Prison for file swappers

Yet another copyright law is hitting the books in the US. This time it is the Family Entertainment and Copyright Act of 2005.

"(Sec. 103) Establishes criminal penalties for willful copyright infringement by the distribution of a computer program, musical work, motion picture or other audiovisual work, or sound recording being prepared for commercial distribution by making it available on a computer network accessible to members of the public, if the person knew or should have known that the work was intended for commercial distribution."

The criminal penalties referred to are 3 years in jail (and there is also the provision for large fines) for any P2P file sharers found offering a single copy of eg a film on pre-release (or "being prepared for commercial distribution").

As Peter Jaszi said: "I don't think this is an approach that is well calculated to create respect for the system." You certainly must question the proportionality of this.

The "family entertainment" bit of the act makes it legal for viewers to edit out gratuitous sex or violence and for commercial entities to create technologies to automatically cut these parts out to facilitate home produced family friendly versions of films. This was in response to the Directors Guild of America suing ClearPlay for making this kind of software, the popularly labelled "clean flicks" case.