Prison terms on tap for 'prerelease' pirates

Found on CNet News on Tuesday, 19 April 2005
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File-swappers who distribute a single copy of a prerelease movie on the Internet can be imprisoned for up to three years, under a bill that's slated to become the most dramatic expansion of online piracy penalties in years.

The bill, approved by Congress on Tuesday, is written so broadly it could make a federal felon of anyone who has even one copy of a film, software program or music file in a shared folder and should have known the copyrighted work had not been commercially released. Stiff fines of up to $250,000 can also be levied. Penalties would apply regardless of whether any downloading took place.

If signed into law, as expected, the bill would significantly lower the bar for online copyright prosecutions. Current law sanctions criminal penalties of up to three years in prison for "the reproduction or distribution of 10 or more copies or phonorecords of one or more copyrighted works, which have a total retail value of $2,500 or more."

What if zombie botnets would be tied to P2P? Thinking about it, that would be neat: a releaser uploads its data to a zombie net which then starts releasing the file to a P2P network. Who to sue then? The owner of the zombified host who doesn't even know what's going on? That would be like sueing said person for being infected with a spambot (oops, I give ideas for new laws here).