The Case for Copyright Reform Read Online Free PDF

ACTA
agreement , it says that
     
    … In determining the amount of damages for infringement of intellectual property rights,
a [signing country’s] judicial authorities shall have the authority to
consider, inter alia, any legitimate measure of value the right holder submits,
which may include lost profits, the value of the infringed goods or services measured by the market price, or the suggested retail price .
     
    (emphasis added)
     
    In other words: To calculate the damages for having a disk full of
illegally copied songs, you would multiply the number of songs with the
suggested retail price for a song. But although this may look pretty harmless
at first glance, it will lead to very drastic consequences in practice.
     
    A two-terabyte disk can hold roughly half a million songs. If you
calculate that at the market price of 1 euro per song, the damages for having a
2 TB disk full of music would be half a million euro.
     
    Would that be proportionate or not? Remember that this is not an extreme
example, it is something that lots of teenagers do. Would it really be
proportionate that the family would have to sell their house and all their
possessions if they were found out?
     
    Under current European laws, damages are (at least in principle) limited
to actual losses that the party that wins can show that he has actually
suffered. They have to be proportional. Not even the lawyers for a film or
record company would be able to convince a European court that they have
actually lost half a million euro in non-purchases from a teenager who has
never seen that kind of money in his life.
     
    But according to ACTA, the film or record companies would no longer have
to prove that they have actually lost the money. All they need to do is to
multiply the number of songs with the price for one song to get the amount of
damages measured by the suggested retail price.
     
    A half million euro claim against a teenager with a 2 TB disk would be
considered disproportionate and absurd by any European court today. With ACTA,
awarding those damages becomes mandatory.
     
    The copyright lobby knows this, or course. They have been deeply
involved in the ACTA negotiations since day one. It is only the citizens and
the elected members of parliaments that have been kept in the dark for as long
as possible. The plan was to get ACTA signed, sealed, and delivered before too
many elected politicians in parliaments knew the real consequences of ACTA as
well.
     
    We must now make sure that that plan does not work.
     
    Due Process
    In Sweden, with nine million inhabitants, about ten people get struck by
lightning every year, and one or two of them die. This is of course very
tragic, but this one-in-a-million risk is not enough to make people think that
they themselves will get struck by lightning, and it is not enough to make them
modify their behavior in any significant way. You will not see anybody wearing
a protective hat with a lightning conductor if you walk down the streets of
Stockholm.
     
    Before 2011, the risk of getting convicted of illegal file sharing was
about as high as the risk of getting killed by lightning. It happened at most
to one or two people per year, so it was not something that anybody would
seriously expect to happen to themselves.
     
    In 2011, with three special prosecutors and ten police investigators focusing
on file sharing crimes, the number of
convictions went up to 8 . Put in another way, this rather massive
deployment of scarce judicial resources (which could otherwise have been spent
on other crimes) only managed to get the risk of getting convicted for file
sharing up to the risk of getting struck by lightning, as opposed to getting
struck and killed. This is a considerable increase, but it is not enough to
make file sharers modify their behavior in any significant way. Some may take
the (sensible) precaution of spending five euros per month for an anonymizing
service to hide their IP number, but a potential