Antipiracy = terrorism?

Antipiracy = terrorism?

The torrenttracker/site swebits is down. Most of you who tend to use this site has most likely noticed
the nice sign at the door regarding first, a DDoS attack and then faulty hardware in servers abroad
wich makes it a little harder to fix.
Heres a swedish article about it: http://www.expressen.se/nyheter/1.2349481/fildelningssajt-har-lagts-ned

And just like the terror organisations in middle east, out comes Henrik Ponte’n and claims responsability.
To me, its a little similar to the movie “Life of brian” and the different
liberations groups that’s there and that they all take responsability
for the actions perpetrated.

Nowhere was there any “proof” that anti piracy firms are involved in this
and despite this, Henrik alledges that “The owner of the site has gotten
nervousdue to resent events” Now, correct me if I am wrong, but
wouldn’t the correct time to be nervous be around the time of the
#spectrial where Henrik so prominently figured?

I can understand that this man is a mouthpiece and it is his job to be,
but seriously somewhere, someone will have to draw the line.

Now, Henrik, I ask you: Has anyone on the swebits team been arrested,
that was actually on that team, or simply some poor sap with the hardware
to be a good seeder?

Has there been a seizure of the actual server hardware? and the million
dollar question: Have your “team” filed a claim against Google yet?

Of course there is propaganda involved in this. Do not be mistake, this is a kind of war that is being fought online, between filesharing activists and monetary interrests and unfortunatly, the casualties in this war is freedom of speech and personal integrity.

Personal integrity has already been locked up in a dungeon and has been severly beaten, to the point
of actually be in a coma and needing life support, but sofar, freedom of speech has managed relatively
unscathed… unless you count a few anal gangrapes…

Oh, come on already. You gotta be kidding!

Oh, come on already. You gotta be kidding!

According to CopySweden, Home burned CDs are at a new low and they
are looking to generate income from other storagemedi…..
WAIT A MINUTE.

We already pay unknown people to be able to store our vacation photos
and whatnot just for the sake of the “Possibility to use to store copywrited
material” and we also get flooded with the latest commercials when
listening to music on the radio. Now they want to add the SAME PENALTY
ON MEMORYCARDS?!? They have got to be joking but alas, I am pretty
damned sure they are not.

Seriously, just because YOU CAN doesnt mean YOU WILL!
I have the equipment to rape hundreds of women every year, aswell
as with my bare hands strangling and beating people to pulps but
does that mean I should serve a preemptive lifetime sentance in
jail, or better yet, seeing as you could count it into possible
thousands of victims, be dragged to the tribunal in Haag
and condemned to death for crimes against the human race
just because I HAVE THE ABILITY TO?

We already pay a license to HAVE a TV, regardless if we watch it or not
or, even if we only have it plugged in to the TV to have that GLORIOUS
image when playing games, but hey … we have to pay for 2 channels that
hasn’t produced anything viewable since the late 70’s when Lennart Hyland
went into retirement aint that good for something?

Either way I turn, there crops up new fees for this and that, I am sure that
pretty soon there will be an “arm bending tax” wich will be calculated on
how many times you lift your arm to speak into your mobile phone, and a hefty
fee will be added to the bluetooth headsets because they make it possible to
circumvent the tax laws. Hows that for a treat?

So in essence, if you can store ANY data on a device, you will, in the future
have to pay a fee for the filesharers that potentially may use this device
to store copywrighted material. Just so you know, in theory, you could store
information in a standard digital wristwatch…….

Wich means, anything that has any form of storage, as long as you in one
way or another, will be getting this new fee… lets hope pacemakers doesnt
have any chips that you can access.

View through my glasses

Yesterday, while on a train ride home I got asked on my political views since I am wearing a pirate party keychain.
Well, I explained to him that yes, my vote will go to the pirate party. And the person more or less exploded in my
face demanding to know how I could vote for a “one-issue party”. Well, then came a nice little diatribe about stealing
artists material, freeloader, etc etc etc.

