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Swedish ISP Vows to Protect Users From a Piracy Witch Hunt (torrentfreak.com)
Ernesto Van der Sar, reporting for TorrentFreak: Swedish Internet service provider Bahnhof says it will do everything in its power to prevent copyright holders from threatening its subscribers. The provider is responding to a recent case in which a competing ISP was ordered to expose alleged BitTorrent pirates, reportedly without any thorough evidence. At the birth ground of The Pirate Bay, media outfit Crystalis Entertainment received permission from the court to identify several BitTorrent users, based on their IP-addresses. The case, which could be the first of many, was filed against the local ISP TeliaSonera who handed over the requested information without putting up much of a fight. This prompted the competing Internet provider Bahnhof to issue a warning. The company notes that the copyright holder in question doesnâ(TM)t have a very strong case, and it criticizes Telia for caving in too easily.
Seriously,
While I applaud this ISP for waking up and smelling the sewer, this is what happens when unfettered power is given to any group of people with an interest and a will to enforce it against others.
You can think about it this way:
The copyright holders and their shell organizations were initially granted a boon from society in exchange for continuing to produce new works. This boon gave them legitimate grounds to assert that society owed them something. This initial boon was not enough for them though, and through various methods, they have incrementally demanded, and obtained more and more from society, and society so far has accepted the increased demands.
We are now to the point where the demands are absurd.
The copyright holders and their satelites act like you are trying to put them into a sweatshop if you suggest that they have overstepped what they are actually owed by society, while simultaneously taking unilateral and extrajudicial action against society to obtain what it wants.
I propose that the next time they demand copyright reform, we give it to them, but actually reform it so that this abusive relationship is properly reset and expectations are forced back into the realm of reality.
Writing a book does not make you entitled to a heredetary estate. The purpose of copyright is to keep your lights on, your bills paid, and food on your table so that you can continue to write. Nothing more. It is not a free ride for either you or your children. It is not providence for limitless profits by a corporate body either, and any corporation profiting from copyright is going against the foundational concept of copyright as an allowance between authors and the rest of society. (EG, to extract a profit from the situation resulting from properly maintained copyright allowances, the corporations would have to be taking food off the author's table, and making him unable to pay his bills, because that is all the more copyright protections should be providing to authors.)
The actions of this ISP are laudible, but it is too little, too late on that front.
What needs to happen is for the copyright cartels to get busted into the stoneage for vigilanteism, racketeering, and barratry, followed by REAL copyright reform.
You say 'entitlement crowd' as if it were some sort of heinous crime to expect the internet to work the way it was designed to. It is the ultimate information distribution platform, you can write something today and have billions of people reading it tomorrow if it is worth reading. But before the internet blew everything out of the water, you had the public library - an institution specifically created to enable anyone to be able to access written material and more for no cost, i.e. giving people entitlement to literature, music and film. For some reason, society thought that was a noble goal, to facilitate universal access to knowledge! Funny thought, right?
But no, we would rather hamstring the biggest revolution humanity has come up with since the wheel, for the sake of keeping the bastard parasite publishing industries in business, businesses that only exist because of the difficulty involved making actual physical media gave them a choke point to sit on and dictate who gets to be famous. Anyone who dissents should be publicly flogged as an example to the rest of the paying punters. After all, Tom Cruise's pay check has to come from _somewhere_, right?...... Right?
I'm not in the least bit concerned. The next generation will take care of it, ask them if they give a fuck about what happens to people who can't get a record deal or a book deal - ask them in the comments section of their blogs that have hundreds and thousands of subscribers. If piracy means the collapse of Hollywood and the cult of celebrity... then fuck me, we need more piracy. We need it now.