Outsourcing p2p police work
p2p news / p2pnet: The public prosecutor of the German district Karlsruhe is afraid he might be crushed under the workload of (future) p2p-prosecutions presented to him by the German gaming industry:
"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 and in the Netherlands, at least, 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 unacceptable pressure on its resources and is said to only proceed with criminal prosecutions against users who have been previously convicted and have sold songs on a large scale.
That would be in line with the so-called Bagatellklausel from 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 whether the Bagatellklausel was born out of practical considerations or legal charity, the prosecutor’s practice seems to have given the answer.
Rik Lambers – CoCo
[Lambers is a former researcher at the Institute for Information Law, Amsterdam, who's now in transition to a new full time job in the field of IP/Internet law. He's also an associate member of the European INDICARE project, which researches consumer issues related to DRM.]
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