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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Dannyalcatraz" data-source="post: 1564285" data-attributes="member: 19675">So your complaint is that IP protection is unfair because Disney can pay to enforce its copyright with a wall of attorneys and you can't?  That's not the law's fault- that's life.You, the underdog, have the same bundle of rights in your IP as any powerful IP holder has in its IP, and those rights arise at the moment of creation.  The original movie you make is just as protected as Disney's.  Your novel is just as protected as Stephen King's.  Your song is just as protected as Metallica's.The difference is that you might not be able to afford a lawyer to defend your rights, and every other IP holder above can.  The only time you're entitled to free legal councel is when you're destitute and charged with a crime,  and trust me, the attorney you get for free may be high quality, but he has less time to work on your case than a hired gun.That is not something the law can readily address.  That is where the private citizen must step up to the plate.  For the record, you're starting to see more attorneys take on copyright infringement cases on a contingent fee basis- if they don't win, they don't get paid.  And, much like Barry Sheck has his Innocence Project, which tries to get DNA tests done for indigent persons on death row (pro bono), perhaps someone will eventually form an analogous organization for low-income IP holders, prosecuting their cases for nominal fees.  Heck, perhaps Ralph Nader's crowd is already doing this.Until then, you can always learn your copyright law well enough to proceed pro se and protect your own rights.  Yes, its a scary process, but the courts generally grant pro se plaintiffs a lot more leeway in a courtroom since they are amateurs.  The essentials of an infringement case are 1) proving you created the IP, 2) the accused subsequently violated your copyright by using your IP without permission and in a fashion not protected by the fair use doctrine, 3) a reasonably certain number of times or with a reasonably certain dollar amount of harm.Plus, if you get enough publicity (perhaps due to an anonymous call to your local media watchdog?), you might just become the proverbial ambulance getting chased.Actually, that's still piracy, but it is on so small a scale it is what an economist and the law would call "optimal-level piracy."  That is, it would cost the company more money to go after you for 1 infringement than to ignore it or let you go with a warning.  To enforce the law perfectly would be so prohibitively expensive, its the economic equivalent of trying to accelerate a given mass to the speed of light.  The only way you'll get in trouble for a solo copy scenario like this is by doing it in a blatantly stupid way- like burning the whole CD at Sony Music's headquarters in front of the artist and the company president.What has the music and movie industry (as well as other IP holders) quivering is the ability of one person to upload a copy, and have millions of people download it all over the world, especially since it is obvious that the technology of electronic IP distribution will only become faster (I'm peripherally involved in one such project).  Past pirates needed to make physical copies, which required a lot of time, a factory and all kinds of machinery (all the same kinds of overhead as a legitimate producer).  In fact, many piracy busts happened in factories doing legitimate production- they just ran off an extra 125k copies of the IP in question during off-peak hours, and they had to sell physical product just like the normal retailers.  Modern potential pirates only need a computer- insignificant overhead and a negligible time investment- and due to anonymous P2P filesharing, its MUCH harder to track the infringement.  If you look at the people the RIAA has gone after so far, they all stockpiled illegally downloaded IP- not a one was a first-time offender.  Note also that the settlements have so far averaged around $3000, probably about the value of the stolen merch, + some nominal penalties, including, I think, probation.</blockquote>

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