Immigration Board Says You Can Be Deported For Copyright Infringement

from the moral-turpitude dept

While we still wait to see if Kim Dotcom can be taken against his will from another country into the US for "copyright infringement" claims, apparently the DOJ has also decided that it can work the other way. The Justice Department's Board of Immigration Appeals has said that people can be deported for copyright infringement. Apparently the law (the Immigration and Nationality Act) says that non-citizens can be deported if they commit crimes "involving moral turpitude" but had never weighed in on whether or not copyright infringement counted. But now they have:

On Friday, leaning heavily on precedent that previously declared criminal trademark infringement a CMT, the board said criminal copyright violations “must also be a crime involving moral turpitude.”

“Like the use of a spurious trademark ... respondent’s copyright infringement also involves significant societal harm,” BIA member Hugh Mullane wrote in Friday’s ruling. “Congress has made clear that copyright infringement enforcement is an important priority and that the risks and costs associated with intellectual property crime are significant.”

To be fair, this was a case of criminal copyright infringement, and not civil copyright infringement -- and the board noted that because criminal copyright infringement requires the showing of "willfulness," it suffices for the "moral turpitude" question. The person in question, Raul Zaragoza-Vaquero, had been arrested for selling 800 copied CDs to an RIAA investigator. He received 33 months in prison and had to pay $36,000... and was then told he had to leave the country.

The fact that it's only for criminal copyright infringement is certainly better than it being for any copyright infringement, but we've seen some bizarre attempts to turn what clearly should be civil copyright infringement cases into criminal ones (the Kim Dotcom case being but one example).

Filed Under: copyright, deportation, doj, infringement, moral turpitude