This new legislation may also be declared unconstitutional.
This time they try with a special court consisting of one judge to decide cases. The judge may not hear the parties involved, but is only allowed to give his decision solely based on a report from the new state antipiracy office. He is supposed to work expediently and not use more than 45 minutes per case.
Also language has been changed in the new law text possibly making it legal to eavesdrop private communications like email for antipiracy purposes.
The law text passed the senate wednesday, and is expected to pass the national assembly soon.
This argument will only last until the first case of stalking by one of the surveillance volunteers breaks the news.
That is... if it breaks the news. Consider the journalist with this story contacting the major for a comment, and getting this message: "Publish this and we will publish the video of your wife going to the abortion clinic."
It's perfectly legitimate to suspect that this guy did this himself to make the pirate party look more childish and discredit them. We've seen the anti-piracy fucks do weirder, stupider and more far fetched things in the past.
We cannot know if he did it himself to discredit the pirates.
But he did break this story just days before the election where the Pirate Party according to the polls at that time was going to win two seats (they ended up with only one seat). And he used the media time he got because of this to blame the Pirate Party for a lot of alledged harrasment, including death threats. Some of the harrasment he blamed the Pirate Party for dates back to long before the Pirate Party was even founded.
He is currently head of the swedish anti-piracy outfit Antipiratbyrån, who has a history of doing wrong and attempting to blame others for it. One example is the Bahnhof case. This was a big raid against an ISP, initiated by Antipiratbyrån. Servers were confiscated, as a lot of illegal copies were found on them. Later it was revealed that Antipiratbyrån had hired a person to get an employment at this ISP, and that all the illegal copies found on the servers were placed there by this person.
Besides copyright reform they want to abolish the patent system.
And they are also very strong on the protection of personal integrity, in particular civil rights like the right to free speech, privacy and a fair trial.
After having followed the swedish election campaign closely, it looks to me like the protection of personal integrity got them their victory.
The preliminary results say that the german Pirate Party got more votes (229117) than the swedish Pirate Party (214313). Of course Germany is larger than Sweden, so the swedish percentage is higher.
But as Hurricane78 points out, it is only a matter of time. Sweden is far ahead in the development into a networked society, and 10 or 100 mbps connections to every household in cities is the norm here. As the world develops further into the information society, the Pirate Parties will become stronger and stronger.
Surpeis claims that all the music on the top-100 list on TPB is from major labels. He may be right; I don't know.
But he forgets the long tail. There are currently 1.741.982 torrents on TPB. The numbers of downloads int the top-100 is nothing compared to the number of downloads in the rest of these torrents.
There is even a web page in english, where people can report what they give. Near the bottom of the page is a list of articles from around the world about this. There has even been written a tribute song to him after his testimony, which Wired covered here.
And this court case has really helped the Pirate Party of Sweden. During the last week they have gotten over 1000 new members, which makes them the second-largest opposition party (in member count) in Sweden. Their youth organisation has also grown to become the second-largest political youth organization in Sewden.
Yes, corruption in Sweden is low, and the tolerance for corruption is low, so it is not unusual for an investigation to be opened if there is just a slight chance there could be corruption.
Some of the articles are about the etical problems with Honeywell sponsoring. This is not illegal, and I do not think this is being investigated.
The trips to China are being investigated, but I think this will end with the travelers being freed of all accusations.
More problematic is the role of Astra Zeneca. They are also sponsors. And Bo Angelin, who is in the committee that awarded the price in medicine to Harald zur Hausen is also on the board of Astra Zeneca. Harald zur Hausen got the price for research that has been patented by Astra Zeneca.
The new approach will be more expedient, and less costly, since their victims don't get any due process rights.
Due process is becoming more and more a problem for the RIAA. They can avoid the problem of "due process" by making the ISPs agree to cut off subscribers without due process.
A central element in countries (like France and the UK) where the music business is doing this is to ensure that the customer contracts with the ISPs allow the ISP to cut off the customer without due process.
This will happen in the US too. And there will likely be heavy lobbying to ensure that ISPs should be required to have a clause in their customer contracts saying that the customer can be cut off the net without due process. In France the law already says so.
Do you want to be cut off the net without any possibility of due process?
You are wrong, as the link you provide proves.
UK, like all other EU member countries, is bound by EU law to have a copyright protection term of at least author's life + 70 years.
