There is this little thing called the United States Bill of Rights, and in this bill there is an even smaller thing called the Eighth Amendment, which prohibits the federal government from imposing excessive bail, excessive fines, and cruel and unusual punishments. Today, President Bush just signed the PRO-IP law into effect, which by this blogger’s standards, smashes the Eighth Amendment to pieces. Theoretically, if one person downloads even the smallest and simplest of MP3 files without the artist’s consent, they can seize all computers, electronics, and hard drives in a particular home or office. That’s just the beginning; you receive the real punishment for anything they happen to come across on these seized computers.
Cliffhanger! See the rest of the law after the jump!
What’s really crazy is that they made these laws so broad that the definition of a person’s ‘work’ is all out of whack. Before, one album was considered an artists work, but now thanks to this new law, each individual track on the CD is an artist work; ie. you will be breaking roughly 15 more laws than you would have before for downloading a CD. But what if you downloaded a show, like your favorite episode of Bible Black? The concept of work can be divided even more by separating the sound-track as a separate work, along with anything else they can pull out of their asses.
How the hell did the law become so screwed up that you would get less of a punishment for actually stealing a CD from a store than downloading a digital copy, which by all means hurts no one? Right now this law appears to be aimed at the music and film industry, but could easily sway into the anime industry. I don’t think anyone deserves to have their laptop taken away from them for watching an episode of Haruhi on it.
Ever since man walked on this planet he shared his stories, music, and culture to each other without worrying about financial gratuity. Yes, artists, like myself, need to be paid, I won’t deny that, but there has to be some other way. The artist creates art, and the art was meant to be viewed. The RIAA and MPAA can not punish the audience to such a degree that it cripples them; all because they did exactly what the art was originally created for.
This law is insane.
[Via Joystiq]
[Update: The section of the bill that allowed the government to separate each work into different categories was taken away from the bill before it reached the president, and for damn good reason. Now you can have all of One Piece on your computer without serving five consecutive life sentences because of it. (Thanks Kougeru)]
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