First Monday Blog Post

sorry this is soo late my friend's computer that i was using lost Microsoft Word so I couldn't post the blogs i had written on the articles. so here is the first one...

First Blog Entry
Monday October 1, 2007

Germany Outlaws Burning CDs Made From Illegally Obtained Music

This is an article about a recently approved copyright law in Germany’s upper house of Parliament. This new law makes it illegal for individuals who have obtained music and movies illegally to make copies of the movies and music onto CDs. The Bundersrat, upper house of Parliament, ignoring harsh criticism from consumer protection groups passed this law which outlaws private copies of content that has been downloaded from illegal sources such as P2P and file-sharing networks.

Although this law is not supposed to be taken into effect until 2008, both the Green Party and many consumer protection groups have been trying to add a stipulation that wouldn’t criminalize youths as well as other private users, but they has been little to no success in the way to pass this exemption. These groups wanted to ensure that there was a profit motive involved and not just a way to merely single out sources that have made the illegal information available to users and creating a possible crime scene.

Germany’s federal justice minister, Brigitte Zypris, states that this new law brings Germany in line with many other European Union codes, but many others believe that the law surpasses the previously proposed legislation and that this new law is simply a way to help out the entertainment industry in Germany.

I think that this law looks good in theory but will have problems actually implementing it in the real world. Does Germany actually believe that they will begin to bust people for making bootleg CDs? Music, whether illegally downloaded or not, ultimately looks the same on a CD so this is one of the problems with this new legislation. Either way Germany has taken a big step in the direction of intellectual property laws, that can possibly protect actors or artists work from being illegally distributed. Whether or not this law will necessarily stop this illegal distribution of other’s work or just instead halt the flow of free information from the web is still yet to be seen. Either way the road to the protection of individuals work’s while still maintaining the freeness of the internet has begun to be built. This new law may not really be a step in the right direction, but it will at least form some point of reference for other forms of legislation to get a jumping off point from in the future.

Link to article
http://www.zeropaid.com/news/9013/Germany+Outlaws+Burning+CDs+Made+From+Illegally+Obtained+Music

Anna :)