Reps. John Conyers Jr. (D-Mich.) and Howard Berman (D-Calif.) have introduced a bill in Congress that makes illegal file swapping a felony. The bill carries penalties of up to five years in prison and up to a $250,000 fine. The bill also makes filming a movie in a theater without authorization a federal offense.
The bill, called the Author, Consumer and Computer Owner Protection and Security Act of 2003, or ACCOPS, is designed to increase enforcement of copyright laws. The bill would allocate an additional $5 million in funding to the Justice Department to investigate copyright crimes.
(via Wired News)
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Thats a total load of bull if this country still has a soul of anykind it should be stopped.
A felony for something that hurts noone thats just plain worng.
There are rapeists, drug dealers and crooked bussiness men the government should go after.
It’s total bull that something as harmless as P2P could carry a penalty as bad a rape or armed robbery.
This country was built on pricipals the human rights are more inportant then money and if shit like this passes then whatis their left of what our forfathers fought and died for they’d be spinning in their graves.
And those two morons John Conyers and Howard Berman should be removed from office and exiled from the country this is the USA not china.
It is noteworthy to nore that even Michael Jackson, who is perhaps the most prolific artist around today, disagrees with this bill. Here is the link: http://sg.news.yahoo.com/030721/1/3cq45.html
Despite what idiot american says, p2p does hurt people. Without property rights artists lack an incentive to innovate and create new songs… in the future the quality of music will decrease greatly because of this severe idiocy. Play on, playa.
P2P does hurt people… but the artists of the music seem to care less than the record companies.. in my oppion music should be free. No one should be aloud to make millions while doing nothing more than singing a song once a week and shooting a video in a month. The record companies are mad because the americans have found a way around the high priced cds. A cd with 15 songs should cost a dollar at most.. now as for the rejects in congress these two have gone of the deep end and should be removed from congress. The bill is nothing to worry about as it is unconstitutional. They are putting a penalty on something which is much the same of what we used to do, copy a cassette and give it to our friend. as the american said there are rapists murders people who steal cars… If i were the two.. brain deads… in congress i would go after the people that post how to information such as locking picking and bomb making… you know i have read 20 ‘how to become a killer’ documents online for free in the past month.. you can find this stuff on google, but i’m off topic. P2P will never end, as internet connections become faster it may become a simple ’swap by email’ program. and for the fly homie to say he\she has never recieved copy write merchandise illegaly is absurd, and anyone that has gotten illegal music\or anything else has no place to go against p2p
This is outrageous! A bill designed to protect artists by criminalizing art lovers? It’s simply ridiculous.
99.9 percent of P2P file sharing is done for personal enjoyment or “educational” purposes. There is absolutely no malicious intent here; it CANNOT be equated with other felonious acts.
I download a song because I like it, and I can’t rationalize paying $15 to $20 for that one song, just because it’s on a CD with 10 substandard tunes. THAT phenomenon is criminal. I’ll wager that my worst burned mix is better than any fully released CD/album (notable exception: RHCP’s “By the Way”; [FLY HOMIE: those guys can innovate - what's their incentive?])
If the RIAA needs some scapegoats, go after the .01 percent who derive monetary benefit from sharing copyrighted material …or the ubiquitous advertisers who pervade the P2P interfaces …the rest of us are mere music lovers. Does that make us criminal?
-S
N.B. What happened to the crusade against internet porn and prurient content? Isn’t that a better cause than impugning hundreds to thousands of my “peers”?
Music Lover says:
> This is outrageous! . . 99.9 percent of P2P file sharing is
> done for personal enjoyment or “educational” purposes. There
> is absolutely no malicious intent here; it CANNOT be equated
> with other felonious acts.
What planet do you live on? There’s no malicious intent in smoking marijuana, either, and its also “done for personal enjoyment”. [Disclaimer: I can't stand pot myself, but have friends who like it.] Hard drugs, like alcohol, sometimes cause anti-social behavior, but stoners are mostly just lazy.
But “More than 5 million Americans have been arrested for marijuana offenses in the past decade. Almost 90 percent of these arrests are for simple possession, not trafficking or sale.” [http://www.norml.org/index.cfm?Group_ID=3418] Although local laws vary, pot is on the Federal “Schedule I”, the most illegal group of drugs, so most of these are felony charges.
Next we also have the “Illicit Drug Anti-Proliferation Act of 2003″, a rewrite of the “RAVE Act”, snuck through by a bipartisan group of Senators headed by Joe Biden (D-DE). This law says that Bars (and all other event organizers, including rave organizers, who were the nominal target) ARE RESPONSIBLE FOR DRUG USE AT THEIR EVENTS if one could reasonably assume that drugs would be done at said event, even if the organizer and/or property owner made a good-faith effort to keep their event drug-free.
Senator Biden claimed that the the critics were exagerating the dangers of the bill, but the law has already been used for blatant political repression: http://www.drugpolicy.org/news/06_09_03rave.cfm
All I’m saying is to save some of your outrage for all the other repression out there.
p2p is..ok…. says:
> The bill is nothing to worry about as it is unconstitutional.
I aggree that this bill is outrageous, but how do you figure its unconstitutional? The current Supreme Court is fairly pro-free-speech, but their also very pro-Corporate. But even if they would still say that the 1st Amendment calls for a “fair-use” doctrine, the activities of file-sharers go way beyond “fair-use.”
I think music should be free because there is no point in having the record companies any more people are learning how to take over their own music. The most inportant part of music is to make people feel beter and have fun music is from every one so y should we pay for it I sing and rap and would do it for free because its all about the love of the music not the cash
I have to do a s.s. project on this topic. Its bullshit that people are being fined by loving music. Music is a great way to express yourself and emotions.
Despite everyone else’s claims, the Constitution clearly states that Congress has the authority to regulate Copyrights and Patents. It’s Article I, Section 8, Clause 8 of the United States Constitution. So when it comes to the Constitutionality of such a bill, you can’t argue with anything that is clearly written in the Constitution.
The current laws on Copyrights and patents are as follows: For Patents, it’s 17 years. For Copyrights (this includes copyrights on music), it’s the life of the author, artist, etc., plus fifty years. If more than fifty years have passed since the death of the artist/author of something, then that “something” is considered “Public Domain”, and is not subject to Copyright laws anymore. What this means is that in seventeen years, the copyrights on all the material Jimi Hendrix wrote will expire.
However, this bill does not mention anything about “Public Domain”. So if someone downloading “Public Domain” via p2p is prosecuted under this bill when that same person has downloaded ONLY public domain, only then will the Constitutionality of this bill be in question.
wow I don’t even know what to think of all this, they got to make a way for the artists to get there money yet but for them to pass this is just outright outrageous, cause I know alot of people that go to church 3 times a week and never break a single law besides what they want to pass and they don’t think there’s anything wrong with it, so I think it’s going to piss alot of people off cause there basically labeling everyone as a criminal, voters, church goers, everyone, they might as well put bars up alround the U.S cause we’ll all criminals then what a joke. And also that’s how I find good music I download and if I like it I go and buy it I don’t see the problem
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