Showing posts with label punitive damages. Show all posts
Showing posts with label punitive damages. Show all posts

17 November 2007

Some is Rotten in the State of Copyright

Nicely put:

By the end of the day, John has infringed the copyrights of twenty emails, three legal articles, an architectural rendering, a poem, five photographs, an animated character, a musical composition, a painting, and fifty notes and drawings. All told, he has committed at least eighty-three acts of infringement and faces liability in the amount of $12.45 million (to say nothing of potential criminal charges).50 There is nothing particularly extraordinary about John’s activities. Yet if copyright holders were inclined to enforce their rights to the maximum extent allowed by law, he would be indisputably liable for a mind-boggling $4.544 billion in potential damages each year. And, surprisingly, he has not even committed a single act of infringement through P2P file sharing. Such an outcome flies in the face of our basic sense of justice. Indeed, one must either irrationally conclude that John is a criminal infringer—a veritable grand larcenist—or blithely surmise that copyright law must not mean what it appears to say. Something is clearly amiss. Moreover, the troublesome gap between copyright law and norms has grown only wider in recent years.

(Via Boing Boing.)

15 May 2007

Copyright Done Right(er)

Meanwhile, back in the real world:

The Government has proposed a change to the damages available under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, ruling out the possibility of the award of punitive damages in civil cases of copyright infringement.

...

The Government has long considered punitive damages more appropriate to criminal law. "[The] aim of civil law should be to provide compensation for loss, not to punish the defendant," said the paper.

Amazing. Kudos to the UK Government. (Via Michael Geist.)