Bad legislation is often a result of lobbying efforts from industrial groups trying their hardest to sustain an obsolete business model. In my last post, I mentioned a UK paper that, amongst other things, discussed how UK law is adversely affected by lobbying groups, and I also explained why I thought this was a huge problem in the US. Well, it doesn’t take long for new examples to come up. This week we saw Tennessee governor Bill Haslam signed a bill into law which classifies the “theft” of “entertainment subscription services” as a crime. “Theft” in this case may include sharing your account password, and “entertainment subscription services” refers to things like Netflix or Hulu.com. Also this week, Maria Pallante started her new job as the Register of Copyrights at the US Copyright Office by declaring at a House Judiciary Committee hearing that unauthorised Internet streaming should become a felony.

What is the problem with all this?

New legislation criminalising copyright infringement would turn many more Americans into criminals and, if fully enforced, would put them into prison. In 2008, the United States already had the largest incarceration rate in the world, at 1.6 million prisoners (according to its Department of Justice) in a population of 309 million. That’s one person in prison for every two hundred, and one quarter of the entire world’s prison population.

According to Ms Pallante, “”unauthorized copyrighted content is a significant problem that will only increase in severity if technology outpaces legal reforms.” I disagree – it will only increase in severity if business models are outpaced by technology. Copyright infringement today – and in the past, before the Internet – is not a legal problem, it is a pricing problem (see this report by the Social Science Research Council). In other words, it is a business model problem.

But what do we see happening today with copyright legislation? It is criminalising infringement, putting otherwise honest people into jail or bankrupting them with obscene fines, in order to sustain an obsolete and failing business model. Legislators in the US (and in the EU, UK, and other countries) are choosing to turn their citizens into criminals in order to prop up industries that are failing to adapt. Why? My guess would be because of lobbying efforts.