Software pirates and other copyright violators have been met with increasingly severe punishments. Under the former version, piracy of computer software was a misdemeanor offense, whereas the current version elevates the offense to a felony. Defendants convicted of criminal copyright infringement are sentenced under 2B5.3 of the Federal Sentencing Guidelines which carries a base offense level of six. The Copying of Computer Software at 234. The drafters believe there is a conflict between federal Copyright Act and state statutes.
Federal law preempts state software piracy laws.
Thereafter, no person is entitled to any such right in any such work under the common law or statutes of any state. The Fourth Circuit found that the section of Virginia s Computer Crimes Act that criminalized reproduction of copyrighted computer programs was preempted by the Federal Copyright Act. 1976 U.S. Code Cong. Recently, some courts have found that in order to survive a preemption challenge based on equivalency of protected rights, the state law claim must contain an extra element. That defendants were bound, as a matter of state contract law, and that federal law did not preempt the private contract rights because they were not equivalent to the exclusive rights granted by copyright law.