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Originally Posted by HarryT
How do you balance the individual's "right to privacy" with the intellectual property owner's equal right to be able to take legal action against those infringing his or her rights? Clearly there needs to be some mechanism in place to allow the identification and punishment of those committing crimes.
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1) Copyright infringement, in the situation of "distributing free copies online," may not be a crime, but a civil tort. If there's no profit (almost always the case), and no identifiable loss to the owner (arguable in some cases), there may be no criminal offense.
2) Copyright owners HAVE the right to take legal action. The problem is that they don't want to. They want to force other people to enforce their rights, instead of using the systems in place, because with the current systems, it's prohibitively expensive for them to claim their right to keep a monopoly on distribution.
3) The fact that it's prohibitively expensive to enforce a set of laws is a sign that the laws need reform, not a sign that the burden of enforcement should be turned over to private businesses, at the expense of innocent customers.
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One cannot simply say that individuals have a "right" to commit crimes with impunity on the grounds that identify them would be a breach of their right to privacy!
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Of course not. But individuals who have not broken the law are not obligated to be searched on the grounds that "some people have broken the law." Individuals have the right not to be placed in a "potential lawbreaker" category just because they have a computer. Or even because they use p2p networking.