Life imprisonment for using pirated software?
“Intellectual Property Protection Act of 2007″, is a new bill proposed by attorney general Alberto Gonzales. Among other things, it proposes to make “attempt to commit piracy” a punishable crime, as well as extend the maximum penalty for using pirated software to life in jail. I would like to shortly comment on this proposition.
Idiot.
You can see the other ridiculous points from the proposed bill in the article over at Cnet.
May 15th, 2007 at 11:57 am
“Idiot” sums it up perfectly.
Why not just send someone over to live in my house and monitor if I make any “attempts to commit piracy”.
What’s the world, or at least the U.S., coming to?
May 20th, 2007 at 7:05 am
Try reading the full story behind this before judging.
The whole “life in prison” part is ONLY applicable if the pirated software is used in a situation where other people’s lives and health are at risk.
In the bill, the examples of a hospital and a fire department were given.
Outside of life-dependent situations like those, while the punishment will be increased, it is not life in prison. Pirating Windows will not get you in prison for life unless you work in a place where people’s health and safety are taken care of.
May 20th, 2007 at 8:04 am
@X: I’ve read the full story. The argument about life-threatening situations because of piracy is, in my opinion, just a cheap and sleazy way to scare people into thinking that piracy can, literally, kill.
First of all, such situations are very, very rare.
Secondly, how do you determine the severity of the offense? Should a doctor go to prison for life because he installed a shareware version of some program on a hospital computer and forgot to remove it (or purchase it) after the grace period is over?
Thirdly, even if an event in which there was real loss of life directly due to the use of pirated software should occur, I still don’t think it warrants life in prison for the offender. People make mistakes on the job, even on important posts like the military, health, etc, but they don’t immediately get sentenced to life in prison for them. Everyone makes mistakes.
And finally, what about lives endangered by legal software? Like, a hospital running into problems because of problems with Windows activation?
There’s more to be said about this, but I’ll leave it at this. My opinion is that equalizing piracy with loss of life is scare tactics and severe stretching of the truth. In a similar line of reasoning, you could say that anyone who steals a cellphone from a doctor should go to prison for life because it might have prevented that doctor from doing a life-saving phone call.
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