I let him ramble on for a while and simply stated that I couldnt care less
about filesharing. Filesharing is not the reason for me to leave the more
established parties, the issue that I want to adress is the personal integrity
breaches that now occurs daily, that foreign monetary interrests are more
or less able to dictate domestic laws and that the swedish government actually
bends for those demands.

He then pretty much looked like I had hit the back of his head with a board,
completely stunned. It was as if he did not understand what I was saying.
A “pirate” sympathizer who did not want the free, albeit questionable, “right”
to download whatever he wanted from the web.

I gave it a few seconds of thought and formulated the answer like this:

Would you mind if I stopped the mailman before he reached your mailbox,
took your mail, opened it, copied it for future reference and then put it back
in the envelope and slid it inside his mailbox. Of course he was outraged, Noone has the right to read his mail of course. My thoughts around here was “he is taking it, hook line and sinker” so I pressed on.

If you where talking to your wife on the phone, would it be OK for me to have a hidden device and
sit somewhere else just to listen, and to be able to file the entire conversation, no matter what
it was about so it will be stored in some archive just incase you will do something later on?
He started to get confused again, so he told me: Of course not, but what does that have to do
with the pirate party?

I then explained the FRA law, IPRED and ACTA agreements. And of course, he dragged out the 2
arguments that seems to be the last saviour for those defending these idiocies: But what if I dont have
anything to hide? Well.. You wouldnt mind someone videofilming you and your wife then?
My point is, what someone think is private varies, but you have to have a common limit on what
is OK to look at. We have just given the government to treat the entire swedish population as
potential terrorists and now, any communication that is not face to face can be monitored,
dont you see a problem with that.

I could see uncertainty slowly creeping up on this poor man but I had my steamengine puffing now
so I pressed on.

Your kid probably uses facebook, MSN and a wide variety of other social tools, are you OK
with someone knowing all about your daughters/sons conversations online, no matter on how an
embarrasing subject? You know, if I followed you around constantly for a few weeks, always noting
down what you did, you could call me into court and slap a restraining order in my face with ease
and the court would approve, and I am pretty sure that you would, however you have just told
the government that “Hey, its ok, follow me and my family” in the same way, albeit online, and whats
worse, is that its leaning more and more towards that uncontrolled, (or should i say overcontrolled?)
profit organizations will  have the exact same permission.

On top of that, BOTH government has promised, word for word, that these new laws will not be used
to persecute young people and alienate the entire youth population, yet, this is exactly what has happened.
They havent “caught” anyone that makes money on filesharing (There still isn’t anything that shows that the
founders of The Pirate Bay” earned their money on filesharing.) And those that HAVE been fined for it
has mostly been students and we all know that students are the same as the rich people… or maybe not.

At this point, I could actually see this man squirming in his seat and then came the surveillance supporters
try at “Ace” card. “Well, it can stop potential terrorists”

Now, I will use a technique that I actually despise myself, one of the ruling techniques so used by Göran Persson,
But do you honestly think that either Blondinbella, Agda at the nursing home, or for that matter will plant a
bomb somewhere and do you seriously think that IF terrorists use the internet for communication, that
will happen through MSN? I dont think so, we are probably talking about 256 bit AES encrypted VPN
tunnels, wich pretty much are impossible to break, and then on top of that, some other type of encryption
just to be on the safe side, and by the time the government has FINALLY cracked the encryptions, the
victims will be buried and the survivors have all recovered as fully as possible, so what good is it?

Ever seen a fish on land? I did yesterday.

It appears that I was talking to a pretty high placed politician in Örebro Län. I wont tell you whom,
but now atleast, I know the ignorance that is displayed by politicians firsthand. Good to know.

Sheesh

Censorship, the silent creativity killer (Rambling set to ON)

These days censoring things have become more and more
common again for some reason and unfortunatly, the
reasons are none other then pure greed and monetary interrests.

