Mark's picture
Mon, 07/05/2007 - 3:20pm — Mark

Copyright violations are victimless crimes: they stop copyright holders from profiting from their copyright holdings, but don’t actively harm them. Yes, there may be struggling musicians who are forced to get day jobs, but it’s the copyright laws themselves that victimise people, from kids who have to get part time jobs to line the pockets of musicians and movie moguls, to the people who are denied access to medical, cultural and literary products because of the cost, to Hew Griffiths, an unassuming man, who has been torn from his home by federal agents and removed to a US jail and now is threatened with ten years in prison for fiddling with bits of code on a computer screen and then giving other people the same fiddled-with code. Like David Hicks, only far more innocuous. I hope in time we’ll see the same campaigns for his release, although I won’t hold my breath. (I should disclose by the way that I don’t read any Australian blogs because I think they’re all dire and therefore only have the vaguest idea of the stuff written about Griffiths in teh Oz blogosphere already, and am just bloggig my reaction to reading an SMH article about this case).

Like Hicks, the legality of what’s happened is highly dubious, in that Griffiths, like Hicks, is being held by the United States not on the basis that he broke the US’s laws in the United States, but on the basis of breaking them outside the US. Admittedly, Griffiths is now being exposed to a more normal version of US judicial procedure than Hicks was. I presume that this all means that Griffiths, like Hicks, was not prosecutable under Aussie law.

Rather than asking questions about lost productivity from piracy (not that I think the arguments implicit in them stack up, except from the perspective of the ruling class and its interests), let’s ask questions about the human cost of the war on free flows of information.