Happy new year dear readers! In this first post of the year, I’ll take perhaps the most important event of the year so far… at least the one I can report on, hopefully adding my voice to all the noise about it.
Yesterday many sites had a blackout or a protest against SOPA. The Stop Online Piracy Act is a legislation the copyright industry wants the U.S. senate to pass. It has met protest on the Internet, especially yesterday. The problem with these bills is that they give the authority to shut down sites without due process. Which sites? Only pirates? Actually, it can be interpreted that this can go beyond and be an instrument of censorship and control.
I’ll pass along a collection of some links I liked about it with a short comment and at the end some of my comments regarding why SOPA and PIPA (Protect IP Act) are evil. You can look at all I read about it by looking at my tweets @judamasmas
PIPA Support Collapses, and Here’s a Full List of the Senators Who Newly Oppose It via Gizmodo. The way I see it, the online protest was mainly against SOPA, but support for PIPA was affected as well.
SOPA via xkcd. Reasonable content creators are and should be happy that people share their content in social media, with such legislation as SOPA, it would be hard to see what would happen with social media, perhaps in the long term they would like to shut down sites like Facebook.
Surprise! Senators with Huge Campaign Contributions from Media Support SOPA/PIPA via Gizmodo. This is great about the Internet, everything is hardly a secret. You can see the name of the senators and the money they had for supporting SOPA/PIPA. Lists like this one have been posted on many sites from quite some time. Other ones showing even the money they make compared to the ones not supporting these things.
Internet SOPA/PIPA Revolt: Don’t Declare Victory Yet via Wired. It is a good point that although a good blow was dealt to SOPA and PIPA, these instruments are not completely defeated and they will be revised in these months. We the Internets have to remain on our toes and respond quickly making enough noise to oppose them.
That pipe of trash that someone smoked via The Pirate Bay Blog. Great piece, I highly recommend you read it. From Edisons’ patent of moving pictures, they go to the lawless origin of this copyright industry. Making the point that as they have bad business models, the Pirate Bay is a threat as it is a competitor. “The entertainment industry say they’re creating ‘culture’ but what they really do is stuff like selling overpriced plushy dolls and making 11 year old girls become anorexic. Either from working in the factories that creates the dolls for basically no salary or by watching movies and tv shows that make them think that they’re fat.”
LOLing Our Way to Internet Freedom via Wired. The funny side around it, click it!
The MPAA Says Blackout Protests Are an Abuse of Power via Gizmodo. In this context, I believe it was best for them just to shut up instead of giving themselves more bad publicity. Yes, they say the blackouts were abuse of power. Is it not abuse of power their own lobbying, “sue ‘em all” schemes and manipulation? It was a very hypocritical statement on their side, as this legislation is pro-censorship and about real abuse of power.
Honorable mentions in pictures:
I am not the only one seeing that the copyright industry manipulates political agencies to achieve their objectives. However I was very glad when I read the position of the White House on this, which is very reasonable. Paraphrasing what I have read some days ago about this is that despite the problem piracy might represent, it is not an excuse to disrupt the Internet and walk the dangerous path of censorship. The industry is obsessed in claiming that it is losing money. However, there are studies stating that it is doing better than ever. Also, consider the following factors: there is still a financial crisis in the world, media releases don’t offer as much value for money as they should, newly created artists are shitty (you know who they are). And most importantly, think of this: perhaps if the copyright industry stops being so interested in lobbying to make it’s will into law (I think this lobbying is a nice way to say bribing) and “sue ‘em all” legal schemes, they could find that they are not losing money, they are spending it being evil. Anyway, the money resulting from suing infringers is not going to the artists whose rights were violated, right?
Copyright has become something very different than what it should be. Legislations are created to favor just the big companies, not for protecting the artists rights, the later is just an excuse now. For example, how is it possible that Martin Luther King’s “I have a dream” speech is copyrighted? Or that in Canada nothing else would enter the public domain until 2032? Or that in the U.S. many works published in 1955 are going to enter the public domain in 2051 instead of today? Go copyright the Declaration of Human Rights or the Constitution of the U.S. while you’re at it!
The Internet doesn’t belong to anyone and at the same time, it belongs to everyone; and the Internet is free. I am not supporting piracy, and online criminal activities have to be monitored, reported and shut down. However, legislation written as SOPA and PIPA leaves serious doubts and takes many free thinkers like me to be afraid of censorship. This post is an example. I am criticizing the copyright industry, if SOPA were in place, they could shut down my site without even telling me. That’s the main problem with it.
Finally, there could be a hidden agenda behind all this. The copyright industry might want to turn the Internet into a television channel, and in the most horrible scenario: a big brother of sorts, where all the content you watch is created by the industry and delivered to you with payment schemes, like cable tv. In this scenario, user generated content, which is for me the most wonderful thing about the Internet, would die. I smelled something like this with the “Youtube offering professionally created content” thing. I’ll write about this next time.
Update: operators of Megaupload were detained yesterday, ¿Do they need to approve SOPA to have even more power?
Waiting for a final resolution on the case of the Pirate Bay (TPB) has been a long wait. Who would have thought that after loosing the trial, the website would be still up and running to this date. However, the ex-TPB guys stated in the past that they could spend years with appeals on this case. After trials and appeals nothing has changed much, just some modifications on the amount of money the accused have to pay and jail time. There were some developments leading nowhere like some rumors about the acquisition of TPB by companies like Global Gaming Factory, but it led nowhere. Perhaps the most interesting development was that on the 18th of May 2010, a new host for TPB appeared and it was no other than the Swedish Pirate Party!
“Today, on 18 May [2010], the Swedish Pirate Party took over the delivery of bandwidth to The Pirate Bay,” says the Party’s Rick Falkvinge in a statement. “We got tired of Hollywood’s cat and mouse game with the Pirate Bay so we decided to offer the site bandwidth,” he adds. “It is time to take the bull by the horns and stand up for what we believe is a legitimate activity.” The Pirate Party say they will provide bandwidth to the site’s homepage and search engine. The Party adds the attempts at censoring The Pirate Bay “is an attempt to silence one of today’s most important opinion makers in matters of civil liberties and rights on the web,” adding that it is “nothing less than political censorship, and something that any democratic-minded person must reject.”
The BitTorrent Protocol
Some aspects of its history, development, images and public relations (specially with copyright holders and defendants) are now legendary and even mythical between Internet users and tech geeks, such as the attempt to buy the micronation 
The prosecutor was unable to prove the .torrent files brought as evidence were actually using The Pirate Bay’s tracker.
After the trial, Sveriges Radio P3 News organised an investigation that found on April 23 that the judge Tomas Norström had several engagements with organisations interested in intellectual property issues. Peter Danowsky, Monique Wadsted and Henrik Pontén from the prosecution side are also members of one of the organisations, the Swedish Copyright Association. Several legal experts have commented that the judge should not have taken the case because of the potential conflict of interest, and that there are grounds for a retrial. As of April 23, Peter Sunde’s lawyer Peter Althin has already put in a request for a retrial. Such requests would normally be handled by the Swedish Parliamentary Ombudsman, but as the case is under appeal for other reasons, it will be taken up in the Svea Court of Appeal.