"Fogedretten" is the correct danish name for this special kind of court. It is a special kind of court used to get preliminary injunctions fast, and is considered a level lower than the court of first instance (called Byretten in danish).
And the court decision is basically a preliminary injunction. When Fogedretten considers the arguments of plaintiffs in such a case, they need no proof, only that the arguments are shown to be probable. Such a decision is almost always followed later by a real court case.
TFA states that Tele2 is a major ISP in Denmark. But Tele2 only has a 4 percent market share, so it is quite small.
This is not the first case of this type raised by IFPI against danish ISPs. It is the third case, and all have been raised against Tele2. None of these cases have been followed by a real court case. Instead all the ISPs have started doing the filtering too, although no court has told them to do so. Nobody really knows why. But a few days ago I was told by a reliable source that in the first of these cases (about blocking allofmp3.com) IFPI paid Tele2 to accept to continue blocking and not to go further with the case. I guess the reason Tele2 is willing to fight now is that they have realized that this will never end unless they start fighting back.
So why is such a decision possible at all? The copyright fundamentalists have over the years developed some very twisted case law here in Denmark, mostly in cases where their opposition lacked expertise in copyright law.
One twisted thing established in case law is that a link on the web is considered a public performance of what is linked to, done by the person doing the link. So if I link to a newspaper article on the web, I do a public performance of the article I link to, which is illegal without permission. (So now you know why Google news doesn't exist in Denmark.) This is a bit simplified, as case law has evolved to the point where legally there are about a dozen different kinds of links, depending on how an where you link, even though they all are simple hypertext references.
Another twisted thing established in case law is that all content traveling through the net of an ISP is considered copied by the ISP. The rationale is that when IP packets are forwarded by a router they are copied from the incoming interface to the outgoing interface. And here in Denmark it is illegal to copy any part of a copyright work, no matter how small.
Local legal experts say that if this decision holds up, IFPI could easily get Google blocked in Denmark if they wanted.
Please explain the big difference you see between copyright lasting until the death of the author and copyright lasting 70 years after the death of the author as is currently the case.
Do you expect record companies to hire killers to kill artists to avoid paying? Do you know that in most cases the recording contracts mean that the recording company gets money from the performing artist (to pay "expenses") and not the other way around?
Although this is far from as important as a vote on a EU directive, I think this is good news.
Unfortunately there is no information on exactly which amendments were rejected. In particular I was worried about amendment 80 (which TFA implies is rejected), amendment 82 (extension of protection time for related rights), and amendments 81 and 83 that looks like a requirement that educational institutions should proliferate the propaganda of MAFIAA.
As for the extension of copyright protection time: This is the same in Europe as in the USA. But in the EU the protection of recording artists and whoever makes the recording is limited to 50 years. There has been big pressure in particular in the UK to extend this, but this has been rejected as not being helpful to cultural development. I am glad that this first attempt by the copyright lobby to force EU member countries to adopt legislation they do not want has failed.
Oh, BTW here is a link to the prosed amendments voted on tuesday.
Well, he is not just a member of the Swedish parliament. He is also a member of the largest party in the current coalition government. And he is far from being alone. Last time I checked 13 MPs from his party had expressed similar viewpoints in mainstream Swedish media.
And young people seem to understand the issues at stake here a lot better. The youth organizations of all the parties currently in the Swedish parliament have similar viewpoints.
It is quite funny that some of these viable arguments come from Håkan Roswall (the prosecutor in charge of this case) himself.
A few months before the raid he wrote a PM (PDF in swedish) with a legal analysis.
Here we can read that he thinks it would be hard to get a conviction, as TPB does nothing illegal according to swedish law. At most a judgment of aiding to commit copyright infringement would be possible, and even that would be hard to get.
While your theory is possible, please note that it would be more effective for them to spread their FUD in a press release. But they have not done this and I have never heard McAfee spreading FUD against FOSS, except for this SEC filing.
But of course there is a reason they included these statements in their SEC filing, and I have an idea why:
Probably an internal code audit has discovered that they violate GPL, possibly by linking their own proprietary code with some GPL code. So they know there is a risk they could be sued, and in this case they must tell about the risk in their SEC filing. The problem is that stating outright that the risk is because they are infringing on the copyright of others doesn't look good. As a solution to this problem some lawyer probably said that copyright law and the GPL could be interpreted in a way that would make what they did legal, but that it would probably not hold up in court, although the GPL was never tested in an US court. But with such a statement they can talk about a risk of being sued because the GPL is unclear, instead of admitting that they risk being sued because they are infringing copyright.
