Warez Law and the Warposted on: Wed, 10 May 2006 10:08:56 GMT
Eric Goldman lecturer and author of a number of articles involving criminal copyright infringement and warez trading has started his own
technology and marketing law blog.
His works such as Warez Trading and Criminal Copyright Infringement, The Challenges of Regulating Warez Trading and
Critique of the No Electronic Theft Act are some of the better researched publications floating around the net.
He claims he will have more to say on the topic at a later date.
So criminal copyright infringement has a low capacity to deter warez traders. As a result, the official government response has been to bust and lock up warez traders one-by-one. Basically, the government is fighting a war of attrition. The consequence is that about 120 United States warez traders have been convicted or pleaded guilty, with a few more internationally.
But wars of attrition are costly. The government incurs significant enforcement costs, the traders prosecuted incur significant personal costs (possibly beyond the culpability of their behavior), and other people may be chilled from socially-beneficial non-infringing copying by the fear of being busted next.
Worse, I think the war of attrition is ultimately unwinnable. I think that, so long as digital assets are scarce and risky, there will continue to be people who will be attracted to the trading of such assets--even if we successfully busted every single warez trader currently in the scene.
