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Digital Act Could Spur Creation of Pirate ISPs In UK
scurtis writes "British anti-copyright group, Pirate Party UK, has predicted that Pirate ISPs will spring up across the country — promoting online privacy and allowing users to share files anonymously — in response to draconian file-sharing proposals outlined in the Digital Economy Act. The news follows reports that the Pirate Party in Sweden (PiratPartiet) will launch the world's first 'Pirate ISP.' The move is designed to curb the use of online surveillance in the country, and combat what PiratPartiet describes as the 'big brother society.'"
Next you'll be telling me draconian drugs laws could create multi-billion-dollar black-market economies that could turn streets into war zones, corrupt law enforcement, and actually bring down elected governments.
Go sell crazy somewhere else.
Why associate the creation of ISPs that protect your privacy with piracy?
I'm all for the idea of having certain protections in place at your ISP so you can sleep well at night, maybe even have an unsecured access point knowing that the ISP won't help authorities get you for something your neighbor or a wardriver did.
But what if I don't care for piracy and like to buy the stuff that I enjoy? Why do they want to, in a way, force you to be guilty by association?
Even in the event that the "less than 400K subscribers" loophole doesn't manage to give people enough freedom, there's always the various darknets. And if the freedom is for copyright infringement, actual physical "sharing parties".
Really, if you don't have enough freedom to break the law, you probably don't have enough freedom. (And before the comprehension-disabled jump on me for encouraging crime, I did not imply that people should break the law --- just that they should have enough personal freedom that they could.)
In most of these digital rights doctrines that are popping up, ISPs receive a safe harbor status provided they actually respond to DMCA takedown notices. If some DRM law does get passed, how much do you want to bet that the pirate ISP will be drowned in litigation for not complying to it? Even if they don't take logs of their customers, they'll just be disbanded for not complying.
I wish the people behind these anti-big-brother movements would stop calling themselves pirates. There are LOTS of good reasons to support file-sharing and a free-as-in-speech Internet, and to oppose abusive government intrusion and the commercialization of the Internet. Those who fight for this cause under the "pirate" banner are not only doing a disservice to their own cause, but to the rest of us who want a free Internet for reasons other than downloading the latest crappy summer blockbuster movie via BitTorrent.
At the very least, the word "pirate" should be avoided because that is the MAFIAA's loaded word of choice for painting file sharers as dangerous criminals. Why let your enemy frame the argument in his own terms? It's akin to the way the neocons in the U.S. frame the war debate as a question of whether or not you support the troops.
The GPL exists to ensure source code is available to the user. Without copyright, companies would use your volunteer code in their own binaries without contributing back. You may be able to pirate the binaries, but you wouldn't have the freedom of source code access that the GPL is supposed to protect.
I'd be happy with an ISP that considered itself a collection of dumb tubes.
Laws make guarantees of things all the time. As a software license, the GPL cites copyright law to make a guarantee that source code be accessible, with legal consequences for violators.
Theft of intellectual property. You've never seen a "GPL code theft" story on Slashdot before?
That doesn't make any sense. What I was talking about is a decoy source release "leaked" from the company itself via a fake anonymous source that contains inefficient or misleading code which isn't the code being used to compile the binary release. Your scenario in which we wait on anonymous sources to leak code is fraught with problems like these.
"Sheeple." Ugh.
Anyway, the thing about copyright is that it protects things that aren't necessities. We're not entitled to movies and music. They're entertainment we are able to enjoy. Copyright's primary purpose is to make sure people make money from their work so that we have an economy, which is a benefit to society. If nobody pays anyone for their work, you won't have the amount and quality of art as before, and culture would suffer. It's common sense.
Somehow I think you lack imagination, and culture would survive quite well, even without copyright. Not that it's going to happen, anyway.
I never understood the complaint when Slugboat Willy was about to fall into public domain. We have a right to Mickey Mouse? Who cares about it? If Disney is still making money off of it, why shouldn't they still own it?
Now it's my turn to say "ugh". Corporations, unlike people, are virtually immortal. Your paragraph is something which could only have been dreamed up by someone who doesn't actually create any "culture", because the vast majority of the those who do create culture (the ones who aren't too full of themselves) will tell you that they are just recycling and revitalizing material from the public domain. You know, the public domain which no one would have if corporations could maintain copyright forever (by showing a profit of $1 even on things which no one is currently interested in and which they don't even sell --- make way for the new form of Hollywood accounting).
We live in a different era than when copyright was first created, an era in which media is far more pervasive and long-term than before, so it makes sense to extend copyrights to reflect today's media reality.
Actually, in our era, the term of copyright should be shortened because practically no works generate any significant income after 10 years. Didn't you listen to Andy Warhol (well, actually it's because the production of content is now so much more widespread that most older content just gets drowned in all the new stuff)? I think something like 15 years from publishing plus another 15 years if you pay to extend would be plenty.
Or we might get one that puts people with communist ties in his cabinet, borrows money from China and spends it like there's no tomorrow, gives money to the very people that caused the financial crisis, and nationalizes our entire health care and banking systems.
Oh wait, that's what our current system produces.