Andre Yoskowitz
4 May 2010 12:53
The Songwriters Guild of America has made it clear with a note this weekend, via Ars, that music piracy is worse than bank robbery, and that the FBI should begin prosecuting all file-sharers civilly and criminally.
"There are numerous economic crimes of much lesser magnitude (such as bank robbery) that are routinely and fully investigated, for which law enforcement agencies such as the FBI have significant resources," says the SGA. "By contrast, online copyright piracy dwarfs bank robbery in causing economic losses, yet the FBI has limited criminal investigative interest and no civil mandate whatsoever to pursue this devastating economic harm. This inequity must change."
The Guild goes on to say that the DOJ (Department of Justice) needs to class illegal file-sharing as a "serious" crime. "Unfortunately, this misguided attitude allows domestic and foreign pirates to decimate an industry—intellectual property—where the United States enjoys a true global competitive advantage," they add.
Additionally, the SGA says that the federal government should immediately begin bringing civil copyright lawsuits against offenders. Currently, any lawsuits against illegal file-sharers come from the private sector.
Finally, the SGA gives some hints as to what they would like to see currently done to help combat piracy:
-Technologies to detect, monitor (and filter) traffic or specific files based on analysis of information such as protocols, file types, text description, metadata, file size and other “external” information;
-Content recognition technologies such as digital hashes, watermark detection, and fingerprinting technologies;
-Site blocking, redirection with automated warning systems/quarantine of repeat offending sites;
-Bandwidth shaping and throttling;
-Scanning infrastructure (the ability to subscribe to RSS-style data feeds as sites get new postings of content and links (for linking, streaming, and locker sites)