The Case for Copyright Reform Read Online Free PDF Page A

principle of
proportionality, which is one of the cornerstones of a just legal system. But
the big rights holders have managed to persuade the legal system that this
principle should not be applied to petty crimes and misdemeanors occurring
online.
     
    When it comes to copyright enforcement on the Internet, justice is blind
– with rage. And unfortunately, this applies not only to US courts, but
to European ones as well.
     
    In Sweden in 2011, courts started handing out prison sentences to
ordinary file sharers that had been unlucky enough to get caught by the rights
holders’ organizations. So far, it has only been a handful of cases, and in
each of them the victim of the prosecution got the sentence suspended (since,
being ordinary citizens picked more or less at random, none of them had a
previous criminal record). But even so, from a legal point of view, the courts
found that they had committed a crime that was grave enough to merit prison.
     
    Is this really what we want in our society? There was a time when you
could be sure that the headline “Sentenced to prison for listening to music
illegally” would refer to a country like Cuba, the Soviet Union, or Chile under
general Pinochet. Totalitarian regimes have always had the habit of putting
people in prison for listening to music illegally, in order to protect the
state against unwanted political influences.
     
    But now we are seeing that headline being used to report court cases in
what ought to be respectable EU member states, like Sweden. The purpose this
time is not to protect the state against dangerous political thoughts, but to
protect the entertainment industry against having to adapt to technological
progress. But the sentences are the same: Prison for illegal music listening.
Do we really think that this is proportionate, and represents the right way
forward?
     
    In 2008, a Danish man was sentenced to
pay 160,000 Danish kroner (21,000 euro) for allegedly having shared
13,000 songs on a Direct Connect network in 2005. The verdict was later reduced by
the Danish Supreme court in 2011, after 6 years of legal battles,
but the first two courts that handled the case both thought that 20,000 euro
was a perfectly reasonable punishment for an ordinary file sharer that happened
to get picked as a scapegoat by the entertainment industry lawyers.
     
    To put this in perspective, 13,000 songs is not very much by today’s
standards. 30 years ago, you would have needed a whole room full of LP records
to have 13,000 songs, but today they will easily fit on a 64 GB USB stick in
your pocket, which can be copied in minutes. Technology has changed the way
that people think about and handle recorded music, especially for the younger
generation. It is probably hard to find a Danish teenager who has not
downloaded or shared a lot more than that.
     
    Does this make it reasonable that all Danish families with teenagers
should live under the threat of having to fork up 20,000 euro if an
entertainment industry lawyer comes knocking at the door? Is listening to pop
music illegally really as bad as stealing a 20,000 euro car and destroying it?
     
    Today, courts in Europe haves a lot of discretion when deciding how much
convicted file sharers have to pay in damages. This is why the Supreme Court
could reduce the damages in the Danish case. But this may change if the
European Parliament gives its consent to ratifying the controversial
Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, ACTA.
     
    Although the name of this treaty suggests that ACTA would be about
commercial goods counterfeiting (which everybody, even the Pirate Party, agrees
is a bad thing that should continue to be illegal), the implications of ACTA
are much wider than that. In particular, ACTA aims to sharpen the enforcement
of copyright on the Internet, in an attempt at combating file sharing.
     
    According to ACTA, the damages for illegal file sharing will be higher,
in some cases absurdly high.
     
    In Article 9.1 of the