Civil vs. Criminal

Another complication in the realm of copyright is the difference between civil and criminal copyright infringement. Basically nobody ever gets busted for civil infringement because it's bad press, even Disney backed down from busting a day care center with an unlicensed Donald duck on the wall. Criminal infringement is another story: the DA does the deed and the more companies can off-load the task of enforcing their copyrights on the taxpayer, the happier they are.

It used to be easy: if you charged or made money for the distribution of infringing materials you were a criminal. If you did it for free you were civilly liable, the claimant had to sue you, and the claimant had to be the creator or her direct assignee.

Under that definition our little friend at MIT managed to get off scott free despite a massive warez server in his dorm room.

No more, thanks to him and the No Electronic Theft act the definition of payment has been widened to include receipt of anything of value including other copywritten works, or of value over $1000 total. This means a small warez server with low value software is probably a civil violation unless you complain about leaches. But most warez servers have been a criminal violation since 7 Jan 1997.

And criminal violations are no fun: HR 2281 gives first offenders up to $500,000 fine and 5 years and twice that for further offenses.

Just to make it easier to catch your ass, NET also expands the rules for who can complain: it used to be that just the owner of the copyright could file a victim impact statement with the DA, Now anybody who has a financial stake in the work can: Producers, sellers, holders, and the legal reps thereof. A big list, and one that shifts the nature of the claimant from generally the creator or holder of the copyright to generally those corporations that profit from it.

And it's created a list of on-line bounty hunters out to narc on your infringing ass: our old friends SPA have been joined by markwatch and infringitek and probably others who spend their days scanning your websites looking for misues of Reebok or naked Pocahontas pictures.