European Parliament Considers Banning All Pornography, Blocks Emails From EU Citizens Protesting Against Censorship

from the that's-democracy? dept

A few weeks ago we wrote about Iceland's thoroughly daft idea of trying to block porn there. Bad proposals for the Internet always seem to spread, and so it should perhaps come as no surprise that the European Parliament will be considering a similarly unworkable proposal, but in a rather more covert way, as the Pirate Party politician Christian Engström noted on his blog:

Next week in Strasbourg, probably on Tuesday, the European Parliament will be voting on a Report on eliminating gender stereotypes in the EU. To promote gender equality and eliminating gender stereotypes are of course very laudable goals, so my guess would be that unless something happens, the report will be approved by the parliament, possibly by a very large majority.

That would be a good thing, were it not for the following detail:

Article 17 of the report says (with emphasis added):

17. Calls on the EU and its Member States to take concrete action on its resolution of 16 September 1997 on discrimination against women in advertising, which called for a ban on all forms of pornography in the media and on the advertising of sex tourism;

There's no definition of "the media", but it's hard to believe that the digital world would somehow be exempt. Of course, banning pornography in this way simply won't work, but it will cause huge collateral damage to freedom of speech online in the EU. As if that weren't bad enough, the way the report wants this put into effect is deeply problematic too:

the resolution we will be voting on next week has other things to say about the internet. Article 14 reads (again with my highlighting):

14. Points out that a policy to eliminate stereotypes in the media will of necessity involve action in the digital field; considers that this requires the launching of initiatives coordinated at EU level with a view to developing a genuine culture of equality on the internet; calls on the Commission to draw up in partnership with the parties concerned a charter to which all internet operators will be invited to adhere;

This is quite clearly yet another attempt to get the internet service providers to start policing what citizens do on the internet, not by legislation, but by "self-regulation". This is something we have seen before in a number of different proposals, and which is one of the big threats against information freedom in our society.

This is another example of "voluntary" measures that will in fact by compulsory, since any ISP that refuses to implement them will doubtless find itself responsible instead. As we've noted before, this allows all kinds of dangerous ideas to be implemented in ways that are not subject to judicial review or even challenge.

It's important to note that this is not a law as such, but a report, as Engström explains:

This means that it does not automatically become law even if it is adopted, but is just a way for the European parliament to express its opinion.

But the purpose of these own initiative reports are to serve as the basis for the Commission when it decides to present legislative proposals to the parliament. If this own initiative report is adopted by the parliament, it will strengthen the Commission's position if and when it wants to propose various"self-regulation" schemes in the future.

Equally, if the report is defeated next week, it will weaken later attempts by the Commission to bring in self-regulation. Recognising this, people like Rick Falkvinge have been asking Europeans to write to their representatives to urge them to reject the report, as Techdirt user rudeholm pointed out. But as Engström now reports, emails on these censorship plans are being blocked by the European Parliament's tech department:

around noon, these mails suddenly stopped arriving. When we started investigating why this happened so suddenly, we soon found out:

The IT department of the European Parliament is blocking the delivery of the emails on this issue, after some members of the parliament complained about getting emails from citizens.

This is exactly what happened with ACTA, when the Parliamentary authorities decided that all emails on the subject would go straight into the spam folder. It's extraordinary to see how quickly politicians forget that hundreds of thousands of people took to the streets to defend their online rights back then, and how unceremoniously dumping their emails in the spam folder only made things worse.

Discussions have been taking place on Twitter around the hashtag #mepblock (disclosure: I've been part of these), and an e-petition has been created, calling on European politicians to drop their censorship and to listen to their constituents as they are supposed to, instead of just ignoring them. There are still a few days before the vote next week, so there's plenty of time for further developments in what looks like becoming an increasingly heated debate.

