Copying and swapping music and movies or putting spyware onto someone else’s computer without permission could get you up to three years in the calaboose under bills that moved out of the House Judiciary Committee September 8.
“We must not let Internet technologies become a haven for criminals,” said Rep. Lamar Smith (R-Texas) after the committee voted to send both bills to the floor of the House.
That isn’t exactly the view of P2P United, the Washington-based group fighting to keep peer-to-peer technology and use from being criminalized. Executive director Adam Eisgrau told AVNOnline.com the new copyright bill won’t put the proverbial genie back into the bottle or real money into the pockets of performers “for the literally billions of inevitable downloads” various surveys show will increase each year, “no matter how much Congress continues to allow entertainment conglomerates to ‘offload’ their responsibility to enforce their copyrights on the American taxpayer, as [this bill] does.
“The real crime,” Eisgrau continued, “is that Congress won’t so much as hold a hearing on the many creative ways that respected academics and economists have put forward that, through ‘collective licensing,’ could turn tens of millions of Americans from criminals into customers overnight, and individual artists into genuine competitors of the multinational conglomerates that have mercilessly exploited them for decades.”
"Tens of millions of Americans continue to use P2P networks," said Electronic Frontier Foundation senior intellectual property attorney Fred von Lohmann. "Turning college kids into criminals is not going to change that reality, any more than the 4,000 lawsuits against file-sharing music fans has. This is a business problem, not a FBI problem."
Titan Media counsel Gill Sperlein was unavailable for comment. Titan has been trying quietly to settle complaints with P2P swappers moving Titan product on P2P networks, and with their Internet service providers, without the high-publicity litigation tactics used by the mainstream music and film industries.
But here’s the part of the copyright bill that might get Hollywood in a snit: those editing out sex and violence from movies to make them more “family friendly” would be immune to copyright suits. Rep. Howard Berman (D-Los Angeles) told reporters that provision could let third parties strip commercials out of television programs or put in their own commercials whenever they please.
The anti-spyware bill could be melded into one the Senate Commerce Committee approved earlier this year, a bill requiring software makers to tell you before they load new programs onto your computer.
