What SHOULD happen to online pirates…

on June 7, 2011

Online pirates are really ticking me off.  Hey…it’s STEALING.  Really.  It is.  Don’t download someone’s book without buying it.  If Karma kicks in, what SHOULD happen to online pirates:

1)      The second he/she downloads a pirated copy of a book, a huge, one-eyed pirate should cover the screen, flip the jerk the bird…and fry the hard drive.

2)   In addition, all electrical appliances should explode in the pirate’s house.

3)   Huge, bulbous, gigantic hemorrhoids should attack the pirate…making it so he can never sit and read again.  Huge.

4)   The most embarrassing website the pirate has ever visited should send instant emails to his mother, grandmother, and first grade teacher with pictures and full details of the schmuck’s online surfing.

5)    The pirate’s worse picture in existence, anywhere in cyberspace, should be blown up and sent to every contact he has ever made.

6)   His picture, phone number, and email address should be advertised in every ‘for sex’ magazine and website in the world.

7)    A picture of the pirate with a threatening message toward the President should be sent to every Navy Seal and Green Beret team on active duty.  And those retired.

8)   A computer generated virus should explode the individual keys on his computer and dye his fingers neon green for life.

9)   His computer should create a toxic gas that creates scales to cover his entire body.  Heck.  Let’s make them boils instead.

10)     Remember those hemorrhoids from #3 above?  They should burst.

Is Online Piracy Really Stealing?

on March 29, 2011

Hell yes, it’s stealing.  Seriously. 

Welcome to Legal Musings…where I try to find a blog niche and talk about the law.  Yes, I’m a lawyer.  Yes, I hope to include a lot of legal analysis dealing with being an author.  But I might digress into other legal areas…because there’s some weird stuff going on in the law.

So, what is Senate Bill 3804, the Combating Online Infringement and Counterfeits Act…and where is it today?  Well, it’s a Bill that was introduced into the Senate by Sen. Leahy from Vermont that allows the government to go after pirates.  By pirates, I don’t mean Captain Hook.  I mean the blood sucking, evil, narcissistic people thumbing their noses at karma and stealing books on the internet.  Dante has a brand new, special level of hell for those folks.

But, I digress.  About the current status of the law…The Bill spent some time in committee, and needs to be re-introduced. 

On February 16, 2011, the Senate Judiciary Committee held hearings and Scott Turow, one of my favorite authors and the president of the Author’s Guild, gave testimony. 

First, Senator Leahy testified, “I am confident that we will pass legislation to target rogue websites this year. I want to hear from all sides as we move forward, but I refuse to accept that addressing the problem is too difficult because people who want to steal will always find a way. That is like saying that we should not prosecute drug crimes or child pornography because bad people will find a way to do bad things anyway. I am a former prosecutor, and that line of argument is unacceptable.”  See Judiciary transcript for full text.

Scott Turow testified and gave some amazing examples of online piracy.  “One is tempted to call it a vast underground economy, but there’s nothing underground about it: it operates in plain sight…Money clearly suffuses the system, paying for countless servers, vast amounts of online bandwidth, and specialized services that speed and cloak the transmission of stolen creative work.” 

Turow then gave specific examples of the most prolific of pirates, stating that it was time to make piracy not so secret, calling for online providers to register an agent for service of process (just like any business in the US has to do).  He had several recommendations…read the full text here.

Is anyone besides the pirates against the Bill?  YES.  There are groups up in arms about the former text of the Bill, claiming it would allow the U.S. Government to shut down every site from YouTube to Yahoo. So the text may have been over-broad.  I think that’s why it went back to committee and they’re holding hearings now.  To clarify the text.

Finally, Nora Roberts, the Queen of Romance, submitted a letter to the Judiciary Committee in support of the Act.  She asked, “If piracy continues to devastate a writer’s income, to erode the ability of the publishers to make the profit necessary to bring those books to the public, where will the next generation of storytellers come from?”  The woman can write!  The full text of her letter is up on the RWA website. 

So…the current status of the law is that they’re working on the law.  I’ll try to keep you updated.