News

posted on 19 February 2008 08:25

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There is proposed legislation being considered by the US House of Representatives which could result in people who copy musdic CDs being fined up to $1.5 million.

A House committee is considering the Prioritizing Resources and Organization for Intellectual Property Act of 2007. Amongst its proposals is one that makes copying music CD tracks a criminal offence.

There would a US president-appointed Intellectual Property Enforcement Representative (IPER), an IP Enforcement Division in the US Department of Justice and IP people on the staff at US embassies. Computing equipment used by copyists could be seized by US federal authorities.

Presumably the same criminalisation of copying would also apply to DVDs, to movie copying. The bill is backed by the MPAA, the Motion Picture Association of America, the fim-makers' trade association.

It seems that the US music industry is really, really serious about trying to stop music copying. Most CD owners and most people would think that copying your own CDs is far removed from piracy. The withdrawal of copy protection on Internet-distributed music indicates that this criminalisation of CD-copying is antithetical to current thinking in the Internet-delivered music area.

But there is much to play for in the movie arena where the film studios would find film production costs far, far harder to recoup if film piracy continued to grow and grow and become as common as music copying.

That probably explains why its trade association is fighting so hard to have optical disk content copying regarded as a crime and susceptible to steep fines.