Quote:
Originally Posted by radius
Is small scale copyright infringement really a crime in any of our countries?
People keep saying "theft", "crime" and "criminal" when I think they really should be saying "unauthorized copy", "offense" and "offender".
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It's a civil offense, not a criminal one.
If I'm a rights holder, and become aware of infringement, it's on me to take action and bring suit. It's not something law enforcement agencies will care about.
A fair bit of infringement happens because bringing suit is time consuming and expensive. I've been corresponding with a site owner who mentioned a lot of commercial offerings ripped from his site that he can't do anything about. He technically
could, if he had the time and money to go after the infringers in court, but most folks running sites as a labor of love devoted to a subject they are enthusiastic about aren't in a position to really take action on infringement.
Note the discussion here a while back on the Bookeen Cybook. It uses a Linux kernel, and Linux is open source under the GPL, but Bookeen doesn't provide the source as the GPL requires. Bookeen can't - the Linux implementation is from the hardware vendor they buy from, and the vendor hasn't released it. Technically, the vendor is in violation of the GPL, but who will take the time and pony up the money to go after them in court? (And the vendor is in China, where attitudes toward such things are different, and you would have lots of fun getting anywhere if you
did go after them.)
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Dennis