If my theory is true, I hope they are working hard to get into compliance with the GPL again. If this is the case the warning about "risk of being sued because the GPL is unclear" will go away in a future SEC filing. If not, I hope somebody find out what GPL software they are violating, and that they will be sued by the copyright holders of that GPL software.
Comcast has absolutely no right to modify the traffic of their customers, just like the phone company has no right to change what I say on the phone. And just like the postal office has no right to modify the letters I send while they are in transit.
And this isn't even about modifying traffic. It is about Comcast deliberately injecting false data into the network with information falsely claiming that it was sent by parties other than Comcast.
Yes, this paper is mindblowing, and more people should know about it. But this paper is also theoretical, so it can be disputed by IP fundamentalists as having little to do with the real world.
In particular I like the paper AN EMPIRICAL LOOK AT SOFTWARE PATENTS. This paper is an empirical investigation of the effect it had on innovation in the IT industry when software patents were legalized in the US.
From the abstract:
We find evidence that software patents substitute for
R&D at the firm level; they are associated with lower R&D intensity.
Contrary to popular belief, software patents aren't actually illegal in the EU, there is simply no union-wide policy regarding them. The EPO has granted tens of thousands of software patents, and it is up to individual member countries whether they want to enforce them or not.
When the EU Commission proposed the software patent directive that was later rejected by the EU parliament I studied the patent laws of all the (at that time 14) member states of the EU, as I did not believe the EU Commission claiming that the proposed directive was needed to harmonize the patent laws.
And it turned out that the patent laws of all member countries said the same about software patents: Software 'as such' is not patentable subject matter.
(The EU has since been expanded with new member countries. I have not studied their patent laws, but since the new member countries are all signatories to the European Patent Convention (which is the model of the patent laws of most european countries, and says that software 'as such' cannot be patented), it is extremely unlikely that the new member countries allow software patents.)
So while it is true that there is nothing forbidding the EU member countries to change their patent laws to legalize software patents, we also have to acknowledge that the EU member countries all have laws making software patents illegal.
Slashdot Mirror
This new legislation may also be declared unconstitutional.
This time they try with a special court consisting of one judge to decide cases. The judge may not hear the parties involved, but is only allowed to give his decision solely based on a report from the new state antipiracy office. He is supposed to work expediently and not use more than 45 minutes per case.
Also language has been changed in the new law text possibly making it legal to eavesdrop private communications like email for antipiracy purposes.
The law text passed the senate wednesday, and is expected to pass the national assembly soon.
Links in french: Numerama Le Monde
That is... if it breaks the news. Consider the journalist with this story contacting the major for a comment, and getting this message: "Publish this and we will publish the video of your wife going to the abortion clinic."
It's perfectly legitimate to suspect that this guy did this himself to make the pirate party look more childish and discredit them. We've seen the anti-piracy fucks do weirder, stupider and more far fetched things in the past.
We cannot know if he did it himself to discredit the pirates.
But he did break this story just days before the election where the Pirate Party according to the polls at that time was going to win two seats (they ended up with only one seat). And he used the media time he got because of this to blame the Pirate Party for a lot of alledged harrasment, including death threats. Some of the harrasment he blamed the Pirate Party for dates back to long before the Pirate Party was even founded.
He is currently head of the swedish anti-piracy outfit Antipiratbyrån, who has a history of doing wrong and attempting to blame others for it. One example is the Bahnhof case. This was a big raid against an ISP, initiated by Antipiratbyrån. Servers were confiscated, as a lot of illegal copies were found on them. Later it was revealed that Antipiratbyrån had hired a person to get an employment at this ISP, and that all the illegal copies found on the servers were placed there by this person.
And they are also very strong on the protection of personal integrity, in particular civil rights like the right to free speech, privacy and a fair trial.
After having followed the swedish election campaign closely, it looks to me like the protection of personal integrity got them their victory.
The preliminary results say that the german Pirate Party got more votes (229117) than the swedish Pirate Party (214313). Of course Germany is larger than Sweden, so the swedish percentage is higher.
But as Hurricane78 points out, it is only a matter of time. Sweden is far ahead in the development into a networked society, and 10 or 100 mbps connections to every household in cities is the norm here. As the world develops further into the information society, the Pirate Parties will become stronger and stronger.
