Thursday, December 7, 2006
Copyright Pirates Face Crackdown
Posted by Suhit Gupta in "NEWS" @ 07:00 AM
"Copyright criminals must face far tougher regulation to protect the entertainment industry, a report says. The Gowers Report was commissioned by the government to look at modernising UK copyright laws for the digital age. While it proposes new powers against copyright infringement, it also says private users should be allowed to copy music from a CD to their MP3 player. It also recommends the 50-year copyright protection for recorded music should not be extended. Former newspaper editor Andrew Gowers said piracy and counterfeiting was probably the biggest challenge the intellectual property (IP) system faced. The report estimates 20% of the entertainment industry's turnover was lost to illegal copying and says tougher enforcement is a vital part of reform."
While I am fine with this in principle, we hear of reports, more often than not, that the authorities go after some consumers and end users (young teens, kids, moms, etc) than trying to figure out the main perpetrators of ripping and sharing copyrighted materials. This just leads to bad press for them and doesn't actually seem to reduce the amount of copyrighted material on the net.
While I am fine with this in principle, we hear of reports, more often than not, that the authorities go after some consumers and end users (young teens, kids, moms, etc) than trying to figure out the main perpetrators of ripping and sharing copyrighted materials. This just leads to bad press for them and doesn't actually seem to reduce the amount of copyrighted material on the net.
