Perilocity

Pirate Party Legitimized by Winning EU Parliament Seat

There's lots of academic and commercial effort put into stopping software and other intellectual property piracy, especially for videos. A form of risk management, I suppose, but one that ignores the much bigger risk to traditional intellectual property of causing political blowback such as what just happened in Sweden:

“Together, we have today changed the landscape of European politics. No matter how this night ends, we have changed it,” Falkvinge said. “This feels wonderful. The citizens have understood it’s time to make a difference. The older politicians have taken apart young peoples’ lifestyle, bit by bit. We do not accept that the authorities’ mass-surveillance,” he added.

Funny thing about what happens when the majority of the population participates in an illegal activity: eventually it's not illegal anymore.

At least partially, The Pirate Party puts its increased popularity down to harsh copyright laws and the recent conviction of the people behind The Pirate Bay. After the Pirate Bay verdict, Pirate Party membership more than tripled and they now have over 48,000 registered members, more than the total number of votes they received in 2006.

With their presence in Brussels, the Pirate Party hopes to reduce the abuses of power and copyright at the hands of the entertainment industries, and make those activities illegal instead. On the other hand they hope to legalize file-sharing for personal use.

Many of those abuses of power probably already are illegal; the appropriate laws just aren't being enforced. We saw this during alcohol prohibition in the U.S., and we see it now with marijuana prohibition in the U.S. The first prohibition ended, the second probably will, and meanwhile, online "piracy" is on its way to being redefined.

-jsq

Traffic Control Viewed as ISP Risk

Certain ISPs plan to spend a lot of money throttling, stifling, policing copyrights, campaigning and lobbying to control content of information flow through their networks. They might want to look at what's happening in China:

Beijing has recently added a new weapon to its arsenal of surveillance technologies, a system it believes to be a modern marvel: the Golden Shield. It took eight years and $700 million to build, and its mission is to "purify" the Internet — an apparently urgent task. "Whether we can cope with the Internet is a matter that affects the development of socialist culture, the security of information, and the stability of the state," President Hu Jintao said in January.

The Golden Shield — the latest addition to what is widely referred to as the Great Firewall of China — was supposed to monitor, filter, and block sensitive online content. But only a year after completion, it already looks doomed to fail. True, surveillance remains widespread, and outspoken dissidents are punished harshly. But my experience as a correspondent in China for seven years suggests that the country's stranglehold on the communications of its citizens is slipping: Bloggers and other Web sources are rapidly supplanting Communist-controlled news outlets. Cyberprotests have managed to bring about an important constitutional change. And ordinary Chinese citizens can circumvent the Great Firewall and evade other forms of police observation with surprising ease. If they know how.

— The Great Firewall: China's Misguided — and Futile — Attempt to Control What Happens Online, By Oliver August, WIRED MAGAZINE: ISSUE 15.11, 10.23.07 | 12:00 AM

And if they don't know how, that article provides tips.

Mounties Admit Making Up Online Piracy Costs

Hey, if you don't have any research, why not just pick some number off the net? Police agencies do:

However bogger Michael Geist thought there was something fishy about the figure and asked for the sources behind the Royal Mounted Police's $30 billion claim.

The letter came back from red-faced coppers confessing that they made up the figure based what they had read on the Internet.

The RCMP did not conduct any independent research on the scope or impact of counterfeiting in Canada, but rather merely searched a couple news stories.

— anadian coppers admit making up piracy figures, $30 billion figure simply plucked from bottom, By Nick Farrell, The Inquirer, Wednesday 19 September 2007, 08:52

I like the punchline:

Soon they'll try solving their cases by looking to see who did it on Wikipedia.

And will they change their motto to "we always make up our scam?"

-jsq