John Chow asked the question Do People Respect Copyright Anymore? In the post, Chow indicates that his article The Internet’s Biggest Google Whores was copied in its entirety and posted on other blogs. Chow indicated that he was trying to get two other blogs to remove his Google Whore article. Chow was successful, when you try to link to the two articles that copied his post, the pages have been removed. I would expect that there are several who have taken their place. With respect, Chow asked the wrong question. The issue is not Do People Respect Copyright Anymore, it is Do People Care About Copyright At All.
As I was putting this post together at the top of Reddit was a copy of an email.
The writer of the email, and I have to say this guy has balls, complains that he has been using images from a website for sometime and that they have been removed. He is claiming that if the images are not restored he will contact his lawyer because he is using the copied images for advertising. The writer does not want to have to find the images again and wants to resolve the issue. I would have included an image of this email but to be cautious the writer may himself claim that its contents are protected by copyright and I do not want to have to deal with his team of cutthroat lawyers.
Chow had it right:
Fair use copyright rules will allow a site/blog to link to my original post and include a little plug about the article but they are NOT ALLOWED to reprint the entire article. It doesn’t matter if they give me credit or not, reposting an article without permission is a copyright violation, plain and simple.
The internet is one large copyright violation. I expect that over the next few years this will decrease but it will always exist. Why it will decrease I will cover in a subsequent post. In the United States, for a good reference site see the U.S. Copyright Office. In Canada, the Copyright Act regulates copyright and imposes penalties.
It varies nation by nation but generally, if copyright is violated, the perpetrator may face both civil and criminal penalties. For civil penalties, an amount equal to the losses suffered by the copyright holder, and any profit made as a result of the violation may be awarded to the copyright holder. Punitive damages may also be a possibility.
I have not come across a case of this nature but for the purposes of discussion only, lets say that for every time 1000 people visited John Chow’s article he made $1 through his advertisers. If someone copies his article and attracts 2000 visitors the loss to Chow, while offensive, is not all that significant. Of course, if the offender makes money by ripping off the article, those funds would also belong to the copyright holder. In addition to the copyright holders losses, the offenders profits, the copyright infringer may be ordered to pay the copyright holder punitive damages and the costs of the lawsuit. These costs only rarely represent the actual costs that the copyright holder spends chasing down the damages owed to him.
The reason that most people do not care about copyright is that they know that no one is going to come after them for a few bucks. John Chow was lucky because he was able to either convince the two bloggers that copied his article to remove it or shame them into doing so. If you create something original and do not have his traffic you might not be so fortunate.
Another possibility of copyright violation is criminal charges. Remember those warnings from the F.B.I. at the beginning of every blockbuster. Of course, the law and potential penalties vary but in addition to jail time, fines and damages to the copyright holder may be imposed. A copyright infringer may even face extradition to a foreign country, one that may have harsher penalties and less favorable prison conditions than those at home. Not to say that it is not possible that someone may start a criminal prosecution or extradition to make a point, logic dictates that this type of action would commonly occur only where the infringement is significant. So again, lets look at an infringement where the loss to the holder and profit realized is small. Is it reasonable to expect the state to spend substantial sums of taxpayers dollars to prosecute the infringement? Assuming a successful investigation and prosecution would the penalty justify the expense?
Fact is not a lot of people are being prosecuted or extradited for copyright infringement. With the increasing popularity of the net, copyright infringement is increasing. Little is being done to deter it. So the question is not Do People Respect Copyright Anymore, it is Do People Care About Copyright At All. What do you think?
1 response so far ↓
A reader // Jan 15, 2007 at 12:25 am
To answer your question, no, I do not think that most people care about copyright at all. I’m an American living in Shanghai, and just today I was playing tour guide to two American business visitors, whose main “tourism” agenda was going to the market to buy their wives fake Louis Vuitton purses. The Chinese policies (or more to the point, enforcement) of copyright violations aside, every Western expat I know buys fake DVDs on the street every week, with neither fear of repercussions nor guilt at violating intellectual property law.