Oppose increasing copyright infringement penalties
From BinaryFreedom.INFO
A proposed bill called the "Intellectual Property Protection Act of 2007" would allow civil seizure (using the Drug Abuse Prevention and Control Act procedure), allow prosecution for attempted infringement, require restitution, allow wiretapping in copyright cases, require notification of importation of infringing goods, and allow life imprisonment if an infringing good causes death.
[edit] Sample Letter
I am writing to urge you to vote against the Intellectual Property Protection Act (IPPA) of 2007, which was just proposed by the Department of Justice. This bill is a capitulation to the copyright industry at a time when copyright law is already harsher than it has ever been. Copyright law is meant to be a temporary concession to the author in exchange for greater production, as stated in the Constitution ("To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors [...] the exclusive Right to their respective Writings"). This nation's original copyright law provided for a term of only 14 years with an optional 14 year renewal; it now lasts for the life of the author plus 70 years. This is just one example of how the copyright law has morphed into a one-sided grant to the copyright holder (which is now usually the publisher rather than the author) in exchange for questionable benefit to the public.
The IPPA further abuses this bargain by increasing the penalty for crimes with little tangible harm. Most seriously, it creates a new crime of attempted copyright infringement. This means someone could be subject to a year in prison for even attempting to copy a single music file without permission. In addition, the bill allows a broad range of civil forfeiture provisions. For example, it allows the seizure not only of infringing copies, but also any technology used to make the infringing copies. That means copying a music file could allow someone's entire computer system to be seized, potentially costing them legitimate business. Then, the bill also requires paying restitution for the same violation. It is difficult to justify restitution at all when the copyright holder has not lost anything concrete (only hypothetical "lost sales"); providing for both restitution and forfeiture for copyright infringement is unconscionable.
The bill also further legitimizes the unethical anti-circumvention provision of the Digital Millenium Copyright Act (DMCA). The DMCA's anti-circumvention provision has already effectively made fair use illegal for works with DRM (Digital Restrictions Management) technology. It is no longer always legal to move such a copyrighted work from one device to another, extract part for criticism, or even play it if you must reverse engineer technology to do so. Such an unethical law can not be granted extra enforcement tools. Yet the IPPA liberally penalizes violations of the DMCA. It once again allows forfeiture of the tools used for anti-circumvention. This means simply playing a legally purchased media file with unauthorized technology (such as the GNU/Linux operating system) would again allow the entire computer system to be seized.
There are other unjustifiable provisions in the act. For instance, it grants music copyright holders the special privilege of being notified of the import of infringing material. It provides for life imprisonment for the distribution of infringing works that negligently cause death (though this would certainly violate existing law); there is no penalty for legal works with the same effect, even though the infringing work may be an exact copy. Wiretapping would be allowed for copyright infringement investigations, even when the suspect has only attempted to infringe copyright, regardless of scale; this is a waste of a tool that is meant for serious crimes.
Please oppose the IPPA in any form and work to restore balance to copyright law.
