Distribute pre-release movie, music, software, go to prison for three years [ip]

Declan McCullagh <[email protected]>
Newsgroups gmane.politics.politech
Message-ID <[email protected]>
Text of legislation:
http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/bdquery/z?d109:s.00167:

A lively Slashdot thread:
http://yro.slashdot.org/yro/05/04/20/1733215.shtml?tid=95&tid=17

---

http://news.com.com/2100-1028_3-5677232.html

Prison terms on tap for 'prerelease' pirates
April 19, 2005, 4:33 PM PDT

File-swappers who distribute a single copy of a prerelease movie on the 
Internet can be imprisoned for up to three years, under a bill that's 
slated to become the most dramatic expansion of online piracy penalties 
in years.

The bill, approved by Congress on Tuesday, is written so broadly it 
could make a federal felon of anyone who has even one copy of a film, 
software program or music file in a shared folder and should have known 
the copyrighted work had not been commercially released. Stiff fines of 
up to $250,000 can also be levied. Penalties would apply regardless of 
whether any downloading took place.

[...remainder snipped...]
_______________________________________________
Politech mailing list
Archived at http://www.politechbot.com/
Moderated by Declan McCullagh (http://www.mccullagh.org/)
lmpx.com only provides a reader for public news (NNTP) servers. It is not affiliated with the servers or forums shown here and is not responsible for the content of articles, which is written by their respective authors.