Digitalwerks » brein http://www.digitalwerks.org Complex issues, efficient discussion. Fri, 11 Feb 2011 04:51:32 +0000 en hourly 1 Pirate party is on http://www.digitalwerks.org/2009/05/08/pirate-party-is-on/ http://www.digitalwerks.org/2009/05/08/pirate-party-is-on/#comments Fri, 08 May 2009 21:13:04 +0000 kosmonaut http://www.digitalwerks.org/?p=354
Ernesto at Torrentfreak recently reported that membership in the Swedish Pirate Party is skyrocketing after the recent Pirate Bay trial that resulted in a guilty verdict for the Bay, but also uncovered a number of disturbing facts about the prosecution and the trial judge’s impartiality. In previous life, I used to study European party politics, so I had to comment, as this strikes me as somewhat silly but also not without some possible real ramifications. Despite the membership gains, the Swedish Pirate Party is unlikely to actually disrupt the party landscape in as mature a political system as Sweden, but the particular timing of the trial does really work in the Pirates’ favor. The next notable election for Sweden is for the EU parliament, something that many, many Europeans do not consider of much importance, at least in relation to local and national elections. Not surprisingly, EU voting has been used for protests in the past, to focus on specific interests rather than traditional party differences. If the Pirate Party can translate their current momentum into enough actual votes to get representatives into the EU parliament, it would do a lot to get the word out on precisely the kind of copy-left, filesharing, network neutrality that the Pirate Bay has promoted for years, and it would do so via far more mainstream avenues than in the past. Obviously the Pirate Party would not wield any tangible power, but it would be quite a propaganda coup, and would, just as with the trial, create another strong platform for the proponents of a vastly different copyright landscape than than supported by the MPA’s, BREIN’s and IFPI’s of the world.

]]> http://www.digitalwerks.org/2009/05/08/pirate-party-is-on/feed/ 2 Listen to Leia http://www.digitalwerks.org/2009/02/10/listen-to-leia/ http://www.digitalwerks.org/2009/02/10/listen-to-leia/#comments Tue, 10 Feb 2009 17:58:28 +0000 kosmonaut http://www.digitalwerks.org/?p=186 leia
Public Knowledge, via Clay Shirky, via BoingBoing, is reporting that the Capitol Hill lobbyists for the MPAA are rushing to get “network monitoring provisions” into the broadband stimulus package before Congress right now. Apparently they believe that if they get to look at every bit of data that passes through US ISP’s, then Hollywood will be able to stop the illegal sharing of video content.

According to the rules of Internet memes, I will quote from Star Wars to describe the likely result of this, “The more you tighten you grip Tarken, the more star systems will slip through your fingers.”  In other words, the people who create, develop and maintain file-sharing networks and P2P technology are not going to hear this news, shrug their shoulders and give up.  They will innovate around it, and come up with something that is even harder for the MPAA, the RIAA, BREIN, etc. to combat.  An easy solution would simply be to encrypt the traffic. All the major Usenet providers already offer an encrypted solution and I’m sure something could be figured out for large-scale Bittorrent and direct download sites.

Of course a better solution would be to just have the ISP’s themselves stand up for themselves and their customers and rightly point out that this idea is ridiculous.  Or to have Congress do the same.  But I’m not counting on that, and nor will the P2P community I suspect.

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