But he forgets the long tail. There are currently 1.741.982 torrents on TPB. The numbers of downloads int the top-100 is nothing compared to the number of downloads in the rest of these torrents.
There is even a web page in english, where people can report what they give. Near the bottom of the page is a list of articles from around the world about this. There has even been written a tribute song to him after his testimony, which Wired covered here.
And this court case has really helped the Pirate Party of Sweden. During the last week they have gotten over 1000 new members, which makes them the second-largest opposition party (in member count) in Sweden. Their youth organisation has also grown to become the second-largest political youth organization in Sewden.
Yes, corruption in Sweden is low, and the tolerance for corruption is low, so it is not unusual for an investigation to be opened if there is just a slight chance there could be corruption.
This started with critical journalism at Sveriges Radio (in swedish). Because of the articles, the public prosecutor is now investigating.
Some of the articles are about the etical problems with Honeywell sponsoring. This is not illegal, and I do not think this is being investigated.
The trips to China are being investigated, but I think this will end with the travelers being freed of all accusations.
More problematic is the role of Astra Zeneca. They are also sponsors. And Bo Angelin, who is in the committee that awarded the price in medicine to Harald zur Hausen is also on the board of Astra Zeneca. Harald zur Hausen got the price for research that has been patented by Astra Zeneca.
Due process is becoming more and more a problem for the RIAA. They can avoid the problem of "due process" by making the ISPs agree to cut off subscribers without due process.
A central element in countries (like France and the UK) where the music business is doing this is to ensure that the customer contracts with the ISPs allow the ISP to cut off the customer without due process.
This will happen in the US too. And there will likely be heavy lobbying to ensure that ISPs should be required to have a clause in their customer contracts saying that the customer can be cut off the net without due process. In France the law already says so.
Do you want to be cut off the net without any possibility of due process?
You are wrong, as the link you provide proves. UK, like all other EU member countries, is bound by EU law to have a copyright protection term of at least author's life + 70 years.
Will terrorists will plot and scheme where the government cannot monitor them?
Yes, of course!
Will it help to let the government monitor everywhere?
Maybe a bit, if it is possible. But it would mean that we destroy the kind of society we are trying to defend against the terrorists.
"Fogedretten" is the correct danish name for this special kind of court. It is a special kind of court used to get preliminary injunctions fast, and is considered a level lower than the court of first instance (called Byretten in danish).
And the court decision is basically a preliminary injunction. When Fogedretten considers the arguments of plaintiffs in such a case, they need no proof, only that the arguments are shown to be probable. Such a decision is almost always followed later by a real court case.
TFA states that Tele2 is a major ISP in Denmark. But Tele2 only has a 4 percent market share, so it is quite small.
This is not the first case of this type raised by IFPI against danish ISPs. It is the third case, and all have been raised against Tele2. None of these cases have been followed by a real court case. Instead all the ISPs have started doing the filtering too, although no court has told them to do so. Nobody really knows why. But a few days ago I was told by a reliable source that in the first of these cases (about blocking allofmp3.com) IFPI paid Tele2 to accept to continue blocking and not to go further with the case. I guess the reason Tele2 is willing to fight now is that they have realized that this will never end unless they start fighting back.
So why is such a decision possible at all? The copyright fundamentalists have over the years developed some very twisted case law here in Denmark, mostly in cases where their opposition lacked expertise in copyright law.
One twisted thing established in case law is that a link on the web is considered a public performance of what is linked to, done by the person doing the link. So if I link to a newspaper article on the web, I do a public performance of the article I link to, which is illegal without permission. (So now you know why Google news doesn't exist in Denmark.) This is a bit simplified, as case law has evolved to the point where legally there are about a dozen different kinds of links, depending on how an where you link, even though they all are simple hypertext references.
Another twisted thing established in case law is that all content traveling through the net of an ISP is considered copied by the ISP. The rationale is that when IP packets are forwarded by a router they are copied from the incoming interface to the outgoing interface. And here in Denmark it is illegal to copy any part of a copyright work, no matter how small.
Local legal experts say that if this decision holds up, IFPI could easily get Google blocked in Denmark if they wanted.
Please explain the big difference you see between copyright lasting until the death of the author and copyright lasting 70 years after the death of the author as is currently the case.
Do you expect record companies to hire killers to kill artists to avoid paying? Do you know that in most cases the recording contracts mean that the recording company gets money from the performing artist (to pay "expenses") and not the other way around?