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Filed Under: blocking, censorship, communications, eu, eu parliament, filtering, free speech, porn

SEC Still Way Behind The Times In Dealing With The Way People Communicate

from the broken-regulations dept

Way back in 2006, Jonathan Schwartz, then the CEO of Sun, caused a ruckus at the SEC for doing the amazing thing of trying to disclose material news about the company on his blog. The SEC was concerned about this, because it massively over-regulates communications from public companies, specifically under Regulation FD (for "fair disclosure"). The issue is that information needs to be available widely at the same time so that no one has a particular advantage (i.e., you can't just reveal info to some big bankers on Wall St. who trade on it, and then release your press release later). But, in our over-regulated world, the SEC had to go through a long process before deciding that, in this modern digital world, perhaps these crazy "blog" things are okay.

We're seeing something of a repeat of the episode a little more than six years later, Netflix CEO Reed Hastings wrote on his Facebook account the news that Netflix users were watching "nearly a billion hours per month." The SEC decided that this might be material information that Hastings had dangerously shared in a new-fangled manner and this might violate RegFD. Amusingly, Hastings told the world about this... via Facebook.

SEC staff informed us yesterday that they are recommending that the SEC bring a civil action against us for my July 1 billion hour public post, asserting we violated “Reg FD”. This rule is designed to ensure that individual investors have equal access to information as large institutional investors, by prohibiting selective disclosure of material information. The SEC staff believes that I gave you all “material” investor information in my post and that we needed to instead release the June viewing fact “publicly” with an 8-K filing or press release.

Hastings points out that the whole thing is stupid. The Facebook postings are public and viewable by anyone with a Facebook account, and he already has 200,000 subscribers to his updates. Furthermore, he pointed out that the announcement itself had nothing to do with "material" information for investors, it was just cool news -- which had been blogged about a few weeks earlier anyway.

Hastings finds the whole thing so ridiculous (and it is) that he's promised to keep posting news to Facebook even as the SEC continues its "investigation." As he points out, the whole thing is more about SEC red tape than any reasonable regulation:

“Reg FD was about protecting me from telling Carl Icahn something special, the big investor, that not everyone else got,” Hastings said. “This was me talking to 200,000 Facebook followers; it is letting the small guy in on the information.”

It would be nice if our various regulatory institutions didn't react to any new technology by automatically dumping it into the "must be evil / most be stifled" category.

Filed Under: communications, public communications, reed hastings, regfd, sec
Companies: netflix

UK Police Department Twitter Accounts Offer FREE iPads... With A Catch

from the please-tell-me-someone-fell-for-this dept

Normally, if someone were to offer you a FREE iPad or the like unsolicited via the interweb, you'd either be a) reasonably suspicious or b) consulting various anti-malware forums in hopes of regaining control of your computer/Facebook account/credit history. But what if that offer were to come from a more respectable source -- say, an official police Twitter account? If you answered "b" then you're probably taking stock of your life and wondering if leading a life of crime is really for you.

Police in Leicester did exactly that, tweeting out this tantalizing offer to the public a few days ago.

Not a scam: If you've committed a burglary in the #Leicester area within the last week - come to our #police station & claim a FREE iPad.

— Leicester Police (@CityCentreLPU) January 6, 2013

"Not a scam: If you've committed a burglary in the #Leicester area within the last week - come to our #police station & claim a FREE iPad."

While it's doubtful this police department snagged any criminals with this playful tweet (although I'm holding out hope that it will), it did manage to catch that attention of another police department, who accused the Leicester police of tweet theft.

.@citycentrelpu – we need to talk to you about a tweet theft earlier today, “You do not have to say anything, but it may harm your....

— Solihull Police (@SolihullPolice) January 6, 2013

.@CityCentreLPU – we need to talk to you about a tweet theft earlier today, “You do not have to say anything, but it may harm your....

The Solihull Police had apparently made the same offer to gullible criminals earlier that day, but had only received 18 retweets as compared to the 4,000 received by Leicester's purloined tweet. An apology was extended and both police departments went back to work, providing a mixture of the useful and the comical, with Solihull PD helping reunite lost cannabis with its owner and the Leicester Police performing field sobriety tests via Twitter.

