Criminal offenses, 17 U.S.C. 506

The criminal infringement section of the Copyright Act. It is filed here because a court named it, not because this archive has read it into an argument.

Scope of this record, stated plainly. The url resolves to the section as currently codified. That is not the text in force in December 1991, and this record does not claim it is. The section was enacted by Pub. L. 94-553, title I, § 101, Oct. 19, 1976, 90 Stat. 2586. Cornell’s editorial notes record subsection (a) being amended generally by Pub. L. 105-147, Dec. 16, 1997, and again by Pub. L. 109-9, Apr. 27, 2005; the last amendment to subsection (a) before December 1991 was Pub. L. 97-180, May 24, 1982. On the note’s own account, the subsection as it stood between the 1982 and 1997 amendments read: “Any person who infringes a copyright willfully and for purposes of commercial advantage or private financial gain shall be punished as provided in section 2319 of title 18.”

That pre-1997 text is recorded here for the cataloguer, from Cornell’s amendment note and from nowhere else. The casefile that cites this record makes no claim about the penalties available in 1991 and quotes no statutory text. Everything it says about this section comes from the court’s own sentence naming it. If a later draft wants the 1991 text as evidence rather than as apparatus, it goes through the receipt gate against the Statutes at Large first.