Photo Business News archive, 2006–2026. New writing is at Substack.

New Crime – Attempting to Steal Photography?

by
According to CNET:
Attorney General Alberto Gonzales is pressing the U.S. Congress to enact a sweeping intellectual property bill that would increase criminal penalties for copyright infringement, including “attempts” to commit piracy.

“To meet the global challenges of IP crime, our criminal laws must be kept updated,” Gonzales said during a speech before the U.S. Chamber of Commerce in Washington on Monday.

The Bush administration is throwing its support behind a proposal called the Intellectual Property Protection Act of 2007, which is likely to receive the enthusiastic support of the movie and music industries and would represent the most dramatic rewrite of copyright law since a 2005 measure dealing with pre-release piracy.

While the devil is always in the details, this is certainly an interesting turn of events. Further, it’s worth noting that Rep. Lamar Smith, who is quoted as tentatively in support of this, previously was reported (also by CNET) “Congress readies broad new digital copyright bill” which didn’t gain traction, and the roundly criticized Orphan Works bill, which also sank in the last Congress, but may yet have a pulse during this session.
Please post your comments by clicking the link below. If you’ve got questions, please pose them in our Photo Business Forum Flickr Group Discussion Threads.

Originally published on Photo Business News & Forum on May 15, 2007. Comments are closed; this post is part of the archive.

6 thoughts on “New Crime – Attempting to Steal Photography?”

  1. Wow. I’m strongly in favor of protecting copyrights, but some of those clauses are scary. And why all this protection for some intellectual property, while not others ($$$$ & lobbyists, I’m guessing).

    And considering it is coming from Gonzales, I’m just generally skeptical.
  2. I’ve still yet to finish reading through this completely, but so far I’m as for this as I was the Patriot Act. I’m all for copyright protection but, what can I say, the legislation that gets written these days, especially what comes out of the Attorney General’s office seems to be written with the intent of future revision (it sucks).
  5. It looks like typical, benefit-a-single-party (RIAA) and hose everyone else with the collateral damage type of legislation. This stuff isn’t good for anyone except the thought police that want to run your life. Sure, you *might* catch a few real criminals, but most of those who get punished won’t be the intended targets.

    In the 80’s we made fun of communist countries for doing this type of thing to their own people. Now look at us…

    David

Comments are closed.