I know we tend to focus on the negative side of the law enforcement community so it's nice to see little exchanges like this coming from official channels. It goes a long way towards humanizing these two departments, keeping these accounts from turning into faceless department bullhorns dispensing nothing but blotter activity and talking points.

Filed Under: communications, police departments, social media, uk

Apparently A Debate: Would Twitter Benefit If Users Had To Pay To Use It?

from the easy-answer dept

According to Mathew Ingram at GigaOM, there is apparently a raging debate over whether or not Twitter would actually benefit as a service if users had to pay to use it. I'll admit to being a little bit surprised when I saw this, but digging into the details brought what I think is a wonderful conclusion as to why the answer is definitively "no".

This all more or less started (or at least really took off) when Dalton Caldwell, who founded Imeem, announced he wanted to create a for-pay service similar to Twitter. Caldwell states that services like Twitter don't realize their full potential in what he deems an "advertising-supported monoculture".

"All of these services are essentially in the same business: vying for the opportunity to sell you/your clickstream to advertisers. … I have no interest in completely opting out of the social Web. But please, I want a real alternative to advertising hell. I would gladly pay for a service that treats me better."

It's a concept that I think many people might first agree with...but only if they don't think about it for more than thirty seconds. The first flaw in this line of thinking is that users paying for the service is somehow a firm requirement to avoid what Caldwell calls "advertising hell". I don't think they do; rather, I think that each new service that comes out can be built upon and each innovation can make each service better, including in the way users are impacted by advertisements. As an example, Caldwell could have penned something similar in the 90's, bemoaning a Myspace that had clearly become a musical and bloated hell, so obviously we need to make a social media site that is paid for by users.

Except that's not what we needed. We needed Facebook which, contrary to all the status updates you may have read, does not charge users.

The second flaw in Caldwell's statement is the assumption that advertising does now and always will make us want to bang our heads against the walls in frustration. Certainly advertisements can be annoying, but we've talked repeatedly about how advertising is simply more content, and it can be good or bad. As digital ads continue to get better and better, this "advertising hell" may become an "advertising heaven." Or at least an "advertising purgatory," where the annoyance factor is minimal. In any case, if ads were wanted, then Caldwell's service loses out.

But perhaps that most articulate reason why a service like Twitter should not charge users to join in is made by venture capitalist Fred Wilson:

"Wilson maintains that a free model is the only way to get the kind of network effects necessary for a large consumer business. He also argues that charging users is contrary to the rationale behind such services, since the content being monetized is coming from those same users:

'When scale matters, when network effects matter, when your users are creating the content and the value, free is the business model of choice. And I don’t think anything has changed to make that less true today. If anything, it is more true.'"

What Wilson notes about the content being created by the users is the key point to me. Twitter is a great stage, but those of us that use it are the stars (to varying degrees). To charge the people who are creating the content on your platform seems completely backwards, particularly considering the effect that will have on how your service scales. 

Consider the recent story we ran about how an Irish rail operator used Twitter to reunite a person and their dog: does that happen if you have to pay for the service, reducing its user base? I don't think it does.

Filed Under: business models, communications, free, pay, social media
Companies: twitter

Sweded Movies: The Fans Talk Back

from the losing-control dept

One of the defining characteristics of the digital world -- and one of the problems for copyright law, which was conceived in an analog age -- is the importance of being able to build on the work of others not just indirectly, but directly, through mashups or the re-use of existing material. Stig Rudeholm points us to a fascinating feature in the Guardian about "sweded movies": home-made tributes to Hollywood titles that adopt precisely this approach of creative re-interpretation. The name apparently comes from the film "Be Kind Rewind", where DIY imitations of studio favorites are passed off as Swedish editions.

