From The Sublime…

So now, as well as pursuing the War On Terror, the US Justice Department will seek criminal prosecutions on anyone who shares copyrighted material with others, even with members of their own families. This is the kind of world the media conglomerates want us to live in: thanks to the NET Law, sharing over $1,000 of media with your family gets you a year in federal prison, and over $2,500 gets you up to five years.

Now, I’ve been reading this NET Law and it’s asinine in the extreme. There’s no way to arbitrate in court as to the “value” of the copyrighted material. So, for example, you buy a used CD for $1 in a store. The record company can claim that the actual value of that CD is $20, or $50, or whatever sum they are charging for a repruduction. Say it’s $20, and say you lend it to your Dad, who likes it so much he plays it 49 times. No problem. But once he plays it for the 50th time, it’s time for you to go to jail.

Or consider the current licence for a home movie, which allows as many people as possible within a domestic setting. The movie companies can now easily change that licence to specify, say, only 1-3 viewers, and any extra viewers must purchase their ownlicence. So if you sit down and watch an expensive DVD a few times with different bunches of people, then you caould easily become, yes yet again, a federal criminal.

I had thought some of the drug laws, especially concerning the severity of the penalties for possession of LSD by considering the weight of the paper substrate — when LSD itself in this case comprises only one ten thousandth of the total mass — to be the last word in dumb lawmaking. But now that crown goes to the NET Law, which manages to make criminals out of nearly everyone who owns music or movies and music.