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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.'"
Hopefully public pressure (e.g. the ideas on the "Your Freedom" Government run website for suggesting laws to scrap: here and here) will cause the Digital Economy Act to be scrapped.
Aside from public pressure, there is also a possible review in the Lords so there are a few chinks of light in the sky.
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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.
> You can't get rid of copyright completely and wouldn't want to. Without copyright, companies
> could steal GPL code without consequence because the GPL is a copyright license
> and is thus protected by copyright law.
Much as I like the availability of the GPL and other copy-left licenses, if you would give me a magic wand which would erase copyright, I would have a hard time deciding if I should use it. Face it, copyright can never really get fixed --- as in, optimally benefit society as opposed to large corporations --- because "society" doesn't help elect politicians since most of "society" are sheeple who vote for the politician with the biggest advertising budget (supplied in part by, guess who, large corporations) as opposed to voting for politicians who reform copyright laws.
From the leaked draft:
Rule One: No Pirate ISPs!
Rule Two: No member of law enforcement agencies are to maltreat the innocent Internet users in any way at all -- if there's anybody watching.
Rule Three: No Pirate ISPs!
Rule Four: From now on, I don't want to catch anybody not using DRM.
Rule Five: No Pirate ISPs!
Rule Six: There is NO ... Rule Six.
Rule Seven: No Pirate ISPs!
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
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.
GPL is a clever hack of the copyright system created because people did not agree with the predominant (then) system of knowledge lockdown. Stallman has stated in the past that if he would have the power to abolish copyright, he would do so, even considering the fact that this would also kill the power that GPL depends on, because this is what GPL was created to defeat in the first place. By hacking around it.
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.
Privacy has been redefined; from the sixties where nudity was a sin, the seventies where everything was relaxed and aliens visited the world, the eighties where nudity was a common thing, the nineties where the .com market was blooming in size, after 2000 where our privacy started to erode and take different terms and conditions.
Phonelines can be tapped, faxmachines and e-mails can be read, privacy does not exist anymore because the current technologies allow for high-speed capture of such content. Not only taps but trojans, backdoors and other nasty programs can be installed to redirect such traffic (including passwords) used on that pc to a remote location.
The "ring of trust" lies in how far the user takes his security in his own hands. Use the same password on all sites and you will ask for a disaster to come. It takes only one to break that "ring of trust" to get hacked on many more sites, even some which the user doesn't remember and/or got joined with another service provider on the net.
Emails are important in a way that they will offer unlimited access to some of such services. There is no end in how far privacy can be broken by using a simplistic password or recovery routine by finding the mothers maiden name through Facebook or any other alike service. By getting access to the "ring of trust" they get access to everything. Only one flaw and the ring is broken. "One ring to rule them all". Being lazy in using the same password will bite you once in the nuggets...
To beat the system, everyone has to stand up for their own security, privacy and protection. That means, everyone should be fully informed how important it is to keep a system safe from any trojans or backdoors, how to safely communicate with others and websites, how to determine malicious e-mail versus good, be informed how safe communication really is, what the dmca and eucd means and many more. More information to the public means more understanding. Too many things are being hidden away by legalise which only a third of the population might understand.
There are so many flaws in society and many definitions that we often don't know it anymore by ourselves. What privacy really means versus secrets. We used to play in a camp we built at a small river in a town called Duffel. We told secrets there as kids. As adult I've got a few secrets too. The Internet and cellular technology has sure redefined communications and the "can you keep a secret" thing...
I'm as open as a book although if someone asks me to keep a secret I do that in respect of that person. I don't know if I have to take that with a very sarcastic smile or not.. I'm not paranoid, although I do know reality since i'm born.
--- I am known for the ones who want to find me on the net. Is that a privacy risk or a privilege? One might wonder..
Leader of Pirate Party UK reveals that he wasn't actually trying to get publicity, he was just answering a journalist's question about the possibility of the UK party following the Swedish party's lead and setting up their own ISP. Out of all the countless quotes he's given to journalists over the last year, he's actually quite surprised that this one made it to the front page of Slashdot.
A pizza of radius z and thickness a has a volume of pi z z a
Most Pirate Parties internationally are for copyright reform, not the abolition of copyright. I'm tired of the misconception. It's like saying the Australian Liberal Party is about freedom. Ha.
Disagree != mod troll.
I've been running a UK ISP for a couple of years now, aimed at very heavy users who want privacy and no restrictions. I don't know if my customers are pirates or not but as long as they conform to the AUP "don't do anything illegal or stupid" then they are more than welcome to use their connections for whatever purpose they choose.
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