyright-infringement-must-be-stopped/

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pluma
The problem with these obviously absurd punishments is that they are a result
of conflating piracy and piracy-related crimes.

There's a difference between a regular individual illegally sharing a file in
private and a for-profit organisation doing the same. For most crimes the
motive is a huge factor in the severity of the punishment, the intellectual
property utilisation industry desperately tries to prevent that kind of nuance
from being applied to IP violations.

Even if you buy into the "file sharing is theft" mantra, the lack of
proportion should be obvious: you don't punish casual shoplifters the same as
career criminals who turn a profit on stolen goods.

Justice should be blind, no doubt, but context and motives matter. Cutting a
decade out of someone's life for privately hoarding data[0] is absurd.

That said, punishments are only reasonable if they are in proportion to the
damage (financial, but also social or mental) caused by the crime. The reason
most ordinary people consider piracy a trivial offense is that the damages
claimed by the industry have barely any basis in reality -- although what
damages would be realistic is difficult to say because any research into the
non-adverse effects of file sharing tends to be shot down.

I agree that piracy should be illegal. I just disagree on what should be
considered piracy and to what extent it should be punished. Jaywalking and
fare-dodging are illegal, too, but there are very few occasions in which they
could result in punishments that would ruin someone financially (or socially
in the case of jail terms).

[0]: An addendum: I prefer to distinguish between "normal" piracy (e.g.
downloading the new Hollywood blockbuster) and hoarding (e.g. downloading
every Hollywood blockbuster of the past decade including films you're not even
interested in watching just for sake of completion). Hoarding isn't new
(although the Internet makes it a lot easier compared to cassette and VHS
recorders or stacks of CD-Rs) and I think it's better to consider it as a
mental health issue rather than simply a "more extreme" (and thus more
criminal) form of piracy. My personal experience is that most hoarders in fact
also spend more money on legal media (e.g. cinema tickets, blu-rays or music
albums) -- which is of course considered less of a problem because it's legal,
although it's as much of a symptom as their piracy.

~~~
teh_klev
>My personal experience is that most hoarders in fact also spend more money on
legal media

I was a self-confessed hoarder, and you're right, I also spend plenty of my
hard earned on legal media and online streaming services (Netflix, NowTV,
Amazon Prime including rentals). These days I'm less inclined to
torrent/giganews TV series because they're mostly available online. If the
studios make their content available through legal streaming then people will
pay for it, I'm a perfect example of this.

The cynic in me is now waiting for our government to try and find a terror
angle to throw at private individuals freeloading for personal use.

