Uriel-238

You’re right that I should have specified the US, and will edit my original comment.

It’s not a crime in the US that has state-served sentences like fines or imprisonment, rather is a civil infraction. Granted, the media trade organizations like the MPAA and RIAA would very much like to make copyright infringement felonious, but that could easily lead to overenforcement and filling our already impacted prisons even more.

I’ve heard the European watchdogs are more severe and will go after grandmothers who play radios too loudly regarding public performance regulations.

But we’re in an era in which states are passing laws to make persons illegal or strip them of their rights, so we can’t rely on the state (any state) to fairly assert how their populations should behave, and Disney has been an IP-maximalist shit since the mid 20th century.

So our respect of legality should only extend to what can and will be enforced. The Sheriff of Nottingham does not deserve our obedience. (Prince John neither)

Copyright infringement is not a crime. It’s grounds for a civil suit, but it looks really bad for Sony entertainment to try to bleed tens of thousands of dollars from a poor family trying to watch a movie they couldn’t afford to watch in theaters.

Possessing or viewing CSAM is so severe a crime, you need a lawyer to dispose of it. To not do so is to stay in possession of it, which is a felony. To destroy it is destruction of evidence, which is a felony. Your only recourse is to stuff it in an unmarked box, and ask your lawyer to anonymously hand it over to the local precinct. It is essentially social toxic waste.

ETA [rant] Note that a) Sony (and all the other major studios and publishers and record labels) gladly pirates IP that is not theirs, and also underpays the people that produce their content. And b) Sony freely engages in dark patterns and odious TOSes which is one of the reasons I haven’t been able to play Sony games in years. So it is actually more ethical to pirate Sony content (or again, that of any major studio, record label, publishing house or AAA game company) than it is to pay the company and support their ongoing abuse of workers, end consumers and the market.

Also there is one thing you can do to them that is worse than pirating their content, and that is not pirating their content. [/rant]

McDonald’s is notorious for suing any food-related company with a name starting with Mc or Mac, for trademark infringement. McDonald’s lost to McNally’s, a steakhouse in California, but I have to assume they’ve won enough to persist the policy.

Although in the 2010s it was observed that copyright lawyers on retainer to movie studios and record companies were over-eager to report infringement to media platforms even when it was obviously unintentional and not useful for piracy (e.g. dancing baby videos.) And Disney has a long wretched tradition of suing daycare places for wall murals long before the internet.

So this might be a matter of retained legal teams keeping themselves busy with overvigilence, since overenforcement makes such companies look like abusive dicks who deserve to be pirated (or worse, deserve to be not pirated).