gibbyZone.com/blog a blog by Andrew J Gibson

Piracy laws and US prison population

American prisons house ¼ of the worlds incarcerated population but our country has 5% of the worlds population. This seems a bit skewed. About 1 in 100 of American's citizens are behind bars. These facts tell me that our laws need to be revamped. Or, since that would impact existing functionality, our lawmakers should be increasingly careful about what new laws are introduced. This added care would likely lead to a lowered amount of incarcerations. American taxpayers foot the bill for the $60 billion annual incarceration cost. That's about $88/day per prisoner. Instead of paying to put and keep people in jail, we should pay to put everything through college or some other secondary education. With the greater amount of educated citizens, we'd likely see a significant decrease in crimes committed by our citizens. Perhaps if we put $32,120 pear year ($88 x 365) towards the college education of each of the 2.2 million American citizens in jail, we'd have a significantly greater chance to have a stronger, less criminal-centric society. To clarify who I mean by the 2.2 million people, I'm not talking about those individuals that are already in jail, but those that are upcoming youths who are at risk for future incarceration before the crimes have the chance to occur.

Instead of creating laws like FISA (Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act) or ACTA (Anti-Counterfeit Trade Agreement), to name a selective few, we should be worrying about our growing prison populations while analyzing our laws and the need for new laws that are equally or more harsh than the ones already in place.

ACTA will essentially encourage ISPs to monitor the online activities of their customers, and report any and all activity that may infringe copyright law. Basically, the act will criminalize the downloading of unauthorized content (pirate material). Someone simply downloading videos or music should not be qualified to go to jail. After all, those downloads do little to impact the box office and DVD sales. A teenager is not a criminal for downloading movies he wouldn't otherwise buy because it's from an unfamiliar genre, for example. As a matter of fact, piracy exposes pirates to more movies than those that don't pirate material. It actually leads to more sales, in the long run, for movies and music that are pirated, especially if the content entertains the masses. Movie piracy causes a loss of $20.3 billion/year. It causes the loss of 140k jobs and will cause a loss of tax revenue of about $800 million. On the other hand: "... let's say people are forgoing paying for $6 billion in movies by downloading or consuming illegal goods but end up spending that $6 billion on iPods, computers and HDTV sets on which to watch the movies, which leads to $25 billion in job creation in the computer/software/consumer electronics field," Jason Shultz, staff lawyer at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, wrote in an e-mail. Essentially, piracy of intellectual property actually fuels our American economy just like the illegal drug trade does (which is, not to mention, supplemented by the government). I think it's safe to say without crime, the American economy would essentially collapse or somehow be crippled. I'm definitely not advocating any violent crimes. However, if there's a movie you want to sample before you go buy it on Blu-ray, you shouldn't have to worry about ending up in jail. Downloading intellectual property doesn't physically hurt anyone and we shouldn't try to enact laws that criminalize our citizens for yet another small government misunderstanding the needs of the marketplace.

Citations:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prisons_in_the_United_States

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/09/28/AR2006092801640.html

http://www.rlslog.net/proposed-anti-piracy-strategy-grants-authorities-almost-unlimited-powers-to-invade-citizens-privacy/