Timothy Leary, the LSD advocate of the ’60′s, once said to “Put fire and iron underground, progress is regression.” He had a point. A court case has just closed in Sweden, finding 4 defendants guilty of being accessories to violating copyright law. A Swedish court sentenced each of them to a year in jail and a collective fine of $3.6 million.
The verdict against the founders of The Pirate Bay is being hailed by many as a triumphant win against illegal file-sharing, but I have serious doubts. Pirate Bay is a peer-to-peer file sharing system so people can share mostly music files as well as software, without paying for it. By finding against them, the courts have created a monster.
For one, Pirate Bay is appealing and could still win. Regardless of this, the suit itself has inspired more advanced and far more secret means of file sharing.
“The bigger issue is that unlike Napster, The Pirate Bay and other modern peer-to-peer-oriented networks are far less centralized and simple to shut down. And, even if The Pirate Bay itself were somehow to be shuttered, there are countless other comparable tracking services all over the world. Could they all be targeted and taken down? It’s highly unlikely.”
“Technology is constantly evolving. Just as more advanced decentralized peer-to-peer networks sprung up in the wake of Napster’s shutdown, new alternatives would surface once again were a site like The Pirate Bay to lower its sails. Already, countless other methods exist for exchanging data with ease, and more will only pop up as the months wear on.”
For example: “Just recently, The Pirate Bay team prepared a new service called IPREDator, set to launch publicly any day now. It allows people to surf the Net more anonymously using a virtual private network, or VPN. Unlike other VPN services, The Pirate Bay promises its IPREDator will keep no logs of customer activity and therefore could never turn user information over to authorities.”
Prosecuting people for sharing files has resulted in them increasing their ability to do so, not lessen it. Now people will be able to share virtually anything in complete anonymity, including terrorist plans, pedophilia, criminal plots, what have you, and there will be no way to track it because no traffic data logs will be kept by the service provider.
Google, for instance, keeps IP address logs and computer I.D.s of those who do searches on it, as well as what they search for and what sites they click on. Using an anonymous search service would put a stop to that, something that most of us would welcome anyway, since Googles practices are a violation of our privacy.
Progress is regression. When it comes to crime control, the efforts to stop the small crime of music stealing has not only backfired, it’s made the problem immensely worse by greatly increasing the danger to global security. Brilliant planning and foresight there, people.
In giddy old Europe (by which I mean England plus that rag-tag collection of Continentals) since week afore last EVERY ISP has to log and keep details of every email, every website visit by every customer. The details must, on pain of stupendous punishments, be kept for a year and be made available to “das authorities” on demand.
To aid the, ahem, “war on terrorism” dontcha know.
Ditto every phone call, landline or mobile (that law came in last year, the internet only this month). What number you called, when you called, whether they answered, how long you spoke for.
I’m not sure that the world (by which I mean America, North, States of) realises just what a place England has become.
It’s now a CRIMINAL (not Civil) offence to photograph a police officer. I kid you not. A criminal offence to take a photograph.
Every trip through a border control or on an aeroplane, ferry or through the channel tunnel et al is logged and kept for years. What carrier you used, what card you paid with, how many in your party, how long, where, when…
Council workers (emptying bins, cutting the grass in parks, etc etc) have been given the “power” to AND NOW DO issue fines (usually £80) for feeding the birds, smoking and anything proscribed. Aforesaid workers now have court backing – and use it – to stop single blokes like me, for example, walking through public parks. Our details are demanded – might be a peadophile, dontcha know. Oh god, won’t somebody think of the children…
Mostly life carries on as it always has but every single fringe, every edge of society is going to hell in a handcart.
I mention this only because music may soon be irrelavant anyway – as in banned!
Things are far worse there than I knew. Every bit of that sounds like the result of living in constant fear. Controlling the people through fear. Where have I heard of THAT before?