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Hello. My name is Carlos. I happened to be a student in computing who works in retail. I am writing to you to input my opinion on your copyright reform.

The only media I personally download that might be copyrighted would be videos that I watch on YouTube. You never know what is and isn't copyrighted when you download many things on the internet. Although books tend to have copyright information on the first or so page, songs do not. And you don't know by which terms the work is copyrighted either. For example, an e-book you read may indeed by copyrighted, but it may be distributed under the terms of the GNU documentation license, which allows people to redistribute the work freely. So people should not be harshly punished for committing a crime which is so easy to do obliviously. This is especially the case because lots of our culture and knowledge is on the internet, and it is a great thing that anybody can access it all.

I am sure that a lot of people download copyright material which they don't even know is copyrighted. And consider the peer to peer file sharing program Limewire. People just look at the thing as a program that lets them download songs. Many people don't even know that when they download a song, the program puts it in the "Shared" folder from which other people on the internet can download, so that the person who merely downloads a song doesn't even know they are sharing it. Someone could easily download songs of which they do not know the copyright, and then get fined for sharing them. That doesn't seem fair.

So I think that, although the composers of works should be using something like the GNU documentation license that allows free redistribution of intellectual material, we should only charge people after repeated and knowing offense, like the police do when people don't wear their helmets. That's just what makes sense. Don't ruin someone financially for something like this.

Thank you for reading my input, Carlos