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Posted by Exp315 on 10/07/05 19:31
Christy, the problem is primarily with uploading or sharing files. It's
all because of the "Statutory damages" provision of copyright law. It
says that if some other party sues you in civil court and proves that
you violated their copyright by "making available" their copyrighted
work without a license, then they can get a fixed amount of "statutory
damages" per copyrighted work without having to prove that they
suffered any actual damages, or that anyone actually received the stuff
you made available. The amount of statutory damages is very high
because it was set in the olden days when lawmakers were thinking of
large-scale commercial copyright infringement. That's why the RIAA can
scare little individual file sharers so effectively into settling for a
few thousand dollars instead of trying to fight a legal case where they
could be faced with hundreds of thousands of dollars in damages.
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