Germany Accepts Strict Piracy Law 478
A beautiful mind writes "The TimesOnline is reporting that Germany has accepted a new piracy law, currently the toughest in Europe, which comes into effect on January 1, 2007. From the article: 'Germans risk two years in prison if they illegally download films and music for private use under a new law agreed yesterday. Anybody who downloads films for commercial use could be jailed for up to five years.' Many politicians defended the new law, amongst them Günther Krings, the Christian Democrat legal affairs spokesman, who claimed: 'There should be no legal distinction between stealing chewing gum from a shop and performing an illegal download.'"
well, if that's what you do to gum thieves (Score:5, Interesting)
From the Fine Article:
Also from the Fine Article:
So, you can get two years in prison in Germany for stealing chewing gum from a shop? Cool.
This is all rehashing rehashes, but it bears repetition lest we find ourselves slowly and finally boiled in this slowly heating water. It's more heavy-handed power and money grabbing by those who have the money and power (entertainment droids and politicians). I only hope one of the first "caught" with their hands in the downloading cookiejar is some son or daughter of one of the anointed government members. Also from the article (emphasis mine):
First of all, what supports their estimates? Secondly, I've still yet to see causal studies whereby there are directly related losses because of illegal downloads. I have seen some convincing studies showing strong correlation between downloading and sales.
This is not justice (Score:2, Interesting)
Same as stealing chewing gum? (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm sorry, but I just don't think they're quite the same. An illegal download doesn't prevent the 'owner' from benefiting from the origninal. Whereas when you steal a physical object, it does. If I steal a loaf of bread from you, you no longer have that loaf of bread to eat. If I copy the recipie for making that bread without your permission, it does you no harm (unless, possibly, you're the proprieter of a bakery.) I'm not claiming that illegal downloads are morally ok, just that its not quite the same thing as stealing a physical object.
Mission Impossible (Score:5, Interesting)
1. It's incredibly easy to copy digital media.
2. It's done privately.
3. It harms no one directly and immediately.
No law in the world will stop this people downloading digital media, unless the power of the police is extended to the point that the download behaviour of every individual is monitored.
Unfortunately and utterly unbeliveably and to my utter, inexpressible disgust and revulsion, the law has in fact taken that step, with the new European Data Retention Act.
Welcome to the Police State.
Re:Wow (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Wow (Score:1, Interesting)
Non-sequitur. Yes the government is elected by the people, but that doesn't mean that every decision they make is a direct representation of the social/ethical norms of the people. Far from it. The purpose of a democratically-elected representative is to balance the desires of the people with reasonable pragmatic requirements of economics, international treaties, etc. Then, of course, there are also instances where the actions of democratically-elected representatives are very obviously against the (average) will of the people, but serve some special-interest group or lobby (such decisions can be 'good', e.g. protection for minorities, or 'bad', e.g. laws that benefit companies to the detriment of the people).
I think it is actually quite obvious that the average person considers illegal copyright violations to be a very minor offense as comapred to outright theft of physical property. I would go so far as to say that, yes, copyright violation is fully "socially accepted." That it is a governmentally-decreed crime in no way proves that the people are morally against the activity.
Besides, 'socially acceptable' is coward language to try and demure the difference between right/progress and wrong/destructiveness.
No, it is a statement of fact. I personally would love to see a balanced independant study that determines how people feel about copyright-violation in all its forms. I strongly suspect that it would find that the overwhelming majority of the population consider it to be a minor offense, and a minor problem. In fact, I believe the percent of people strongly opposed to copyright is actually greater than the percent of people that strongly support it (with the majority of the popullation falling in between, with little opinion either way, but certainly not demonizing copyright violators).
That copyright is the "right" path and filesharers are the "bad guys" is precisely what is being debated, whereas you take it as an axiom.
Get a job, hippie.
Thanks for taking the debate up a notch.
Re:Actually, it's not true - yet (Score:3, Interesting)
Or am I missing something?
Re:well, if that's what you do to gum thieves (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:well, if that's what you do to gum thieves (Score:2, Interesting)
copyright infringement is not like stealing an item from a store. It's closer to counterfeiting money. As more and more infringe on a person or company owned copyrighted work, it is devalued over time (less and less people will be willing to pay for it when they can just get it for free from their friend or favorite website). In a sense, copyright infringement does cost a company money..but over a very long period of time.
I have seen stats from a few mISV owners that I know personally. You can clearly see a pattern when a crack gets released for their application. Sales almost immediately drop (I have seen as much as 75%) and bandwidth is wasted (another side-effect of piracy).
When an update is made, and the cracks no longer work, sales gradually go back up.
2 years in prison for sharing is too much. I don't think the germans should be filling their jails with people sharing copyrighted material.
I have seen some convincing studies showing strong correlation between downloading and sales
When downloading is made easy, and a non-tech savvy user can easily get a song, sales are directly affected. If it stays in the background (like in the IRC days), the loss is a lot smaller. I feel that the RIAA has won the battle. Most of my friends are too afraid to download music anymore (even through there are many P2P networks still alive and well).
Re:Wow (Score:3, Interesting)
It just shows how ineffective and out of context the lobbied laws are.
For whom? This is going to create great investment opportunities for some. None of these people care whether it's effective or not. This is about cash flow.
Star Trek Replicator Thing Defense (Score:3, Interesting)
So now Mr Picard can duplicate a million sticks of gum and steal them all... _then_ it's just like stealing a million sticks of gum from a shop... right? Well at least it's more like performing an illegal download.
