The Story
In Brazil, an antipiracy group known as the Anti-Piracy Association of Film and Music (APCM) has recently won a case which has made any kind of peer-to-peer filesharing software illegal. This ruling is in followup to an earlier case in which a company called iPlay was sued for facilitating the transfer of copyrighted files. The APCM named a bunch of files to be filtered, but iPlay were not developers of the P2P software in question. This led the judge in the case to go back and say that any website which hosted P2P software “would be committing a crime, punishable by between two and four years in jail.”
Yes, That Means They’re All Illegal
You know how when you were in middle school you and your friends would talk about how it’s illegal to possess marijuana but not to smoke marijuana? This is the same thing. And why do you make it illegal to distribute something? So that no one can have it. The goal of this statute is to keep P2P software out of the hands of users, regardless of whether or not the users would use the software to infringe on copyright.
Doing It Wrong
In its attempts to preempt copyright infringement, Brazil has created a legal precedent which is essentially a law against thoughtcrimes. It’s ridiculous to assume that all users who want to download filesharing software are doing so to break the law. Peer-to-peer technologies have legitimate uses which we’ve seen time and time again. Much of the open source revolution has been built on the back of filesharing simply because it does not require everyone with a program to distribute to spend a lot of money on a server. And even full-fledged companies utilize filesharing to save on bandwidth costs. Is World of Warcraft now illegal in Brazil because Blizzard delivers patches using filesharng technology?
At the end of the day, what Brazil has is a very nearsighted judge who was able to be taken in by the backwards-thinking arguments of the APCM (which basically has the same membership as the RIAA and the MPAA). In all cases where a tool is used to do something illegal, the party which should be punished is whoever used the tool to break the law. Should we outlaw hard drives because people might use them to store copyrighted material?
