Share A Song Or Movie Before It's Released... Go To Jail
from the seems-a-bit-extreme dept
The entertainment industry continues to insist that they're just looking for "balance" in trying to fight file sharing -- but the evidence suggests that they're just being purposely vindictive. They're not looking at ways to improve their business or how to better provide what people want. They just want to punish people. Even though more and more evidence shows that file sharing helps promote content, the industry refuses to believe any actual evidence and prefers to make the situation worse, at every possible turn. The latest is that they've pushed through a new law that will make it a felony to offer to share one piece of content that has not been released yet resulting in three years in jail and hundreds of thousands of dollars in fines. To be guilty, no one even has to actually download the file. If such a file is in a shared/exposed folder... you can be found guilty and sent away. This certainly seems a bit extreme -- and it's hard to see how the punishment fits the crime at all. In fact, the only way Congress could sneak this past was to bundle it with another law that legalizes software products that "cleanup movies" for those who want their R-Rated movies to be a bit more PG.
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