Although this is far from as important as a vote on a EU directive, I think this is good news.
Unfortunately there is no information on exactly which amendments were rejected. In particular I was worried about amendment 80 (which TFA implies is rejected), amendment 82 (extension of protection time for related rights), and amendments 81 and 83 that looks like a requirement that educational institutions should proliferate the propaganda of MAFIAA.
As for the extension of copyright protection time: This is the same in Europe as in the USA. But in the EU the protection of recording artists and whoever makes the recording is limited to 50 years. There has been big pressure in particular in the UK to extend this, but this has been rejected as not being helpful to cultural development. I am glad that this first attempt by the copyright lobby to force EU member countries to adopt legislation they do not want has failed.
Oh, BTW here is a link to the prosed amendments voted on tuesday.
Well, he is not just a member of the Swedish parliament. He is also a member of the largest party in the current coalition government. And he is far from being alone. Last time I checked 13 MPs from his party had expressed similar viewpoints in mainstream Swedish media.
And young people seem to understand the issues at stake here a lot better. The youth organizations of all the parties currently in the Swedish parliament have similar viewpoints.
It is quite funny that some of these viable arguments come from Håkan Roswall (the prosecutor in charge of this case) himself.
A few months before the raid he wrote a PM (PDF in swedish) with a legal analysis.
Here we can read that he thinks it would be hard to get a conviction, as TPB does nothing illegal according to swedish law. At most a judgment of aiding to commit copyright infringement would be possible, and even that would be hard to get.
While your theory is possible, please note that it would be more effective for them to spread their FUD in a press release. But they have not done this and I have never heard McAfee spreading FUD against FOSS, except for this SEC filing.
But of course there is a reason they included these statements in their SEC filing, and I have an idea why:
Probably an internal code audit has discovered that they violate GPL, possibly by linking their own proprietary code with some GPL code. So they know there is a risk they could be sued, and in this case they must tell about the risk in their SEC filing. The problem is that stating outright that the risk is because they are infringing on the copyright of others doesn't look good. As a solution to this problem some lawyer probably said that copyright law and the GPL could be interpreted in a way that would make what they did legal, but that it would probably not hold up in court, although the GPL was never tested in an US court. But with such a statement they can talk about a risk of being sued because the GPL is unclear, instead of admitting that they risk being sued because they are infringing copyright.
If my theory is true, I hope they are working hard to get into compliance with the GPL again. If this is the case the warning about "risk of being sued because the GPL is unclear" will go away in a future SEC filing. If not, I hope somebody find out what GPL software they are violating, and that they will be sued by the copyright holders of that GPL software.
Comcast has absolutely no right to modify the traffic of their customers, just like the phone company has no right to change what I say on the phone. And just like the postal office has no right to modify the letters I send while they are in transit.
And this isn't even about modifying traffic. It is about Comcast deliberately injecting false data into the network with information falsely claiming that it was sent by parties other than Comcast.
Technically this means they are lying to the customers using BT. And the purpose of their lying is financial gain.
But isn't this the definition of fraud? Why is nobody going to jail for this?
Yes, this paper is mindblowing, and more people should know about it. But this paper is also theoretical, so it can be disputed by IP fundamentalists as having little to do with the real world.
But Research on Innovation has a lot of other interesting papers.
In particular I like the paper AN EMPIRICAL LOOK AT SOFTWARE PATENTS. This paper is an empirical investigation of the effect it had on innovation in the IT industry when software patents were legalized in the US.
From the abstract:
You are wrong. See the description section of the '412 patent, second column, lines 17-29.
When the EU Commission proposed the software patent directive that was later rejected by the EU parliament I studied the patent laws of all the (at that time 14) member states of the EU, as I did not believe the EU Commission claiming that the proposed directive was needed to harmonize the patent laws.
And it turned out that the patent laws of all member countries said the same about software patents: Software 'as such' is not patentable subject matter.
(The EU has since been expanded with new member countries. I have not studied their patent laws, but since the new member countries are all signatories to the European Patent Convention (which is the model of the patent laws of most european countries, and says that software 'as such' cannot be patented), it is extremely unlikely that the new member countries allow software patents.)
So while it is true that there is nothing forbidding the EU member countries to change their patent laws to legalize software patents, we also have to acknowledge that the EU member countries all have laws making software patents illegal.
It's not a comparison; it's a guide for people migrating from Visual Studio to Eclipse.