The National Post reports today that Canada’s new copyright legislation (due tomorrow, maybe) has provision for a $500 personal use download fine.
A $500 personal use download fine.
That means for every song or movie or book or whatever you download, you will be liable for a $500 fine. Think about your music collection. Think about how many songs you downloaded illegally. Now multiply that by 500, and you’ve got your tab, payable to the Government of Canada.
I’m not going to defend the morality of illegal downloading. I do it occasionally, but that don’t make it right. But a $500 fine seems beyond anything even resembling a fair punishment. If you ever needed proof that the new copyright bill is a spectacular example of a government knuckling under corporate pressue, there it is. This bill contains nothing even close to the ‘public interest’. Via Michael Geist.
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I’m of two minds about this. Yes, it does seem excessive. But it also reminds me of a situation in the Czech Republic involving cab drivers.
(Bear with me, this will make sense shortly. I hope.)
Prague cabbies are a shifty lot. At least a lot of them are. And they were ripping off passengers, especially tourists. They wouldn’t turn on their meters, or they’d take unnecessarily long routes, or engage in any number of other shady practices. The upshot was that they were charging way too much (and still might be; I’m not sure if the problem was ever resolved).
There were measures in place to curb this, fines and such, but the amount the cabbies were making outweighed those by so much, they didn’t care if they got caught and had to pay. So there was a new proposal in place: raise the fine to 1 million Crowns (about $60,000 by today’s exchange rate).
Critics argued that this was hugely excessive. Those in favour countered that it was a deterrent; an amount so large, that cabbies would actually think twice before ripping off their customers.
Now I realize this isn’t exactly analogous to the situation at hand, but it does bear some consideration. People continue to pirate music (and what’s the average value of the that music, per person, I wonder; did that play a part in determining the $500 figure?). A $500 fine might make someone stop and think before downloading that next track (I know it would me).
I know there are other factors to consider here (including the fact that the record industry needs to catch up to the times and figure out a model that actually works today), but I wanted to throw another perspective into the mix.
(Sorry for all the parentheticals, by the way.)