As the article's author, Ben Walters, writes, beyond the surface humor, there's something interesting happening here:

sweded movies are a form of talking back to Hollywood. Along with recut trailers and "supercuts" of familiar tropes, they represent a fledgling digital moving-image culture that presents a radical challenge to the mainstream movie industry. They are created as fun for fans but the ideas of entitlement and agency underpinning these videos will shape how we all consume -- and produce -- moving images in the 21st century. They are a taste of what comes after Hollywood.

He gives some examples of that "talking back":

see, for instance, the video The Star Wars That I Used to Know, which combines anti-Lucas sentiment with Gotye's music. The same sense of media-savvy pushback is evident in trailers that reconfigure The Shining as a family comedy or Mrs Doubtfire as a stalker horror; and in supercuts that point out how much Julianne Moore likes to cry or how often the word "fuck" is used in The Big Lebowski.

What's striking about these, he suggests, is the lack of traditional deference to Hollywood and its highly-paid artists. Films are no longer immaculate creations that can be looked at but not touched; instead, cinema has become a store of images, sounds and symbols to be constantly reshuffled, re-used and reshaped in new works of sweded art, offering yet another example of lowered barriers to creativity brought about by low-cost digital technology.

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Filed Under: amateurs, communications, fan creations, fans, movies, sweded movies, sweding

Harsh Tweet Gets Fan Kicked Out Of Nerd Rapper's Show

from the disconnecting-from-fans dept

We talk an awful lot about the need for artists to connect with their fans in order to succeed. One of the easiest tools to use in this effort is Twitter. In fact, Twitter is so easy to use, it has almost become the default method for many artists to communicate and connect. Unfortunately, it has an equal ability to cause strife between an artist and a fan. This is the lesson that one nerd rapper, MC Chris, learned recently.

It all started when one fan, Taylor, sent a tweet complaining about the opening act of an MC Chris concert. This tweet was then read by MC Chris while he was preparing to go on stage. It all went down hill from there.

"I was in my green room checking on my Twitter," he said. "During the show, someone tweeted something negative about Richie. And I don't have a problem with stuff like this. I get made fun of and called all sorts of name every day. But if someone messes with my friend I have this weird reaction that happens, and I do things that probably are kind of not normal, abnormal. I just become extremely protective.

"I marched onstage, and in between songs with Richie, I grabbed the microphone and I said 'Who is this person's name,' he came up, and I said, 'You're going to have to go off with somebody with the venue and tell them to escort you off for talking shit on Twitter.'"

Taylor relented and left the show. Then it got even worse, but mostly for MC Chris. Not only did Kotaku get ahold of the story, but Taylor also posted his story to Reddit. It was this widespread dissemination in the online community that eventually led to MC Chris apologizing on video and breaking down in tears while doing so.

There are a number of lessons to learn from this. The internet provides a way for us to quickly express our opinions. Not all of those opinions are going to be well received, particularly by those we criticize. However, the best response to something like that is not to attack the source of the criticism or the tool those people use. The lesson that MC Chris has learned the hard way is that by responding to online criticism with an attack on the person behind it, he has not lost just one fan but the respect of a whole lot of others. While his apology seems sincere, such things tend to not heal wounded fans very easily.

That said, it is great that MC Chris was taking an interest in what his fans were saying about him and his opening acts. Doing so can be a great way to gauge the how well recieved you are and how you can improve. However, lashing out when negative opinions are shared will do nothing but harm your reputation and your ability to monetize your work. We know that if people like you and your work, they'll pay.

Filed Under: back firing, communications, connecting with fans, mc chris, twitter

Patents Threaten To Silence A Little Girl, Literally

from the profit-motives dept

Slashdot points us to a sad story from blogger Dana Nieder, providing yet more evidence of how patent monopolies can hold back innovation and do very real damage to people's lives in the process—and how people are interested in progress, not patents. As Dana says in her post, she understandably doesn't give a damn about legal details when something as important as her daughter's ability to communicate is at stake:

My daughter, Maya, will turn four in May and she can’t speak. The only word that she can consistently say with 100% clarity is “done”—which, while helpful, isn’t really enough to functionally communicate. When Maya was two and a half we introduced her to the iPad, and we’ve danced with AAC (augmentative and alternative communication) ever since. We experimented with a few communication apps, but nothing was a perfect fit. After an extensive search for the perfect app, we found it: Speak for Yourself. Simple and brilliant, we saw that it had the potential to serve Maya into adulthood, but was also simple enough for her to start using immediately.

