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How The Copyright Industry Drives A Big Brother Dystopia
Google Defends Hotfile (and Megaupload) in Court
Pirate Bay ‘Financier’ Will Serve Sentence Electronically Tagged

How The Copyright Industry Drives A Big Brother Dystopia

Posted: 20 Mar 2012 02:23 AM PDT

Look at the laws being proposed right now. General wiretapping. Mandatory citizen tracking. Excommunication, for Odin’s sake. Sending people into exile. All these laws follow one single common theme: they aim to re-centralize the permission to publish ideas, knowledge, and culture, and punish anybody who circumvents the old gatekeepers’ way beyond proportion.

Having this gatekeeper position – having had this gatekeeper position – teaches somebody what power is, in the worst sense of the word. If you can determine what culture, knowledge, and ideas are available to people – if you are in a position to say yes or no to publishing an idea – then it goes much beyond the power of mere publishing. It puts you in a position to select. It puts you in a position where you get to decide people’s frame of reference. It literally gives you the power to decide what people discuss, feel, and think.

The ability to share ideas, culture, and knowledge without permission or traceability is built into the foundations of the net, just as it was when the Postal Service was first conceived. When we send a letter in the mail, we and we alone determine whether we identify ourselves as sender on the outside of the envelope, on the inside for only the recipient to know, or not at all; further, nobody may open our sealed letters in transit just to check up on what we’re sending.

The Internet mimics this. It is perfectly reasonable that our children have the same rights as our parents did here. But if our children have those same rights, in the environment where they communicate, it makes a small class of industries obsolete. Therefore, this is what the copyright industry tries to destroy.

They are pushing for laws that introduce identifiability, even for historic records. The copyright industry has been one of the strongest proponents of the Data Retention Directive in Europe, which mandates logging of our communications – not its contents, but all information about whom we contacted when and how – for a significant period of time. This is data that used to be absolutely forbidden to store for privacy reasons. The copyright industry has managed to flip that from “forbidden” to “mandatory”.

They are pushing for laws that introduce liability on all levels. A family of four may be sued into oblivion by an industry cartel in a courtroom where presumption of innocence doesn’t exist (a civil proceeding), and they’re pushing for mail carriers to be liable for the contents of the sealed messages they carry. This goes counter to centuries of tradition in postal services, and is a way of enforcing their will extrajudicially – outside the courtroom, where people still have a minimum of rights to defend themselves.

They are pushing for laws that introduce wiretapping of entire populations – and suing for the right to do it before it becomes law. Also, they did it anyway without telling anybody.

They are pushing for laws that send people into exile, cutting off their ability to function in society, if they send the wrong things in sealed letters.

They are pushing for active censorship laws that we haven’t had in well over a century, using child pornography as a battering ram (in a way that directly causes more children to be abused, to boot).

They are pushing for laws that introduce traceability even for the pettiest crimes, which specifically includes sharing of culture (which shouldn’t be a crime in the first place). In some instances, such laws even give the copyright industry stronger rights to violate privacy than that country’s police force.

With these concepts added together, they may finally – finally! – be able to squeeze out our freedom of speech and other fundamental rights, all in order to be able to sustain an unnecessary industry. It also creates a Big Brother nightmare beyond what people could have possibly imagined a decade ago. My undying question is therefore why people waltz along with it instead of smashing these bastards in the face with the nearest chair.

On July 12, for instance, we hear that ISPs in the United States of America will start to serve the copyright industry in the treatment of its own customers, up until and including a possible exile of them as citizens, and most likely scrapping their right to anonymity for the already-going industry game of sue-a-granny.

This is bound to become a textbook example of bad customer relationships in future marketing books: making sure that your customers can be sued into oblivion by entire industry organizations in a rigged game where they’re not even innocent until proven guilty. Seriously, what were the ISPs thinking?

Today, we exercise our fundamental rights – the right to privacy, the right to expression, the right to correspondence, the right to associate, the right to assemble, the right to a free press, and many other rights – through the Internet. Therefore, anonymous and uncensored access to the Internet has become as fundamental a right itself as all the rights we exercise through it.

If this means that a stupid industry that makes thin round pieces of plastic can’t make money anymore, they can go bankrupt for all I care, or start selling mayonnaise instead.

That’s their problem.

About The Author

Rick Falkvinge is a regular columnist on TorrentFreak, sharing his thoughts every other week. He is the founder of the Swedish and first Pirate Party, a whisky aficionado, and a low-altitude motorcycle pilot. His blog at falkvinge.net focuses on information policy.

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Source: How The Copyright Industry Drives A Big Brother Dystopia

Google Defends Hotfile (and Megaupload) in Court

Posted: 19 Mar 2012 01:45 PM PDT

hotfile In February 2011, the MPAA announced a lawsuit against Hotfile, one of the Internet's most popular cyberlocker services.

The site’s popularity is “a direct result of the massive digital theft that Hotfile promotes," the movie industry group said.

Two weeks ago the movie studios asked the court to issue a summary judgment against Hotfile and shut the site down. The MPAA argues that Hotfile is a piracy haven that should not be eligible for DMCA safe harbor protection.

This request didn’t go unnoticed by Google, who have now filed an amicus brief in support of the file-hosting site. According to Google, the movie studios are misleading the court by wrongfully suggesting that Hotfile is not protected by the DMCA.

What makes this even more interesting is that many of the arguments made by Google are also relevant to the criminal indictment against Megaupload.

