Michael Snow wrote:
Steve Bennett wrote
On 4/3/06, Justin Cormack justin@specialbusservice.com wrote:
Do we? I dont actually know of anything else that is a criminal offence in a major country which has general laws protecting free speech, where Jimbo is likely to visit and wouldnt like to be arrested on entry. And where we have an article about the law in question. Maybe we should use the picture to illustrate this?
Sorry, you're correct, I meant we have plenty of examples of copyright violation. Which is not, as you point out, a criminal offence.
Actually, as the occasional outraged victim is more than happy to remind us, copyright infringement can be considered criminal under certain circumstances, at least in the US. For example, willful infringement for commercial advantage, private financial gain, or of works with a total retail value of more than $1,000 over any 180-day period. See 17 U.S.C. ยง506. The safe harbors for online service providers and the requirement of willfulness make it difficult to apply to the Wikimedia Foundation, but I can imagine situations in which it could theoretically apply to the person uploading the material.
The section also provides, among other things, for fines for fraudulent removal of copyright notices. This might be worth pointing out to those users we find modifying images they've clearly copied from other websites to remove such notices.
A key thing for the copyright paranoiacs to remember is that criminal infringement requires that the infringement must also pass the test for being a civil infringement, and it must be "willful". The standard of proof is also much higher. The only thing that goes the other way to making it easier is a longer statute of limitation: 5 instead of 3 years.
In other words, things need to get pretty bad before there is a US criminal prosecution. There would be plenty of warning before things got that far.
Ec