Kids face summary trials for copyright violations – INSIDE JoongAng Daily

Kids face summary trials for copyright violations – INSIDE JoongAng Daily.

Relax, United States. This is from Korea.

Or, better, don’t relax. The law in the US takes the owner of the internet account to task for infringements made under that main account; the music industry, for example, regularly sues the parents of children in the US who download music for “free” from the internet. Thus, in the US, the parents are answerable for the child’s sins.

The Koreans place the onus of the offense where it belongs: on the kids — the actual infringers. 

I talk regularly to kids in schools about copyright and how their “free” downloads will cost their parents thousands of dollars in attorney fees and judgment payments to the music licensors; the kids look at me like I have five heads. Maybe if the US began to treat copyright infringement like the crime it is — and held the actual infringer responsible — the temptation to make those free downloads would be significantly less.

I love kids, which is why I think we just might have a generation of people coming up who have no clue about how to be accountable, and that makes me sad. But that’s a parenting issue, not the subject of this blog. If, though, answering for infringing IP can help, I’m all for making the infringer answer personally, no matter what the tender age.