And she liked it. And it worked. And I started to have little flashes of the future, in which she could rapidly tap out phrases and ideas and tell me more and more of the secret thoughts that fill her head—the ones that I’m hungry to hear and she’s dying to share but her uncooperative mouth just can’t get out.

My kid is learning how to “talk.” It’s breathtaking.

But now Speak for Yourself in under fire, and from a surprising (to an AAC outsider) or not-so-surprising (to an AAC insider) source. They’re being sued by Semantic Compaction Systems and Prentke Romich Company, big names in the AAC world. SCS and PRC allege that Speak for Yourself is infringing on their patents. I’m going to be honest: I don’t know about patents and infringement, and I’m not going to get into debates about the legal merits of the case, because that’s a conversation in which I would quickly drown.

Dana explains that her defense of the app isn't arbitrary. Before discovering Speak For Yourself, she explored dedicated speech devices from the big AAC companies, including Prentke Romich. None of their options were suited to her daughter, and they all carried hefty price tags—as in $7,000+ hefty. She began asking around to see if PRC or any of the other big companies were planning on releasing an iPad app, and learned that although many customers were clamoring for one, the companies had no intention of meeting their demands. They didn't want an affordable option out there reducing sales of their expensive systems.

Whenever the incumbents of any industry are ignoring the demands of their customers, you can bet that someone else is paying attention. In this case, it was speech-language pathologists Heidi LoStracco and Renee Collender, the pair behind Speak For Yourself. The app's website explains how it came about:

Mrs. LoStracco and Mrs. Collender began to see a shift in the field when the iPad was released. Mrs. Collender says, "Districts and parents were buying an iPad with an 'AAC' app on it and saying, 'Make this work.' We would try to reprogram the applications with the language that the children needed, but it took forever and it was never really 'right.'" Heidi and Renee say that it got to the point that someone was asking them about iPad applications for AAC every day, and they decided that they needed a better answer. Heidi says, "We would tell them, there's not really an effective AAC app out there yet, but when there, is, we'll be the first to tell you about it.” Then we started thinking that we could create something that followed motor learning principles and gave individuals access to the language they needed to communicate effectively, and that's when we designed Speak for Yourself." Renee says, "We've always believed that communication is a basic human right, and the only AAC pre-requisite skill that a nonverbal person needs is a pulse."

Dana points out that PRC's mission statement begins "We Believe Everyone Deserves A Voice" and that their refusal to create an affordable iPad app, and now their attempts to crush a competitor who did, clearly runs counter to that mission. For her, that's basically where the discussion ends: a company is trying to take away the only thing that has been able to give her daughter a voice, and she couldn't care less whether or not they have the legal right to do so.

It's hard not to sympathize with her position, even though the lawsuit and the patent in question, #5,920,303, both appear to be solid. As Dana's story gains traction, we can only hope that it will increase social pressure on PRC and possibly shame them into allowing Speak For Yourself to survive by offering them an affordable license, or at least releasing their own iPad app at a similar price point—but as we've seen with pharmaceutical companies, the holders of life-saving and life-changing patents often don't seem too bothered about withholding them no matter what it does to their public image.

Ultimately, this is more evidence that in today's world of rapid innovation, tech monopolies are increasingly untenable. Big companies that have dominated niche markets for years—and have long since paid off their R&D costs by charging monopoly rates—are being disrupted by nimbler competitors. As we've seen with media and software piracy, this happens whether or not the competitors are "legitimate" under intellectual property law. Can there be any doubt that, if Speak For Yourself is shut down and the app eliminated, Dana will seek out a way to keep it running on her daughter's iPad? Since her story is running on Slashdot, she's already received comments with advice on how to do so, and suggestions that she contact Speak For Yourself and convince them to release their source code on github. At the moment, it looks like she just plans on turning off all connectivity on the iPad so that it will no longer sync and the app will remain even if it is removed from the iTunes store. Can anyone blame her? The simple fact is that markets always eventually find a way to meet demands—and if companies (especially those in industries that seriously affect people's lives) use their intellectual property to block powerful market forces, that control will eventually be wrested from them, one way or another.

