Copyright zealots FAST to pursue 'far greater' fines for historic piracy

Mission Creep

imminent.

We are repleat with instances of 14 year olds being prosecuted for "illegally" downloading a song and seeing people and families destroyed by it. Much like the RSPCA, they will ONLY go after the cases where they are sure of a pay-out. Criminal convictions wont play a part in it, you will be fined, fined and fined again. Meanwhile, the cunts behind crypto-locker et all will all go unpunished, as will any gubbermint dept found out to be using dodgy software.

FAST are an utter joke.

FAST are a joke. For a start their name is a lie: Federation Against Software Theft. It's not theft, it's Copyright Violation or License Violation. Having reported organisations for licensing violations in the past (long story and while I like to bash MS as much as most commentards, software should be paid for and I will not report a violation without having pursued all other avenues), what did they do about this? Did they contact me for more details? Did they contact the organisation involved or even do anything? No and no.

The only impression that I can get is that they are a joke and more of an income stream for their own board members and an 'old boys network' usable by members to slap competitors they don't like than an organisation to promote the correct and fair licensing of software.

Anon for rather obvious reasons!

How will they demonstrate historic loss?

Losses in online intellectual property cases are always problematic. How many copies of an item have been pirated - we haven't got a way of finding out. What does your evidence look like? The courts will need proper proof of loss, not extravagant assertions. Does every pirated copy you can identify represent a loss at full retail price, at some discounted price, at the marginal cost of provision / distribution or some other basis? And FAST hope to do this for some notional "historic" period?

I get instructed in some of these legal cases - hence the anonymous posting.

The sweet sound of desperation..

They must be getting rather worried now that there are fewer and fewer opportunities for their grandstanding to be had (and if I find the time I'm going to amuse myself with setting up some recorded stings as well). Microsoft is desperate to move to a subscription model, which will pretty much cut that revenue stream off at the knees, Adobe is already doing it and for the rest there is quite a move towards Open Source for the simplest, most powerful reason of all: money.

So yes, I'm sure they're trying to come up with new ways to play police games without any formal right to do so. There are ways to deal with license issues, but FAST is not part of the solution. They're just vermin IMHO.

100 instances. Yowsa! The mind boggles at the ubiquity.

So... they want to get more money per suit.

I guess the frequency, and with subscription pricing, probably decreasing, isn't enough to keep the BMW's gassed.

Are they going to persue the Linux kernel pirates?

I've got two phones here that have a pirated Linux kernel binary… I know it's pirated as the documentation did not point the way to where I get the kernel sources, nor is there media in the box that contains said sources.

Or does only commercial proprietary software count?

Non-Profit?

Surely that's stretching the definition if you don't get the cash, but the companies providing all your funding do.