Do you remember when democracy was a lead and a motto that
was to be followed and everyone was to have their say in the
proceedings in what went on and what was decided?

Well, when it comes to art, this is no longer true. Lets say that
I make a really cool video with pretty much whatever, it might
even be one of the best/funniest/saddest/whatever in the world
but the theme goes perfectly together with one of all these cookie
cutout artists songs that are so popular in the mainstream these days,
so I decide to use one of them as a background song for the video.

It fits perfectly and I decide to put the thing on youtube or whatever,
and voila, I get the sound removed from the movie or even get the
movie deleted because a record company or other owns the
copyright for this song. … but.. but.. I am not stealing your music,
I am using it yes, but I am not cutting into your monetary interrests
by using it as an audio backdrop, am I?

Now, I dont create that much music, and probably never will, I do however, as you can see
create digital art and if someone wants to us it for pretty much whatever, I am only happy to oblige
and my conditions are simple. 1. dont claim you made the image and 2. send me a link with the final
thing so I can watch in awe and admire your work and know that I had a part in it. Whats the harm in that?
I really cant see it.

Now, lets say that I am a well paid recording artist with a few dollars more then the blue collar guy
in my wallet, wouldn’t it be good of me to spread my work out a little and let users create using what I have
already created and hence maybe enlarging my fanbase and in the end open up possibilities for a bigger
revenue stream?

Unni Drougge released audio books on pirate bay without any intention of getting paid for it, since
“everyone knows that filesharing is stealing”, yet, someone urged her to set up a paypal account,
and guess what…. she got paid, and paid pretty much the same amount that a normal advancement on a
novel from a real publisher would have gotten her.

Hold the phone right here. Yeah, just stop and smell the greens. Pirates actually PAID to download her
audiobook from a place that is known to keep everything free. Now, something is twisted here.

Now, I dont presume to know how the big record, software and movie companies think, and I probably
never will get that insight seeing that I am who I am, but really, shouldn’t new ways of reaching potential
customers be welcomed? There will always be filesharing, theres been filesharing since the old days
when a few holes in a square piece of cardboard was all that was needed to create a working software copy,
and I very much doubt that a phenomenon so ingrained will be removed, more likely it will be pushed
underground and sadly, that will also open up for other, worse situations with other activities best
not mentioned.

So, I have previously made my standpoint clear in what I think, and I will keep it as a mantra and
repeat it over and over and over and over again. I DO belive that artists should get paid for their
efforts, but I also feel that there are a lot of things that needs to be changed, such as the time that they
have an exclusive right for looooooong after they have passed away…. sheesh. When it comes
to software there are also different models that might work, and I even left a suggestion earler,
if you want to browse it, you can find that HERE

Now, this whole post became a giant sidetrack in itself, I think I would be better off stopping here
so I will do just that and say the following: Clear your own yard before complaining about someone
elses.

The enemy of the internet. Part II

A while back I wrote a post called Sarkozy, the enemy of the internet nicolas-sarkozy
about how the french want to start disconnecting
people who fileshare over the internet. This was a
highly controversial thing to say and in my ears,
pure stupidity. Why let the hobbypolice that resides
within the media industry waltz around doing
whatever it wants and without much proof, and remove
peoples way to interact with eachother?

Now, some people say “they have evidence”. Of course
they do .. they have screenshots.. COME ON! I have
shown you multiple times how easy those are to forge.
“They have logs” you say? Oh, and a text file cant be
changed? Really. We all know that the media industry
will go to any extent to “prove” that someone is sharing
material that they feel that they have the supreme
control over.

Today, this controversial “law” was put to the vote in
france and believe it or not, it was voted down. Such
a defeat for Sarkozy, hopefully it was humiliating aswell.
If you are swedish, you can read more HERE
I can’t say that I know much of the grander things the
french has done, but I know now, that they CAN do
good things and do sensible things, aside from art.

So, to all you french people who thwarted the enemy of the internet again
I salute you.