Filed Under: augmentative and alternative communication, communications, ipad, patents, speak for yourself, voice
Companies: prentke romich company, semantic compaction systems

The Pirate Bay's Peter Sunde Questions Why We Let Dying Industries Dictate Terms Of Democracy

from the seems-like-a-reasonable-question dept

Peter Sunde, a very thoughtful and insightful guy, who's been completely demonized by the entertainment industry for his role with The Pirate Bay, has written up an interesting piece for Wired UK where he not only goes over highly questionable issues related to his conviction, but raises a larger question about why we, as a society, allow one obsolete industry to have so much power in government and policy issues. The connections between those involved in his prosecution and the entertainment industry are simply too numerous to be fair:

The Swedish prosecutor sent out a memo in 2006 saying that TPB wasn't guilty of "main" crimes -- at best it aids and abets (he also mentioned that the people running TPB were very clever). But Hollywood was not happy with this and forced the Swedish Minister of Justice to visit the White House and talk about it. The United States told Sweden that if they didn't get rid of the site, they would not be allowed to trade with the US!

The minister (illegally) told the prosecutor what had happened which forced him to raid TPB -- only a few weeks after sending out that memo about how legal it was.

Evidently, Warner Brothers felt that the investigation was taking too long. The studio contacted the police officer in charge of the investigation (one person that worked mostly by himself) and before I had even been questioned by him, he interviewed for a job with Warner Brothers.

When we found out he'd been hired (by him changing his employer from "Polisen" to "Warner Bros" on Facebook) the reply we got was that it was proof that Swedish IT police are of such high caliber that even the big US companies would hire them.

I got promoted from "witness" to "suspect" a week after the job was promised.

During the trial it turned out that the judge was the chairman for the Swedish pro-copyright society, one lay judge ran a record company, another one was formerly the chairman for the songwriter lobby organisation. I could go on.

It's stories like this that raise significant questions about the prosecution. Even if you believe that Sunde was guilty of what he was charged with, I would think you should be able to admit that the list of things above should not have happened under any circumstance. When you read that... and then realize that the guy leading the prosecution against Megaupload for the US DOJ used to work for the industry as an "anti-piracy" exec -- you see the same pattern happening again and again. People who have too close connections to industry are making decisions on these issues designed to protect their industries, rather than looking at the actual impact on society and the economy. That's a pretty big problem, and shows how "regulatory capture" can sometimes become "judicial capture" as well.

Filed Under: communications, corruption, democracy, peter sunde, sweden, technology
Companies: the pirate bay

We're Living In the Most Creative Time In History

from the a-true-renaissance dept

As we recently noted in our The Sky Is Rising study, all of the evidence shows that we're living in a time of true abundance in terms of the content world. All of the data shows this. It's really incontrovertible. And yet, we keep hearing from certain folks -- often legacy entertainment industry interests -- that somehow the content creation world is at risk. That's pretty difficult to square with reality. In fact, I think it could be argued that if the industry gets its way with some of its legal proposals that would put this amazing age of creativity at much greater risk than anything the industry is complaining about.

It seems that plenty of others are recognizing this as well. Tom sent over a great blog post by Terry Border of Bent Objects, explaining why this is the most creative time in history... and why we shouldn't take that for granted. And, of course, a big reason for such an explosion of creativity is because of the internet, and the ability to not just create, promote and distribute works, but the ability to communicate.

