The current national and regional copyright laws and copyright-related worldwide conventions and treaties criminalize and outlaw free sharing of copyrighted works, categorizing the "illegal" use of intellectual creations (copying, distributing and displaying books, music, artistic works, films, broadcast programs etc. without the written permission of their copyright owners) as a theft of personal property. A strict reading of legal provisions makes most of us thieves: who has not copied his favourite songs on tapes and disks or photocopied some pages of books lent from the library? Despite its perversions and pro-rightholder extremes, however, the copyright system had functioned more or less well until the advent of the digital age and uncontrolled dissemination of information and entertainment materials through the Internet on a global scale.
Large content-exporting countries, first and foremost the USA, have tried to protect at all price their revenue-generating intellectual properties from the "piracy" by individual and commercial users and exploiters, resulting in many ugly law-suits and enforcements even involving the FBI and customs agents. The long saga of cat and mouse game between the film and record industries and the peer-to-peer file sharing websites staging the upsurge and downfall of MP3.com, Napster, Grokster, Pirate Bay, Megaupload, TVShack, etc. seems to end, at least for the moment, in criminal prosecutions of the linking websites of the start-ups involved.
Looking at six-digit punitive statutory damages awarded to a record company for the downloading of dozens of songs by a housewife and a 23-year-old British student facing his extradition to be prosecuted in California for making money from the ads on his linking website, it is only natural to think that the law should be changed to keep abreast with the digital age we are living in. Given that a law generally perceived as being unjust is no longer justifiable as a law, the change towards the free sharing under the equitable conditions, which are justifiable both for rightholders and users, is inevitable. It's only a matter of time. Until then, unfortunately, the current biased laws and court decisions will continue to take a heavy toll on the free flow of culture and science, just as it took two world wars for the UN to be established for the maintenance of world peace.
This said, I would like to wish the best of luck to Gottfrid Svartholm Warg, co-founder of The Pirate Bay, a sworn enemy of copyright, who is spending this day of his 28th birthday in a Cambodian cell waiting for his extradition to Sweden to face his jail sentence for his BitTorrent file-sharing website.
Large content-exporting countries, first and foremost the USA, have tried to protect at all price their revenue-generating intellectual properties from the "piracy" by individual and commercial users and exploiters, resulting in many ugly law-suits and enforcements even involving the FBI and customs agents. The long saga of cat and mouse game between the film and record industries and the peer-to-peer file sharing websites staging the upsurge and downfall of MP3.com, Napster, Grokster, Pirate Bay, Megaupload, TVShack, etc. seems to end, at least for the moment, in criminal prosecutions of the linking websites of the start-ups involved.
Looking at six-digit punitive statutory damages awarded to a record company for the downloading of dozens of songs by a housewife and a 23-year-old British student facing his extradition to be prosecuted in California for making money from the ads on his linking website, it is only natural to think that the law should be changed to keep abreast with the digital age we are living in. Given that a law generally perceived as being unjust is no longer justifiable as a law, the change towards the free sharing under the equitable conditions, which are justifiable both for rightholders and users, is inevitable. It's only a matter of time. Until then, unfortunately, the current biased laws and court decisions will continue to take a heavy toll on the free flow of culture and science, just as it took two world wars for the UN to be established for the maintenance of world peace.
This said, I would like to wish the best of luck to Gottfrid Svartholm Warg, co-founder of The Pirate Bay, a sworn enemy of copyright, who is spending this day of his 28th birthday in a Cambodian cell waiting for his extradition to Sweden to face his jail sentence for his BitTorrent file-sharing website.
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