In their brief, Google points out that YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, and Wikipedia are able to thrive because they are protected by the DMCA. But, if the MPAA has its way, these and other services will be in serious trouble.

“Without the protections afforded by the safe harbors, those services might have been forced to fundamentally alter their operations or might never have launched in the first place,” Google writes in the brief.

The MPAA has argued that Hotfile has no right to exist because it’s used predominantly for copyright-infringing purposes. Google replies to this by arguing that it’s irrelevant how many infringements there are. Under the DMCA it would only be problematic if Hotfile is aware of each and every individual pirated file on its systems.

“The case-law uniformly rejects efforts to deprive service providers of the safe harbor based on generalized awareness that unspecified (or even ‘rampant’) infringement is occurring on their services,” Google writes.

Google continues to say that the DMCA specifically states that service providers such as Hotfile can’t lose their safe harbor protection because they refuse to filter content upon request from the movie companies.

“It guards against any claim that a service provider loses the safe harbor by failing to ‘adopt specific filtering technology’ or any other technique suggested by copyright owners for affirmatively seeking out possible infringement occurring on its service.”

Google stresses that the burden to report and identify pirated material lies with the copyright holder, not Hotfile, and suggests that the MPAA tried to mislead the court to believe otherwise.

“The Court should not be misled. It should resist any effort to shift the investigatory burden that Congress deliberately allocated to copyright owners or to impose on Hotfile policing obligations of which it is specifically relieved by the DMCA,” Google writes.

megaupload logo Moving on to another issue, one that’s also key in the criminal case against Megaupload, Google says that there’s nothing wrong with only removing links to files.

Both the MPAA and the US Government claim that it’s wrong for Hotfile to delete links but keep the actual files on their servers, but Google disagrees.

“Plaintiffs make much of the fact that Hotfile, at least for a time, apparently removed only the specific download link identified as infringing in a given DMCA takedown notice, and did not take the additional step of blocking other files on its system (not called out in the notice) that might have also have contained the copyrighted work at issue,” they write.

“But, in this respect, Hotfile did exactly what the DMCA demands, and plaintiffs' takedown notices cannot be used to charge the service with knowledge of allegedly infringing material that those notices did not specifically identify.”

This is an interesting observation that does indeed make sense. While Google doesn’t mention it, removing the actual files would indeed be overbroad and wrong. For example, if an artist stores his files on Hotfile but wants to take unauthorized copies offline, he or she would not want Hotfile to delete the original as well. The same is true for YouTube videos and a variety of other content.

At the end of the brief Google asks the court to “reject plaintiffs' efforts to undermine the protections provided by the statute's safe harbors” and dismiss the motion for default judgment against Hotfile.

While Google’s interest in the Hotfile case is no surprise (they rely heavily on the DMCA themselves), it is intriguing to see that Google is fiercely defending Hotfile and in part Megaupload.

After all the attacks on cyberlocker sites in recent months Google’s support will be welcomed with open arms by the file-hosting industry. Whether the MPAA will be very happy is a different story.

Update: MPAA just asked the court to deny Google’s amicus brief. They argue that Google’s perspective is one-sided and that the company acts as a partisan advocate for Hotfile.

Source: Google Defends Hotfile (and Megaupload) in Court

Pirate Bay ‘Financier’ Will Serve Sentence Electronically Tagged

Posted: 19 Mar 2012 06:54 AM PDT

While Fredrik Neij, Peter Sunde and Gottfrid Svartholm were grabbing most of the headlines, a fourth defendant in The Pirate Bay trial – Swedish businessman Carl Lundström – was trying to keep a lower profile.

That would not prove easy. Famous in his own right for being the grandson of Karl Lundström, founder of the world’s largest crisp bread producer Wasabröd, Carl Lundström made a fortune when the company was sold in the early 80′s. But it would be his involvement with The Pirate Bay that would shoot him onto the international stage.

Lundström provided an early Pirate Bay with structural support through his company Rix Telecom/Port80 and in 2009 he paid the price for that assistance when a Swedish court found him and his co-defendants guilty of copyright infringement offenses.

In 2010 the Court of Appeal upheld the original guilty verdict but reduced Lundström’s sentence from 1 year in jail to 4 months and ordered him to pay his share of 46 million kronor ($6.78m) in damages. Last month a Supreme Court appeal was rejected and Lundström’s sentence was made final.

Now Lundström is ready to serve his sentence and perhaps surprisingly he won’t be going to jail at all. Under Swedish law anyone sentenced to spend less than six months in jail can apply to serve their time in the community. Lundström applied and was accepted as a suitable candidate.

The businessman, who will turn 52-years-old next month, will leave his home in Switzerland and return to Sweden to serve his sentence. There he will spend four months electronically tagged in a Gothenburg apartment. He will only be allowed to leave in order to attend a job arranged for him by the authorities.

“He will have employment arranged, it is a regulated schedule that is very strict,” probation officer Sven Simonsson told TT.

Although Lundström is liable to pay his share of 46 million kronor ($6.78m) in damages, Swedish authorities have only been able to find assets worth 225,000 kronor ($33,149).

The three other defendants – Fredrik Neij, Peter Sunde and Gottfrid Svartholm – are yet to be informed how their sentences will be served. None are currently living in Sweden and Svartholm hasn’t been heard from in a long time, leading Sunde to speculate recently that he might even be dead.

Source: Pirate Bay ‘Financier’ Will Serve Sentence Electronically Tagged

The Pirate's Press

Tuesday, 20 March 2012