Think about the art of writing for a minute. Think about creative, or biographical, or whatever kind of writing. Before blogging, how many people wrote any more than it took to fill the space of postcard? If it wasn't their profession, I'd say very few. Now, it seems like everyone has had a blog at one time or another. And now "micro-blogging" is in style thanks to Twitter. Not as many words you say? Right, but it's a different skill that people are learning. Very concise wording. Do people want to post boring tweets? Of course not. People spend quite a few minutes of their day trying to write interesting, humorous, or informative Tweets and Facebook updates. Small bits of creativity for sure, but add them up on a weekly basis, and it's quite a bit.

I think of all the craftspersons who have learned from each other on-line. Popular knitting blogs for instance have taken that old past-time of grandma's and made it mainstream. Before Etsy and the like, where would a person sell the scarves and hats that they made besides the occasional craft fair? I mean, a family only needs so many scarves, and then the knitting needles were put away. Communities on the web not only serve as a place to share work and ideas, but that also serve as shops to sell your product worldwide, creating a reason to make more, and to try new, crazy ideas. Kind of incredible.

That's just a small clip from his longer post, which goes into much more detail. It's worth a read, and definitely pay attention to his conclusion:

My contention is that these days we live in right now will be looked back on with longing, especially with various governments trying to push through laws to control the internet. If that happens, these will be the good old days, so don't take them for granted. Look around and enjoy. I think this is an incredible time to make things, and I hope it stays around for a while.

Couldn't have said it better myself. And this is part of the reason why so many people are so worried about things like SOPA, PIPA, ACTA and TPP. We don't want this amazing era to go away. We just want it to get better and better.

Filed Under: communications, copyright, creativity, culture, internet, pipa, sopa, terry border

The Only Way To Stop File Sharing Is To Stop Private Communications

from the good-luck-with-that dept

Christian Engstrom, one of the Pirate Party's elected officials in the EU Parliament, has a straightforward, but completely worthwhile read, about how copyright law today simply doesn't fit with what technology has enabled. He worries that the laws are making nearly everyone a criminal -- and worse, that the direction of change has to make it even worse, not better.

It is impossible to enforce the ban against non-commercial file sharing without infringing fundamental rights. As long as there are ways for citizens to communicate in private, they will be used to share copyrighted materials. The only way to even try to limit file sharing, is to remove the right to private communication. In the last decade, this is the direction that copyright enforcement legislation has moved in, under pressure from big business lobbyists who see their monopolies under threat. We need to reverse this trend, in order to safeguard the fundamental rights.

Furthermore, he notes that when you look at the actual details, it certainly does not show an industry in trouble. Perhaps parts of the industry -- the parts betting on distribution over plastic discs -- have had some trouble. But the rest looks pretty damn good:

In the economic statistics, we can see that household spending on culture and entertainment is slowly increasing year by year. If we spend less money on buying CD records, we spend more on something else, like for instance going to live concerts. This is great news for the artists. An artist will typically get 5-7% of the revenues from a CD record, but 50% of the revenues from a concert. The record companies lose out, but this is only because they are no longer adding any value.

It may well be that it will become more difficult to make money within some parts of the cultural sector, but if so, it will become easier in some other — including new ones, that we have not even imagined so far. But as long as the total household spending on culture continues to be on the same level or rising, nobody can claim that the artists as a group will have anything to lose from a reformed copyright.

Finally, he compares the way the entertainment industry today reacts to file sharing to the way book publishers reacted to public libraries:

When public libraries were introduced in Europe 150 years ago, the book publishers were very much opposed to this. The argument they used was the same one that is being used today in the file sharing debate: If people could get access to books for free, authors would not be able to make a living, and no new books would be written.

We now know that the arguments against public libraries were wrong. It quite obviously did not lead to a situation where no new books were written, and it did not make it impossible for authors to earn money from writing. On the contrary, free access to culture proved to be not only a boon to society at large, but also turned out to be beneficial to authors.

But rather than learning from history, the industry still seeks to deny it.

Filed Under: christian engstrom, communications, copyright, file sharing, free speech