ez is off valamennyire, egy xp-s
hírlevélből van, de nem állom
meg, hogy be ne kopizzam:
"Should Technology Makers Be Responsible for How
You Use Their Products?
It's becoming increasingly popular to extend
legal responsibility for illegal behavior way beyond
the person who actually commits the crime. Bartenders
are sued or even charged criminally if a person who
buys alcohol from them drives drunk. Gun owners are
blamed if criminals steal their weapons and commit
murder or robbery. Parents are fined if their teenage
children skip school, even if the parent has delivered
the child to the schoolhouse door. Vehicle owners get
tickets if their cars run red lights - even if they
weren't driving.
The concept of holding others responsible has been
extended into the copyright arena, too. The recording
industry has been sending letters to colleges,
threatening to hold them responsible if students
download music illegally from their university
accounts. ISPs have been served with subpoenas
requiring and threatened with legal action if they
don't cooperate with RIAA in suing their
customers who are accused of illegal downloading.
Recently there has been a big drive to expand the laws
to encompass more and more the concept of
"secondary copyright infringement" - holding
software makers and hardware manufacturers responsible
if people use their products to exploit copyrights.
Some legal experts are referring to this movement as
"copyright panic" - an emotional state that
results in the passage of harsher and harsher laws
that make it more and more difficult for the public to
use copyrighted material, even legally.
Indeed, there seems to some sort of strong feeling at
work. Not that many years ago, copyright infringement
was a purely civil matter. If you violated it, you
could be sued by the copyright holder in civil court.
And you still can - but now making a copy of that DVD
movie can also get you arrested by the FBI, put in
prison for five years and fined $250,000 per copy. In
the past, it wasn't a crime unless you did it for
monetary gain. Now it's a federal offense even if
there's no monetary gain involved at all.
As a professional writer, I make my living producing
intellectual property, so I am no advocate of piracy.
However, I believe the increasingly draconian laws
being pushed by the movie studios, RIAA and other
representatives of copyright holders are going to
backfire (and, in fact, already are backfiring).
The more intrusive copyright protection technology
gets, the more difficult it makes it for consumers to
use legally purchased material, the more likely they
become to either turn to illegal venues to get it or
just stop consuming it at all. In either case, the
copyright holders lose more money than before.
It's a simple fact of business that you
can't make all your customers mad at you and stay
in business.
And it's not just their customers that
they're going after. Courts have held that file
sharing networks can be held liable because people use
them to exchange copyrighted files illegally, that
parents or grandparents can be held liable when their
children use their computers to share files illegally
without the computer owner's knowledge, and that
technology makers can be held responsible if their
customers use their software to "rip" copy
protected songs or movies.
The implications of such decisions are far-reaching
and a little frightening. If software makers are
responsible for how people use their programs, that
opens up a Pandora's Box of immense proportions.
If a kidnapper uses Word to create a ransom note, can
Microsoft be held liable? If a child pornographer uses
PhotoShop to crop obscene images of kids, is Adobe
responsible? If an extortionist sends threatening
email from a Gmail account, is that Google's
fault?... folyt. köv.