Copyright violators should face criminal penalties?
Jason Romney (jromney@werple.mira.net.au)
Mon, 12 Feb 1996 12:51:47 +1100
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COPYRIGHT VIOLATORS SHOULD FACE CRIMINAL PENALTIES
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Copyright © 1996 Nando.net
Copyright © 1996 The Associated Press
WASHINGTON (Feb 8, 1996 00:53 a.m. EST) -- People and companies that
violate copyrights on the Internet should face criminal penalties,
motion picture association head Jack Valenti told a congressional
panel Wednesday.
"These creative works are the jewels in America's trade crown,"
Valenti said. "If you cannot protect what you own, you don't own
anything."
The House Judiciary Committee's panel on courts and intellectual
property is considering legislation -- based in part on
recommendations by the Clinton administration -- to clarify copyright
law for electronic information.
Valenti's group, the Motion Picture Association of America, is
concerned about such copyright protection because in the future movies
and TV programs might be delivered via computer networks, such as the
Internet.
Civil lawsuit damages alone won't scare the bandits off the Internet,
said Valenti. Many of these pirates would regard such financial
penalties "as simply a cost of doing business."
Agreeing with him on the need for criminal penalties were Frances
Preston, president of Broadcast Music Inc., and Edward Murphy,
president of National Music Publishers Association.
The three also agreed that the legislation should be passed quickly.
Separately, Valenti and Preston rejected a proposal by Rep. Rick
Boucher, D-Va., to exempt on-line service providers from copyright
infringement liability and to delay passage of the bill until those
providers and the producers of copyrighted materials agreed on the
appropriate language.
The on-line service providers, Boucher said, cannot know what all the
users of their services are doing and they should not be held liable
for the actions of third parties.
Ed Black, president of the Computer & Communications Industry
Association, said the bill "may go too far towards advancing and
protecting the interests of content providers ... at the expense of
distributors and users."
"If on-line service providers are strictly liable for the
infringements of their subscribers, they will pass the cost of this
liability onto the consumer in the form of higher access fees," Black
said.
But Preston said that if the services were exempted from liability,
"copyright owners' recourse will be severely limited to pursuit of
individual network users whose identities are typically known only to
the services to which they subscribe."
Preston and Valenti also rejected Boucher's offer to write into into
the bill the conclusions of the few courts that have handled such
cases. Those courts have cleared on-line service providers of
liability because they either were not actively involved in the
copyright infringement or they did not know it was occurring.
"If we don't provide statutory clarification, it won't be long before
a court will disagree," Boucher said.
Preston said that if the law required providers to have "actual
knowledge" of a copyright violation to be held liable, many providers
would just "turn a blind eye" to unlawful activities.
The quick-fix version also raised Valenti's ire.
"If we codify before we really know the direction, the dimension, the
velocity and the composition of this onslaught into the future ... you
would then send us out into the cyberspace cold stripped of all our
protective armor," he said.
The subcommittee's chairman, Rep. Carlos Moorhead, R-Calif., called
the legislation a "skeleton bill," He said, "We want to make sure we
get the skeleton bill into law this session. We don't want to put so
much meat on the skeleton that it dies of obesity."
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