Steve Bennett wrote
On 4/3/06, Justin Cormack
<justin(a)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.
§506. 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