The materialized steak was someone's idea of a steak... at the very least you may be stealing the idea, not the steak itself.
Re:well, if that's what you do to gum thieves (Score:5, Interesting)
In the US, quick google lookup shows the average supermarket loses around 2.5% of retail sales to shrinkage. However, only half of that is due to external forces. So, if we use the german analogy, perhaps the true loss to the industry is a little more than 1%. A percentage loss is, of course, better than unit sales as the percentage allows us to judge the impact.
What is interesting, according to various articles, is that Germany has about 82 million people, but only 127 million CD sales, a nearly 50% drop over 7 years. So each german is buying 1 maybe 2 cds a year. And you are trying to tell me that a country that is so uninterested in music is going to download the equivelent of 5 CDs a year. I mean at the height of the sales they were only buying 3 or 4 CDs a year. I guess copying music over the internet is so much easier than just copying an album from a friend that it encourages the people to steal that extra CD that they did not even want in the first place.
I guess not that Germany is a completely a western country, they must learn that the best way to grow a bussiness is to supply products the people want. And, of course, if artificial barriers are erected to try to force consumers to buy stuff they don't want, then those consumers will just find another way to get they stuff they do.
one sided article (Score:2, Interesting)
but the second half only mentions the music industry not making as much money
as they used to?
well, the german movie industry has their own association with a web site at
http://www.bvv-medien.de/ [bvv-medien.de], and despide a very, very aggressive anti-consumer
anti piracy campain, they still more than doubled their revenue in the last
five years: 860 mio euro in 1999 vs. 1747 mio in 2004.
I guess noone of the german movie industry will read this, but: if I'm in cinema
and about some movie, and you want to show some ad to me, it should start with the
word "Danke" (thanks). After all I already paid for the movie ticket. Instead they
show some anti piracy ad with people send into jail and about to be raped or similar
stuff.
Re:Star Trek Replicator Thing Defense (Score:2, Interesting)
Of course, nothing is truly free, as someone earned some credits building and selling the replicators used on the Enterprise, just as many people benefit from movie/music downloading such as hard-drive and blank-cd manufacturers.
Re:well, if that's what you do to gum thieves (Score:5, Interesting)
I found that that around 60% of my respondents felt sharing music should not be illegal, and a similar number felt a lot of people actually ended up buying MORE music after finding new bands or artists by downloading their music.
If you want something more reliable and reputable, the Canadian equivalent of the RIAA released a study very quietly recently that more-or-less says the opposite of everything the industry groups have been saying. It was mentioned on here a week or two ago. Here's a link to the slashdot article: http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/03/18/0
Re:Wow (Score:2, Interesting)
If it was 'socially acceptable', a wide majority of the ELECTED government in Germany would not have supported it.
I seriously doubt that any party in the German government even mentioned copyright law when they were getting elected. If it's anything like in Britain they would probably be trying to sell their policies for taxes, public services, employment etc.
Comment removed (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Without Entertainment DROIDS you'd be left with (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:well, if that's what you do to gum thieves (Score:0, Interesting)
I'm a college student in an American university. My friends occasionally download music and pirate the occasional game, but for the most part we don't do much in the way of illegal stuff. In fact, out of the games my roommates and I play regularly, I'm the only one who is currently involved in a game that has been pirated--Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri, a game that's seven years old. (I would like to say that I'd be tempted to buy the Planetary Pack, should I stumble across it in stores).
On the other hand, while I was in Germany, I felt like I encountered a mentality that was completely disrespectful towards copyright law. My host sister bought a used laptop from her uncle while I was there, and since I am reasonably computer savvy, I was tasked with helping get it set up. When I went to install Service Pack 2, I promptly discovered that her license key for Windows XP was (actually, unsurprisingly) not valid. Whether it was a single license or a volume license that had been exhausted, somewhere someone installed too many copies of XP.
My German teacher, a German native who grew up in West Berlin during the Cold War (so technically a Westerner, but way different from someone who didn't grow up a few hundred kilometers from the rest of the Western bloc), encouraged us on several occasions simply to pirate CDs or other electronic materials that we needed. She asked us why we would buy stuff when one simply could download it online, and she proudly told us that her son was quite capable of finding cracks online for various copy-protected stuff that they wanted to use.
Now, my experience with Germans and technology was by no means extensive or exhaustive, but I just got the feeling that no one really cares about copyright law there.
One additional interesting observation was that a huge percentage of the CDs in stores in Germany are copy-protected, way more than here in America. I was consistently shocked as I wandered around the music section of Karstadt or Galeria Kaufhof and took note of how many CDs were not actually CDDB-approved compact discs. I'm not buying something that doesn't meet the quality standards required by such an organization, yet purports to do so, regardless of the ease or difficulty of circumventing the copy-protection.
I don't know whether the copy-protection is the cause or the effect of the attitude towards copyright in Germany; sadly, I'm guessing it's the latter. The problem with such a mentality, then, causes one to think that copy-protection isn't so bad because one can eventually find a hack the get around it; the problem is, one day they will develop copy-protection that's a lot tougher to crack.
I don't think this law will change much in Germany. There might be a few convictions based on it, should it be codified, but I feel like it's America that's being targeted first for copyright violations. Perhaps it's because we're such a big market, or maybe it's because other countries have reasonable policies towards copyrgiht (cf. Sweden and The Pirate Bay or France and its recent P2P legal stuff), but I feel like any changes in the way that copyrights are handled will take place first here, before being expanded to the international markets.