Germany: P2P Prosecutions Bring Unacceptable Workload
The public prosecutor of the German district Karlsruhe fears getting crushed under the workload of (future) P2P-prosecutions presented to him by the German gaming industry:
The public office in Germany thinks the P2P-prosecution of minor uploaders would put an unacceptable pressure on its resources and is said to only proceed with criminal prosecutions against users that have been previously convicted and have sold songs on a large scale. That would be in line with the so-called Bagatellklausel from the reviewed German copyright law, which exempts the exchange of a small number of songs that are exclusively for private use from prosecution. If one still wonders wether the Bagatellklausel was born out of practical considerations or legal charity, the prosecutor's practice seems to have given the answer.
"20,000 announcements are said to have been received against game downloaders, which take the work time of five lawyers and three particularly policemen turned off for the sifting. The processing of the document mountains will [take] at least six months to take up. "the treatment of heavier offenses could suffer in the future under this substantial additional expenditure"The German gaming industry is using the Swiss firm Logistep, which says to registrate "which contents during which period and with which IP address" users downloaded. At least in the Netherlands this kind of outsourcing of P2P-police work to a non-EU third-party has been deemed unacceptable.
The public office in Germany thinks the P2P-prosecution of minor uploaders would put an unacceptable pressure on its resources and is said to only proceed with criminal prosecutions against users that have been previously convicted and have sold songs on a large scale. That would be in line with the so-called Bagatellklausel from the reviewed German copyright law, which exempts the exchange of a small number of songs that are exclusively for private use from prosecution. If one still wonders wether the Bagatellklausel was born out of practical considerations or legal charity, the prosecutor's practice seems to have given the answer.
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Thru Institut for Urheber- und Medienrecht [German]
posted by Rik Lambers at 21.10.05
1 Comments:
I think in many cases the respective governments pick up the tabs. I could only imagine what you could do to a small nation!
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